Jason: All right everybody, emergency podcast time. Episode 263 of All-In. We have Emil Michael, the under secretary of war for research and engineering working directly for Pete Hegseth. We had to get this out to you on Thursday night because it is an emergency pod. One of my old besties. Emil Michael is here. Emil and I were part of team Uber back in the day. He was Travis's right-hand man. And Emil Michael is now the under secretary for war here in the United States, serving his country. Welcome to the program for the first time. Emil Michael, how you doing, brother?

Emil: I'm doing good. I hope it was more than a fixer, but you know.

Jason: Raising 20 billion fixer. I mean, you got it done. The hardest. He would give you the hardest things. In Brooklyn, we call them fixers.

Jason: All right. The US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran on Saturday. Today is day six of Operation Epic Fury. Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed within hours of the operation. 40 senior officials have also been killed. Death toll so far. About a thousand people according to reports. Tragically, six US Army Reserve soldiers were killed following a drone strike on a base in Kuwait. A US submarine sank an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka. This is the first torpedo kill since World War II.

Jason: Why were at war been a bit of a moving target. First explanation from Rubio. He said Israel was going to attack and the US had no choice but to participate. Later walked that back. Trump made it clear this is not a regime change effort, but we're doing this to stop terrorism and the development of ICBMs and obviously nuclear bombs. Trump also mentioned the people of Iran should seize the moment and take their country back. Emil, I guess there are two questions people really want to know. How long is this going to take? And are we going to have to have boots on the ground? What is success here?

Emil: I think the president talked about this is a weeks not months kind of operation and it's aimed at essentially disarming the regime so that they can't supply Hezbollah, Hamas, all the kind of terror groups. And that's why you see from the reporting they're going after the depots, the nuclear sites. They're a prodigious drone maker. In terms of boots on the ground, there's no scenario where we have some protracted boots on the ground Afghanistan, Iraq 2 like scenario.

Friedberg: I think the president and the administration have probably the biggest meetings of the term coming up in China in April. My estimation based on the conversations is that finding a grand bargain or a deal with China is probably one of his top priorities.

Friedberg: That being the case, I think you could look at the actions in Iran as creating maximal leverage going into those negotiations. The reason for that: 90% of the oil that comes out of Iran goes to China. Creating leverage by having significant influence or damage or destruction to those supply chains for China gives the United States footing to be able to negotiate a better deal for America.

Chamath: I'll build on what Friedberg said. I think all of this centers around that geopolitical discussion. Last night, something important happened: the official Chinese bureaucracy posted what their GDP targets were, a range of 4.5 to 5%, the lowest it has ever been in about 30 years. If you have that as a starting point, what is it in China's best interest to do? It becomes obvious that the right thing to do would be to invade Taiwan.

Chamath: The president saw that. If your goal is to prevent war with China, how would you do it? The most interesting takeaway is that they are enormously dependent on imported oil. About a fifth of it comes exclusively from Iran and Venezuela. And now all of that is off the table. If you add Russia into that mix, it's about 40% of China's oil. You hem in China going into a massive moment at the end of March where there is the potential for a grand bargain.

Jason: Explain to us what you know that makes these two operations go so smoothly. There's obviously some new technology here.

Emil: Besides the discombobulator, what we've got is a very well-trained military. The people now who are fighting that are generals now. And so they've learned a lot of lessons. And you compare that to the Chinese military. They don't have a lot of experience. Conflict experience matters because you understand going in what are the things that could go wrong.

Emil: And then you have incredible technology. You imagine a hundred guys goes into the most fortified compound in Venezuela, take him and his wife out safely and are out with no KAS. These war games have been on the shelf for a long time. Midnight hammer in Iran was planned years ahead of time. We have a very sophisticated way of doing these things to minimize loss of life and maximize success.

Friedberg: Emil, do you think we would have been able to pull off that mission as successfully 5 or 10 years ago? Has the technology improved that quickly?

Emil: I'd say no. It's the rules of engagement. In Afghanistan, if the guy had a small gun you had to have a small gun. The rules of engagement were so punishing that we were at risk all the time. We've gotten back to pushing responsibility to the field. It's more of a Colin Powell approach: go all in, have a clear objective, come out, use overwhelming force.

Jason: My understanding is that there have been more drones deployed by the United States this past week than we've done in the history of military activity. Is that right?

Emil: It changes it big. Russia Ukraine war happened where 70% of the casualties are because of drones. That's why companies like Anduril are making unmanned systems. I'm running the Lucas program, low-cost unmanned combat attack systems. These one-way attack drones can go 500-700 miles at the speed of an airplane, carry a big warhead. Those are like $50,000 to $80,000.

Jason: How much of this should basically be AI? How confident are you that this isn't going to make a mistake?

Emil: A sophisticated drone war is going to be drone swarms controlled by AI. AI could do automatic target recognition. For Chinese hypersonic missiles, you've got 90 seconds. A human doesn't have the reaction time. China has drone swarms called heterogeneous autonomy, where they take different kinds of drones and how they communicate with one another.

Jason: Some breaking news: The Pentagon has formally notified Anthropic that it's been deemed a supply chain risk. The department of war cancelled Anthropic $200 million contract on Friday. Emil, explain to us what happened here.

Emil: If you remember the Biden executive order on AI, Anthropic was one of those winners. They got very sticky to the workflows. I came in in August and I looked at the contracts. I was like, holy cow.

Emil: They say you can't use them to plan a kinetic strike. You can't use their AI model to move a satellite. I said: What do you think these folks do? We use the Department of War. So we started these negotiations. Exceptions doesn't work. All lawful use seems like a good thing.

Emil: The trigger point was after the Maduro raid. One of their execs called Palantir and asked: was our software used in that raid? Which is classified information! And implying that if it was used, that might violate their terms of service. It raised enough alarm that we're potentially so dependent on a software provider that has the ability to not only shut it off, maybe it's a rogue developer who could poison the model. So then that culminated in the Tuesday dramatic meeting with Dario.

Chamath: The reality is that what Anthropic showed is that they are going to have a political perspective. If you're not figuring out how to be multi-model and agnostic, you're taking on enormous business risk. This is deplatforming all over again, but this is that times a thousand.

Jason: Take us through OpenAI, Gemini and Grok. Have any of those given you any push back?

Emil: Grok's all in for all lawful use cases because we don't want ideology. We have Google for all lawful use cases on unclassified networks. Sam Altman was being a real patriot. He was trying to protect Anthropic to his credit. He was like, don't call him a supply chain risk. But I need redundancy.

Jason: Where are we with respect to the US manufacturing supply chain?

Emil: We are early days. I have the office of strategic capital which has 200 billion in lending authority. We're trying to domesticate batteries, solid rocket motors. We don't have a munitions risk, but we do need to plus up because we're still fighting with 1980 cold war weapons.

Emil: DARPA is my favorite part. One of the things that they're working on is they're trying to use biology to synthesize critical minerals. That would leapfrog the Chinese in terms of tech.

Jason: Two quick questions: Are there aliens? And are we competitive with China?

Emil: I fought for the alien portfolio. I didn't get it. On the second one, Chinese have had the greatest military buildup in world history in the last 15 years. That being said, we still have the best stuff in the world. We can't be complacent.

Jason: Emil, thank you for what you do. This has been a fun amazing episode. We'll see you next time.