Speaker 1: Latest interview of Elon Musk. If you like this episode,
just like Sharreon, follow this podcast.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Back to the show. All right, welcome to Starbase, Texas.
This is a city.
Speaker 3: It's actually legally a city that, thanks to the hard
work of the SpaceX team, we built out of nothing
and is now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system.
Speaker 4: And for people out.
Speaker 2: There who are curious to see it, we're actually in
a public highway so you can come and visit and
drive down the road and see the epic hardware. So
I think this is the first time that a rocket
development program has actually been on a public highway, so
you can come and see the epic stuff.
Speaker 4: We're on it today.
Speaker 2: To have a sectary of Pete Hexa and much of
the senior leadership of the Pentagon here, it's an honor
to have them visit. We just did a tour of
the factory, and I think this it really helps illustrate
how manufacturing and manufacturing at scale is critical to the
strength of America.
Speaker 3: And I'll tell you a little bit just about the
purpose of SpaceX.
Speaker 2: It's like, we want to make star Trek real, Okay,
we want to make Starfleet Academy real so that it's
not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction
turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space,
big spaceships with people going to other planets, going to
the Moon, and ultimately going beyond our star system to
other star systems where we may meet aliens or discover
long dad alien civilizations. I don't know, but we want
to go and we want to see what's happening, and
we want to have epic futuristic spaceships with lots of
people in them, traveling to places we've never been to before.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's.
Speaker 2: The goal, and that's what I think the public thinks
of when they think of Space Force. So on that note,
I'd like to introduce the Secretary of Ward he Hexap.
Speaker 1: Thank you, you know, I'm spreciate, thank you very much.
Speaker 4: How about this Star Trek real star trucks. Yes, appreciate it.
I love it.
Speaker 1: Well, what a tour, What an opportunity to be here
at Star Base, Texas with Elon and the SpaceX team.
There's nothing like this in America. There's nothing like this
in the world. And what you have built and what
you will build here is a testament to the strength
of American ingenuity and American invention. So I want to
thank all of you, all the folks out here for
having us today. Elon, thank you so much for hosting us,
for what you've built, for the vision you have for
this company, the vision you have for our country, the
vision you have for American innovation.
Speaker 4: I could not think of a.
Speaker 1: More fitting venue to continue our arsenal a freedom tour
and to outline today the future of technological innovation at.
Speaker 4: The War Department. Those of you here at SpaceX will
appreciate this.
Speaker 1: Knowing that as World War II was ending, the Secretary
of War and Secretary of the Navy wrote to the
National Academy of Sciences and declared that scientific research was
essential to our national security to ensure continued preparedness.
Speaker 4: They wrote, the research.
Speaker 1: Scientists of the United States must be called upon to
continue in peacetime some substantial portion that of which they
have made so effectively during the stress of the present war.
The competitive time element in developing those weapons and tactics
may be decisive in future conflicts. You see, those Secretaries
of War and Navy many decades ago recognize the importance
that innovation and readiness holds for our national security.
Speaker 4: They knew what was at stake, the very freedoms of
the country we hold dear all across the United States.
Speaker 1: Today, extraordinary innovation is unlocking news abilities for freedom, prosperity,
and security. Now, the question before us is not whether
or not the most powerful technologies of the century will
reinforce free societies. Is it going to reinforce our free societies?
Or will that technology be shaped and twisted by malign
regimes that seek to use those technologies for control and coercion.
You see, over the past several months, I've talked at
length about the challenges we face.
Speaker 4: In transforming the War Department to.
Speaker 1: Address current and future missions, all in service of meeting
the deeds of the twenty first century warfire. I'd like
to think we've already made dramatic progress in the Pentagon's
culture by reviving the warrior ethos, and we're moving out
quickly and transforming our acquisition ecosystem as well.
Speaker 4: But today is.
Speaker 1: About how we supercharge innovation at the word of Department
for the era ahead.
Speaker 4: Innovation is happening at a pace.
Speaker 1: We can't even foresee, and we need the entire enterprise
our enterprise to embrace the urgency required for this moment.
