“I get to attend a lot of meetings, dinners, and working groups in which people are trying to bridge the divide between Washington and Silicon Valley, the defense and technology worlds, and I have come to believe that we are radically overthinking this problem. Much of the answer hinges on basic supply and demand. Again, it is a question of incentives. On any given day, billions of dollars of private capital sit on the sidelines in America, looking for promising new ventures that could yield big returns. More of that money does not flow into the defense sector because most venture capitalists have come to believe that defense is a lousy investment, and plenty of empirical evidence supports that assumption. For decades, too many defense technologies have failed to transition from promising research and development efforts to successful military programs fielded at scale. Too many small companies doing defense work have become casualties in the “valley of death” rather than billion-dollar “unicorns.” The reason there are not more success stories is not a mystery: the US government did not create the necessary incentives. It did not buy what worked best in large quantities.”
―
Christian Brose,
The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare
