The Pentagon and, increasingly, Congress have grown frustrated with tech giants who shy away from US government work while flocking to Beijing to tap a massive — but authoritarian — market.

There are times and places in the history of war in which improvements in firepower force anyone in range to take cover instead of advancing, as machineguns and howitzers did a century ago on the infamous Western Front. The fundamental difference today is the width of the killing zone would be measured, not in hundreds or thousands of yards, but in hundreds or thousands of miles.

With Murray’s own HQ, Army Futures Command, stood up this August in Austin, the notoriously hidebound Army is making a concerted effort to reach out beyond its comfort zone and embed its officers, scientists, and civil servants in a wider world of civilian innovation, where hoodies are more in vogue than uniforms.

The goal is to give the 6,200-strong Cyber Mission Force a common, compatible set of tools so they can act in cyberspace as a coordinated military unit.

“I get really irritated when I’m in the audience and I hear ‘startup, startup, startup,’” Army Futures Command’s chief innovation officer said this morning at the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA). “Startups are not the only source of ideas.”

“It doesn’t have to be a tank, it just has to be decisive and lethal,” Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman answered. “If that is run by a flux capacitor, hovers, and has a ray gun — and we can make it run at a reasonable cost — we’ll look at it.”

What did Amazon founder, Washington Post owner and space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos tell the Air Force Association?

Don’t overthink it.
Don’t sweat the small stuff, but it’s not all small stuff.
On low stakes decisions, you should go fast, experiment, try and fail and try again; but on the big stuff — the irreversible decisions — for God’s sake, take your time.

The Air Force can be an “angel investor” for some startups, said Will Roper, the service’s top acquisition official.

The Army believes it has all the legal authorities it needs to reform. Now it just has to make the reform work.

The near-term payoff for military AI isn’t replacing human soldiers in the physical world, but empowering them to understand the world of radio waves. That’s an invisible battlefield which Russia’s powerful electronic warfare corps is poised to dominate in a future war, unless the US can catch up.