Since the end of the Cold War, the defense industrial
base in our country has consolidated. This makes it difficult,
if not impossible, for new creators of technical innovations to
win business at our department. The result is a risk
averse culture that prevents us from providing our warfighters with
the best resources that America has to offer.
Speaker 4: That ends today. Simply put, the United.
Speaker 1: States must win the strategic competition for twenty first century
technological supremacy, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum hypersonics, and long
range drones.
Speaker 4: If you talk to Elon Musk long enough, he will
tell you.
Speaker 1: How important hypersonics and long range drones are.
Speaker 4: Needs one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 1: Space capabilities, directed energy, and biotechnology.
Speaker 4: Are the new areas of global competition.
Speaker 1: The challenge is that our legacy approach to technological development
assumes that technology moves in a predictable linear conveyor belt
from lab to design to development to prototype to test
and qualify a program of record, and can only be
provided by a handful of companies that have consolidated dramatically.
Speaker 4: Now, while this system provided us with the weapons.
Speaker 1: That won the Cold War. It is archaic and inconsistent
with the novel threat environment that we face today.
Speaker 4: At its core, this old approach has.
Speaker 1: The hubrist to assume that you can easily predict the future,
that you can foresee how an invention becomes a weapon
in eight easy steps, three decades from first discovery. Our
system can not keep treating innovation as a decades long
one way march that dramatically reduces who and what is
able to run the gauntlet at our department to get.
Speaker 4: The capability to the warfire.
Speaker 1: Until this administration, the Trump administration, the department's process for
fielding new capabilities had become just one more post Cold
War peace dividend relic that has not kept up with
the times. Worse than that, we've done nothing but add
layer upon layer of committees and councils that coordinated but
never decided. We created endless projects with no accountable owners.
Speaker 4: We have high churn with.
Speaker 1: Little progress and few outputs. That sounds about like the
exact opposite of SpaceX. We treated innovation as a box
to check, not an outcome to deliver. In short, when
it comes to our current threat environment, we are playing
a danger escape with potentially fatal consequences. We need innovation
to come from anywhere and evolve with speed and purpose.
You see, America's open scientific community is an advantage authoritarian
regimes cannot replicate. They can read our scientific papers and
copy our invention or distill.
Speaker 4: Our al Ai.
Speaker 1: Models, but they cannot replicate a culture like this, one
of opened and distributed research.
Speaker 4: We need to be blunt here.
Speaker 1: We can no longer afford to wait a decade for
our legacy prime contractors to deliver the next perfect system,
only to find that it's delivered years behind schedule and cost.
Speaker 4: Ten times what it should. Winning requires a new playbook.
Speaker 1: Elon wrote it with his algorithm question every requirement, Delete
the dumb ones, and accelerate like hell. That's why I
want to make clear across the War Department and for
our partners in the private sector, that our Undersecretary of
War for Research and Engineering, Emil Michael, right here in
the front row is the War Department's single Chief Technology
Officer one CTO for the entire enterprise.
Speaker 4: Novel concept.
Speaker 1: As the sole CTO, E Meal will set the technical direction,
lead the innovation ecosystem that will welcome progress from anywhere
it resides, and he'll tell me face to face every
day and frankly, whether we are gaining or losing the
technology and innovation competition.
Speaker 4: He'll have the decision authority and will lead through.
Speaker 1: Rigorous evaluation with a focus on real, measurable outcomes.
Speaker 4: Now, Congress, and we have a member many members of
Congress with us here today, will be our partner in this.
Speaker 1: By affirming the under Secretary's role as the department's CTO,
we're carrying out the core mission for that Congress assigned
in statute.
Speaker 4: The last Defense Bill.
Speaker 1: Expanded the CTO's authorities, including the power to direct military
departments and other components to align around clear innovative outcomes.
We will use them to deliver those outcomes.
Speaker 4: With speed and urgency.
Speaker 1: An empowered CTO will inject a disruptive mindset directly into
our systems, directing the power of America's world leading scientists
and entrepreneurs, our cutting edge labs, the tech ecosystem, and
our capital markets to build what the warfighter needs, but
to do so better, faster and cheaper.
