Speaker

Christopher Kirchhoff

Christopher Kirchhoff

Christopher Kirchhoff is a founding partner of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and co-author, with Raj M. Shah, of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War (2024).

Kirchhoff built his national-security career from the ground up in disaster investigation and institutional after-action analysis: his first job out of college was on the Space Shuttle Columbia accident investigation, followed by work on an official history of the Iraq reconstruction and the Obama administration’s after-action report on Ebola. He holds a Cambridge PhD in political science, focused on government commissions as an instrument of post-crisis reform. In the Obama administration he served as director of strategic planning for the National Security Council and senior civilian adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and worked as an assistant to Eric Schmidt. In 2015 Secretary of Defense Ash Carter tasked him with designing DIU — the Pentagon’s first Silicon Valley office — and in 2016 installed him and Raj Shah to run it; DIU pioneered a fast-contracting mechanism (‘other transaction authority’) that has since driven $70 billion in Pentagon technology acquisition. He also served on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and completed a policy residency at Anthropic working on AI safety and national security.

Core positions

  • Commercial technology, not defence R&D, now leads. Since the Cold War’s end, the market capitalisation of individual tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon) has each exceeded the entire US defence industry combined — a shift Kirchhoff argues the Pentagon’s acquisition system has not adapted to, leaving it a slow follower rather than the technology leader it once was.
  • Software-based capability cannot be arms-controlled like nuclear weapons. Because autonomous-weapons development cannot be independently verified the way nuclear or chemical programmes can, Kirchhoff argues unilateral restraint would not produce mutual restraint — only cede advantage — making him sceptical of calls to pause or forgo military AI development.
  • Reform requires procedural, not just financial, change. DIU’s central achievement was discovering and using an existing legal mechanism to contract at start-up speed, not simply securing a bigger budget; he applies the same diagnosis to the Pentagon’s broader procurement system and to whistleblower and inspector-general processes he says now punish effective reformers.
  • Favours dual-use AI development over restriction or nationalisation. He opposes proposals to nationalise frontier AI labs, arguing government-run national labs are culturally moribund next to the commercial sector, and prefers close intelligence-community cooperation to protect private labs from nation-state theft.

In the wiki