Ex-Google chairman looks to help military’s tech issues
In July 2016, Raymond Thomas, a four-star general and head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, hosted a guest: Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google. Thomas showed Schmidt around the Tampa, Fla., headquarters. They scrutinized prototypes for a robotic exoskeleton suit and joined operational briefings. Schmidt had recently begun advising the military on technology.
“You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Schmidt told Thomas, the officer recalled. “If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems.”
Four years later, Schmidt, 65, is waging a personal campaign to revamp America’s defense forces with more engineers, more software and more AI. In the process, the tech billionaire, who left Google last year, has reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the national security community.
Through his own venture capital firm and a $13 billion fortune, Schmidt has invested millions of dollars into more than half a dozen defense startups. He said he was convinced that applying new and relatively untested technology to complex situations — including deadly ones — would make service members more efficient and bolster the United States in its competition with China.
While Schmidt has helped generate reports and recommendations for the Pentagon, few have been adopted. Still, he said he had little intention of backing down.
“The way to understand the military is that the soldiers spend a great deal of time looking at screens. And human vision is not as good as computer vision,” he said. “It’s insane that you have people going to service academies, and we spend an enormous amount of training, training these people, and we put them in essentially monotonous work.”