Speaker 4: And Emil is the right man to do it. You see,
this isn't about military structure. This is about building an
innovation pipeline that.
Speaker 1: Cuts through the overgrown bureaucratic underbrush and clears away the
debris elon.
Speaker 4: Style, preferably with a chainsaw, and to do so at
speed and urgency that meets the moment.
Speaker 1: As I've said repeatedly to every audience, the President of
the United States and I have the backs of our
warfighters who have to make split second life and death
decisions on the battlefield. And I want this audience to
know that we also have the backs of innovators who
share that very same urgency. American taxpayers, especially those parents
whose sons and daughters have answered the call to serve
I swore in ten more today demand, and I demand,
and we demand that we arm our warfighters with overwhelming
and lethal technology right now, not a decade from now.
Speaker 4: In modern warfare, the fastest.
Speaker 1: Innovator and iterator will be the winner, and no one
can out innovate an American entrepreneur who has been liberated
from the constrains of stifling bureaucracy.
Speaker 4: That old era ends today.
Speaker 1: We are done running a peacetime science fair while our
potential adversaries are running a wartime arms race.
Speaker 4: Right now.
Speaker 1: From garage startups to factory floors to boardrooms across our nation.
The question of how to harness innovation coming out of America's.
Speaker 4: AI ecosystem is front and center, and rightfully.
Speaker 1: So, because it has the potential to disrupt and transform
every area of human endeavor. The same is true in
the Department of War. President Trump's AI Executive Order spells
out our approach succinctly. It is the policy of the
United States to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance
in defense of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security. That,
ladies and gentlemen, is the War Department's mission.
Speaker 4: We must ensure that America's.
Speaker 1: Military AI dominance so that no adversary can exploit that
same technology to hold our national security interests for our
citizens at risk. America first in every domain. Last month,
I took.
Speaker 4: The first step toward changing how the.
Speaker 1: Department does business with frontier AI technologies when we announce
the rollout of Genai with our partners from Google, and
I want to thank the Google team for leaning forward
and making the investment to get their Gemini app to
about three million.
Speaker 4: Users in the War Department.
Speaker 1: But today we're excited to announce the next frontier AI
model company to join genai dot MIL and that is
GROC from Xai, which will go live later this month.
So I want to thank you Elon and your incredible
team for leaning forward with us on as well.
Speaker 4: Very soon we will have the world's leading.
Speaker 1: AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department.
Long overdue to further that, Today, at my direction, we're
executing an AI acceleration strategy that will extend our lead
in military AI established.
Speaker 4: During President Trump's first term.
Speaker 1: This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments,
and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead
in military AI and that it grows more dominant.
Speaker 4: Into the future. In short, we will win this race
by becoming an.
Speaker 1: AI first war fighting force across all domains, from the
back offices of the Pentagon to the tactical edge on
the front line. The catalyst for this acceleration will be
seven pace setting projects focused on mission.
Speaker 4: Threads across war fighting, intelligence.
Speaker 1: And enterprise missions, each with a single accountable leader, aggressive timelines,
and measurable outcomes that answer a familiar question, Elon, what
have you accomplished this week. This is the execution standard
for AI first transformation. Each of the seven pace setting
projects will use the following model, one owner who reports
monthly on their progress.
Speaker 4: These projects will not be run.
Speaker 1: In a vacuum, but will work directly with warfighters and
transition partners to ensure we incorporate real time operational feedback.
We expect rapid iterations with failure accelerating the learning curve.
These are not science projects, They are not governance boards.
Speaker 4: They are the execution standard for the entire department.
Speaker 1: We will not win the future by sprinkling AI onto
old tactics.
Speaker 4: Like digital pixie dust. We will win by discovering entirely
new ways of fighting.
Speaker 1: That's why we will run continuous experimentation campaigns, quarterly force
unforced combat labs with AI coordinated swarms, agent based cyber defense,
and distributed command and control, pushing the envelope learning from
failure at every stop, which is exactly what this place does.
You see, our department doesn't accept failure in the past,
and so we never fail, which means we never learn.
