[bane]

There's a ton of startups that get U.S. government contracts. It's not hard and in fact the government specifically sets aside something like 30% of contract awards to small businesses and other disadvantaged businesses. There's an entire industry of forming startups that only chase after small business set asides, then sub in a major government contractor to perform the work -- acting as a pass through. Startups that are very good at this end up "owning" lots of large contracts and then end up being acquired as a division of a larger defense contractor so they can squeeze the last few percent out of the contracts the startup holds.

Rinse, recycle and repeat. There's lots of very wealthy Beltway residents who's career is just spinning up businesses to do this. It's a kind of a parallel system to what goes on in the Valley.