”I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO CALL THE CONFLICT WE’RE IN WITH CHINA AND RUSSIA, BUT I’D SAY WE’RE AT WAR.”
MICHAEL BROWN, DIRECTOR OF THE DEFENSE Innovation Unit (DIU) within the U.S. Department of Defense, declares war rather matter-of-factly. “It’s just not war in the way we typically think,” says the longtime Silicon Valley executive who transitioned into government service in 2016. But when adversaries get to the point of “shutting down pipelines and creating other damage,” he says, you’re seeing the “kinetic effects of cyber.”
When Brown and I chat in August—at a picnic table in a glade of cedar trees behind a tan brick building in Mountain View, California, that houses both the 341st Readiness Division of the U.S. Army and the DIU—news continues to dribble out about the extent of the 2020 SolarWinds hack. The event involved a group reportedly backed by the Russian government that compromised networks of a number of government agencies, including the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration. A couple of weeks earlier, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, along with a coalition of U.S. allies, accused China of engaging in cyber espionage, and the U.S. Department of Justice charged four Chinese nationals with being part of a global hacking campaign targeting companies, government agencies, and universities. Chinese officials vehemently denied the charges.
“For cyber, for electronic warfare, for misinformation,” Brown says, “we need to be shifting more dollars to those domains.”
Brown’s job is to try to make that happen. As head of the DIU, he runs what’s designed to be an agile skunk works within the Department of Defense (DOD). It identifies commercial tech products that it believes the DOD needs to prepare for technology-driven warfare, and seeds the companies that make them with research funds. The startups that meet the government’s standards win a contract with a service branch such as the Air Force. Some of the companies the DIU has worked with include Anduril Industries, the drone and security startup founded by Oculus VR creator Palmer Luckey; C3.ai, enterprise-grade predictive tech founded by longtime entrepreneur Tom Siebel; and even Oura Health, maker of a ring that tracks a wearer’s sleep and activity to anticipate soldiers’ illnesses before they show symptoms.
The DIU was created in 2015, during the Obama administration. Brown, who arrived in Silicon Valley four decades ago as a student at Stanford’s graduate school of business and rose to become CEO of the security company Symantec, has run it since 2018. His success led President Biden to nominate him in April to be