We're flipping that dynamic. Before talking about the new rules
of the game, let me talk about a little bit
more about our new team, because no game can be won.
Speaker 4: Without the right team, and we're proud to announce that
mister Cameron Stanley has been.
Speaker 1: Appointed the new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer CEAO
of our War Department. CAM will be leading a new team,
many of whom have forgone, thank you, or left lucrative
careers at pioneer companies such as AWS, Data, Bricks, Palenteered
Meta to join the fight.
Speaker 4: This team will not only.
Speaker 1: Provide a catalyst for change in this department, but will
also act, we believe, as a.
Speaker 4: Magnet for other talented members of the.
Speaker 1: Tech community who want to join us in doing the
mission focused work to protect our great Republic.
Speaker 4: So let's talk about the new rules.
Speaker 1: First, Speed, speed wins, speed dominates.
Speaker 4: Our enterprise currently.
Speaker 1: Operates on staffing and committee cycles measured in months and years,
and that's unacceptable.
Speaker 4: Military AI is going to be a race for the
foreseeable future where the risks.
Speaker 1: To US national security of moving too slowly outweigh the
impacts of imperfect alignment. To do this, Cam and his
team at CDAO will define AI deployment velocity metrics for
all the pace setting projects in the next thirty days
and report at least monthly after that. These will become
the new benchmarks for programs across the department.
Speaker 4: Second, bureaucratic blockers. If you work with Elon, you know
he finds the blockers and you remove them.
Speaker 1: We will take a wartime approach to people and policies
that block this progress.
Speaker 4: You want to block to work somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Barriers to data sharing, authority to operate or ato's test
and evaluation, and contracting are now treated as operational risks,
not simply bureaucratic inconveniences.
Speaker 4: We are blowing up these barriers. That's why today, at
my direction, I'm.
Speaker 1: Establishing a barrier removal SWAT team under RNE with the
authority to waive non statutory requirements and escalate to our
great Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, anything that slows down the
acceleration of AI capabilities.
Speaker 4: Third compute resource.
Speaker 1: We will invest heavily in expanding our access to AI
compute from data centers to the tactical edge, and will
tap into hundreds of billions of dollars in private.
Speaker 4: Capital flowing into American AI.
Speaker 1: President Trump's executive order has directed us to build data
centers on military land and to work with the Department
of Energy to ensure that we dramatically increase the number
and breadth of resources needed to power this computing infrastructure.
We will work together with our partners at Google and
AWS and Oracle and SpaceX, Microsoft and others on these initiatives.
Speaker 4: Fourth pillar, especially in this room, you'll understand it is talent.
Speaker 1: We will use every hiring and pay authority available to
us to bring the best American technical talent and reward
effective AI train informations by our workforce.
Speaker 4: We're going to.
Speaker 1: Heavily leverage President Trump's Tech Force initiative to bring in
the best and brightest from industry and academia, with people
like Elon David Sachs, Emil Mike and others from the
entrepreneurial and business world already in government, we have shown
that we can and that we must enlist the world's
leading talent in this cause. Fifth Responsible AI. Today, I
want to clarify what responsible AI means at the Department
of War. Gone are the days of equitable AI and
other DEI and social justice infusions that constrain and confuse
our employment.
Speaker 4: Of this technology.
Speaker 1: Effective immediately responsible AI at the War Department means objectively
truthful AI capabilities employed securely and within the laws governing
the activities of the Department.
Speaker 4: We will not employ AI models that won't allow you
to fight wars.
Speaker 1: We will judge AI models on this standard alone, factually accurate,
mission relevant, without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.
Department of War AI will not be woke. It will
work for US. We're building war ready weapons and systems,
not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty Lounge six. And finally,
data AI is only as good as the data that
feeds it, and the US military has an asymmetric data
advantage from two decades of military and intelligence operations that
no other military in the world can replicate. But right
now we are under utilizing this advantage. Too much of
our data is stranded. It's stuck in bespoke program databases,
locked behind Title ten or two, Title fifty stove pipes,
invisible to operators, engineers, and industry who could help us
exploit it with winning speed and scale. And that's why today,
at my direction, CDO will exercise its full authority to
enforce the DOW Data Decrees and make all appropriate data
available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission
systems across every service and component. Each service secretary and
component head will submit catalogs of their current data assets.
