Ellen Lord and Tyler Sweatt
The American defense community is balancing a robust yet aging defense industrial base with an emerging $130 billion-dollar defense tech ecosystem. We have the opportunity to increase our military might if we embrace the moment and inject modern cyber, software, materials and electronics technology to enhance our traditional defense industrial base.
Instead, we are wasting the talents of America’s world-class tech sector and, in doing so, putting our country and allies at risk.
That’s because we have an ecosystem without a marketplace. The Department of Defense won’t buy commercial capability at scale from Silicon Valley. The result is fighting with one arm behind our back.
What’s at the root of the problem? Warfighting and deterrence capabilities are typically hardware-enabled and software-defined, but the Pentagon treats those attributes as though they evolve at the same pace.
This paradigm does not work in today’s geopolitical reality where wars are fought both on and off the battlefield. It actively harms our warfighters and disincentivizes the U.S. tech industry from joining the defense industrial base.
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