Speaker 4: To the CDO within thirty days.
Speaker 1: Denials of data access request will be reported to the
CTO within seven.
Speaker 4: Days, and they better have a good justification today.
Speaker 1: I'm also directing the Undersecretary for Intelligence and Security, Brad Hansel,
to ensure appropriate data from across our intelligence enterprise receives
the same treatment and can be fully levered to war
fighting capability, development and operational advantage. AI is only as
good as the data that it receives, and we're going
to make sure that it's there. Persistent barriers to data
access will be escalated to the Deputy Secretary of War
for resolution with authority to reassign or terminate personnel or
withhold funding from non compliant activities within the statutory limits.
Speaker 4: We'll be clear here.
Speaker 1: As I said, data hoarding is now a national security risk,
and we will treat it that way.
Speaker 4: AI is an important part of the future.
Speaker 1: But here's another truth that we've ignored for too long.
Beyond AI, we've treated every other kind of innovation as if.
Speaker 4: They're the same as you know they're not.
Speaker 1: We need to break down unnecessary barriers to rapid technological development, adoption,
and transition. Some of you will remember this a generation
to Goo. One of my predecessors, in a dinner speech
to industry, now infamously known as the Last Supper, advocated
for the consolidation of our defense industrial base. This consolidation
created a closed innovation ecosystem dominated by just a handful
of prime contractors. The results have been characterized by soaring costs,
sluggish delivery, and stagnant innovation. That's what President Trump's recent
Executive Order on the Defense Industrial Base and Defense Companies
seeks to address.
Speaker 4: It makes crystal clear.
Speaker 1: That the priority of the legacy prime contractors must be
our nation's national security, not the next earnings call. That
means less focus on stock buybacks and more investment on
the men and women on the factory floor.
Speaker 4: It means less stockholder.
Speaker 1: Dividends and more investment in infrastructure, plant and equipment. Today,
that old era comes to an end.
Speaker 4: The Department of.
Speaker 1: War is reopening to the disruptive energy and agile creativity
of our nation's tech startups. Funded by our world's leading
capital markets. I'm directing my chief Technology officer to leave
this charge and his wingman, as always in this effort
under Secretary for Acquisitions and Sustatement Mike Duffie. For too
long we organized our ecosystem around stages and silos, labs
over here, so called rapid units over there, commercial outreach
in a different building or on another coast altogether, and
warfare fighters somewhere.
Speaker 4: At the end, almost an afterthought.
Speaker 1: The result is duplication, drift, and confusion. And like the
acquisition process, we are already fixing the creation of organizations
to work around the problems in the innovation ecosystem. Rather
than taking the buld steps needed to transform it, we
created an old ecosystem to get around the actual system.
No more, every dollar of innovation, whether it may be
in a lab or a startup or a classified shop,
must exist to deliver one of three things game changing technology,
scalable products.
Speaker 4: Or new ways of fighting. If it's not doing one.
Speaker 1: Of those three things at speed, it will be realigned or.
Speaker 4: It will go away. And that's why I'm entrusting Emil
as the.
Speaker 1: CTO to ensure that this directive across the department is
rapidly carried out.
Speaker 4: Amelia are going to be busy again.
Speaker 1: What we're talking about today is a transformation and the
way we think about innovation. In Requirements Reform, led by
Mike Duffy, we killed an old, a sclerotic model and
rewire the departments that problems, money and experimentation live in
one system. In Acquisitions Reform, we killed the defense acquisition
system and created accountable portfolio acquisition executives, making speed to delivery.
Speed to delivery our organizing principle. We're going to do
the same for technological innovation. That's why today, at my direction,
we are ending the alphabet soup of councils that meet
and brief and write memos and schedule meetings, but never
decide and rarely, if ever accelerate outcomes. Effective Immediately, the
Defense Innovation Steering Group, the Defense Innovation Working Group, and
the CTO Council are.
Speaker 4: Disestablished and abolished.
Speaker 1: In their place, the CTO will convene a CTO Action
Group to assist him in making decisions, clearing bureaucratic blockers,
holding leaders accountable, and most importantly, quickly delivering new.
Speaker 4: Technologies to our war fires.
Speaker 1: Every organization in this ecosystem must earn its place by
delivering war fighting advantages faster than our adversaries can adapt.
No sacred cows, no exceptions.
Speaker 4: To back up the CTO.
Speaker 1: Today, in my direction, we are realigning two pillars of
the War Department's innovation ecosystem.
Speaker 4: First, the Defense.
Speaker 1: Innovation Unit ORDIU. Since its establishment ten years ago, DIIU
has lived through shifting reporting structures and uneven administrative support, doing.
Speaker 4: Great things, but at times it's the.
Speaker 1: Portfolio overlap with other parts of the department. Effective today,
DIIU is designated a Department of War Field Activity, providing
exceptional tech scouting RAP. I've been contracting in other common
services to the department, executed at commercial tempo.
Speaker 4: The CTO will provide support to DIIU.
Speaker 1: For administrative and resource matters and ensure that the unit's
efforts fit into the Department's innovation priorities. The Director of
DIIU will also continue to report directly to me as
a principal staff assistant and carry out its statutory duties.
And I'm appointing mister Owen West, executor of my Drone
Dominance Initiative, as the Director of DIIU starting in March
when the Fight twenty seven budget cycle firms up. As
a marine with lots of combat experience, Owen will bring
a warfighter's mentality to diiu's core mission of transitioning technology
to our troops.
Speaker 4: Owen also has the private capital.
Speaker 1: Experience needed to ensure DIIU remains working hand in glove
with the venture and investor community and continues to OnRamp
new entrants into the war Department. Owen led doge at
DOW the most effective Doze effort across the administration, saving
tens of billions of dollars for our department, and now
he will lead DIIU. Our world leading defense tech startups
have attracted billions of dollars in capital that are reshaping
warfare through the proliferation of high tech, low cost technologies.
Diiu's mission is to accelerate the adoption of this commercial
technology to help convert entrepreneurial products into tangible combat power. Second,
the Strategic Capabilities Officer SCO is also being designated a
Department of war Field Activity aligned under the CTO. Skull
will maintain focus on its core mission of identifying and
prototyping disruptive applications of.
Speaker 4: New systems, the.
Speaker 1: Unconventional uses of existing systems and near term technologies to
create strategic effects. SCOLL will continue to maintain its statutory
direct reporting relationship to the Deputy Secretary, but will be
operationally re aligned under the CTO to eliminate duplication and
ensure the relentless daily focus on delivering near and medium
term capabilities.
Speaker 4: To our warfighters.
Speaker 1: Relentless urgency and focus is our focus. Today's defense innovation
ecosystem is too fragmented, resulted in insufficient technology transition to
the warfighter. We address some of this in the transformation we.
Speaker 4: Are making in the acquisition's.
Speaker 1: Ecosystem, but it also needs to enter the innovation ecosystem
for too long, and I know a lot of you
have experienced this and others we met with in Los
Angeles recently. The experience of founders and entrepreneurs has been
running endless laps around the Pentagon looking.
Speaker 4: For the right office, the right program, and the right
motivated sponsor.
Speaker 1: And too often new entrants are ultimately stymied by the bureaucracy.
Speaker 4: We hear at time.
Speaker 1: And time again they don't know where to go, and
then when they go to that place, it's not the
right place to go.
Speaker 4: Then they go somewhere else it didn't want them in
the first place, and the lap continues.
Speaker 1: For example, SpaceX and Pallenteer had to sue the Department
of War just to get a shot at competing for
Department contracts. The bottom line is that new entrants need
both a shot on goal, but also faster yeses and
faster knows from the Department, rather than being strung along
with a never ending stream of rudderless maidens. At the
Secretary of War level, we will replace the existing maze
into two clear channels. The Mission Engineering and Integration Activity
MIA will tell enddustry what problems we're trying to solve,
and DIIU will help program offices adopt what industry has
already built. This will help get the faster yeses or
faster nos.
Speaker 4: Clear guidance, clear guide rails, clear.
Speaker 1: Demand signal, which is what industry and capital expects. Now,
this isn't just an Office of the Secretary reform.
Speaker 4: The services need to transform.
Speaker 1: Their innovation ecosystems as well. The Army, the Navy, the
Space Force, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force. That's
why today at my direction, our military services will take
the following actions within ninety days. The Secretaries of the
Military departments will brief the CTO on service innovation plans,
how they will consolidate, streamline, and refocus their labs, research expertise,
experimental units and rapid capability offices around three innovation outcomes.
Our sixty plus lab are a national asset, but it's
pastime they were organized to deliver and not just to discover.
And beginning with the fiscal year twenty twenty eight budget,
every portfolio acquisition executive will fund an Innovation Insertion Increment
Triple I dedicated money for the last mile integration test
and rapid insertion of validation solutions into fielded systems. Innovation
cannot be centralized, and it should not be.
Speaker 4: In fact, I hope it's okay I name him.
Speaker 1: But just this pack weekend I received an email a
proposal from an Army captain named Drennan Green who I've
known him for a while. He had a detailed plan
about how he and his unit wants to deploy AI innovation.
Candid should come from anywhere and anyone wherever.
Speaker 4: Those best ideas reside.
Speaker 1: We're going to bring that good captain in and hear
from them, how can we apply those tools in his
unit and other units bottom up, not just top down.
The military services and program officers own the last mile,
and to that end, I'm directing the services to establish
that Triple I Innovation insertion increment within the budgets of.
Speaker 4: All program portfolios. This will ensure that.
Speaker 1: They have funds set aside to quickly integrate innovations during
weapons system development and so be a tool to free
new innovative, cutting edge weapons and improvements from the constraints
of yearly budget cycles. Here you iterate in terms of
hours and days, maybe weeks.
Speaker 4: In Washington we.
Speaker 1: Talk in terms of months, years, and oftentimes multi years.
Speaker 4: It's too slow. The CTO ecosystem will give them.
Speaker 1: The supply services are contributors to this ecosystem.
Speaker 4: Not bystanders.
Speaker 1: They must deliver outcome, and they must deliver overmatch. And
speaking of budgets and budget cycles, you may have seen
President Trump's truth posts of a few days ago. He's
proposing a one point five trillion dollar budget for.
Speaker 4: The War Department in fiscal year twenty seven. This is
by far the most ever in our history, a historic.
Speaker 1: And generational investment in American security.
Speaker 4: We will not squander this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Speaker 1: To rebuild our military. Think of what this means as
our efforts to transform the department come fully online.
Speaker 4: You add resources, and you streamline.
Speaker 1: Process speed to deliver those capabilities to the warfighter.
Speaker 4: And invitation to new entrants.
Speaker 1: Into the defense industry, which we need so badly, and
an embrace.
Speaker 4: Of AI and other cutting edge defense tech.
Speaker 1: All of this will make our forces more agile, more lethal,
and more ready to deter and if necessary, win a
future fight. This is what President Trump demands, and this
is what we will deliver. This feeds into a next
area we need to fix. You see, reorganizing and a
new attitude are not enough to truly unlock innovation for
the warfighter.
Speaker 4: Our department needs to.
Speaker 1: Capitalize on a key advantage.
Speaker 4: America has over her adversaries.
Speaker 1: The broadest and deepest capital markets and the best entrepreneurial
talent in the world. You know this capital is the
lifeblood of American innovation, and therefore, to be successful, we
need to embrace the role in our department of private capital,
which we have not done for far too long. We
need to be a better partner for private capital so
we can help accelerate capital formation in key areas and
lower the risk for the Department. Private capital is already
helping solve a major problem that President Trump has directed
us to confront and solve across this administration, ending our
reliance on competitors for access to rare earth and critical minerals.
The Office of Strategic Capital or OSC, under the leadership
of David Lorich, is spearheading those efforts and delivering as
we speak. In the past five months alone, the OSC
team has deployed over four point five billion dollars in
capital commitments as part of closing six critical mineral deals,
all of which will help free the United States from
market manipulation. Crucially, OSC's strategy relies on crowding in private
sector investors from this VC community to our country's largest
financial institutions. The six OSC deals to date include nearly
five billion from our private capital partners. OSC has closed
most of those deals in less than thirty days, which
is Trump time for complex transactions that may seem maybe
slow for SpaceX in Washington, that's as fast as it gets.
Speaker 4: I mean, that is warp speed in Washington.
Speaker 1: All of our investments serve one purpose, deliver.
Speaker 4: Faster for the warfighter.
Speaker 1: Now, some will want to cynically posit is this just
another innovation reorganization, another set of strategies that brief well
but don't actualize. No, this is the third leg of
a single war plan. In fundamentally transforming our acquisition ecosystem,
we killed jasids that focused only on process and turned
the j ROCK into a body that ranks real world
joint operational problems, not paper requirements. We created the MEA
to run experimental experimentation.
Speaker 4: Campaigns to solve these problems. We killed the.
Speaker 1: Old defense equi position system and created the war fighting
acquisition system to focus on speed, risk and accountability. With
the AI strategy and innovation ecosystem transformation that we have
just outlined, we are welding that third piece into place.
Speaker 4: The CTO, DIU, SCO.
Speaker 1: DARPA, CDO, and OSC are no longer a loose federation.
They are the Office of the Secretary of War's Innovation
Operating System. DARPA delivers game change in technology, innovation and
strategic surprise. DIU delivers scalable products, SCO delivers new ways
of fighting, and CDO and osc provide the data, test,
and capital.
Speaker 4: To move at wartime speed.
Speaker 1: As of today, they are an ecosystem, an arsenal of
ideas and action for the arsenal of freedom, wired directly
into requirements, portfolio and production, game changing technology, scalable products,
new ways of fighting, all three moving at wartime speed.
Problems drive experimentation. Experimentation flows to prototypes. Prototypes flow to
our program executives. Program executive flow, these to production, production
flows to the warfighter, and the cycle never stops, always
iterating one system, one purpose.
Speaker 4: Speed to the fight.
Speaker 1: We are preparing to win the future because we know,
and you know, for the.
Speaker 4: Free world, for the West, the stakes could not be higher.
Speaker 1: Before this administration, our adversaries may have thought they've finally
broke American power.
Speaker 4: They're wrong.
Speaker 1: They do not have our entrepreneurs. They do not have
our capital markets. They do not have our combat proven
operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.
They do not have our hard won classified technologies. They
do not have the ingenuity and tenacity of American war
fighters who refuse to lose. They don't have a military
that can go thirty seven hours to downtown Tehran or
downtown Caracas without being seen in the process.
Speaker 4: You see, but none of that.
Speaker 1: Matters, however, if we suffocate those advantages under a stifling bureaucracy.
That's why we're unifying the innovation ecosystem, making this an
AI first department, and holding every lab, every program accountable,
all while pushing every officer to liver war fighting advantages
faster than others can adapt. We will not stop, We
will not back down. We will george the new arsenal
of freedom with our partners in industry, in the private sector.
We believe the future will be shaped by those who
lead in technology and innovation.
Speaker 4: We don't believe.
Speaker 1: We know, those who fervently believe in freedom and the
Western tradition like we do, must be those leaders. If
not us, if not America, if not the West, then who,
And if not now, it will be too late to
maintain that advantage. This is not reform for the sake
of reform.
Speaker 4: It never has been.
Speaker 1: This is about whether our warriors fight with yesterday's tools
or they fight overmatching our adversaries using tomorrow's technologies.
Speaker 4: We know the threat, we know the opportunity, We know
what must be done. We share the urgency.
Speaker 1: Now, we will do it, and we must do it
at wartime speed. Thank you, God bless you, God bless
this company that you've built, and may God bless our
great Republic.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, appreciate it. Thank you, thank you,
thank you, you guys, thank you, sir, thank you,