| I was hoping this was going to be something specific to Democracy. That it'd entail unique values & virtues... what defends Democracy isn't just guns & ships & planes, but also some of our character, our freedom of expression, our willingness to engage in healthy/honest/productive (sometimes scarce) debate. Our willingness to try to do good & support human rights. Our nations don't always act fully up to our democratic ideals, but I think most citizens can find some pride in the attempt to have a society that is good and open. I keep hoping that the Arsenal of Democracy involves better ways of rooting out corruption across the world. I keep hoping it involves better & lower cost wireless systems, better ways to deploy internet service or power. I hope the Arsenal of Democracy rebuilds & fortifies us when the peace-loving civilized world is attacked not by bombs or tanks but also by natural disasters and calamity. Anyhow, I'll step through the article a bit. Which starts out far more prosaic but does come around to having some interesting challenges to make. It starts: > Only superior military technology can credibly deter war — but our defense companies are losing the ability to build it. The B21 raider is seemingly going ok, but is by design is seemingly rather a re-hash. The Next Gen Fighter program & other aerospace folks are showing fairly rapid iteration in some segments. Our hypersonics seem ok, but only looking year by year by year. I think we still make all the rifles we can muster. But perhaps- especially after watching the recent Russian situation- a deeper understanding of our supply lines- not for the front but for our industrial base- is merited & worth considering. I wonder what data we'd look at to make or reject this core premise. The article starts getting much closer to relevant for me after the initial opening: > The result is a defense industry that spends a measly 1 to 4 percent of revenue on internal research and development, compared to 10 to 20 percent at major tech companies and 40 percent or higher at technology startups. Heck yeah, now we're talking about. The idea of searching for good things to work on resonates. Our defense rests not just on brawn, but on understanding & intellect & adaptability. On radical vigilance. The Secret History of Silicon Valley is a great retelling of much of our semi-recent (WWII) epic[1], & so much of it is about the intellectual struggle, finding people & putting them in front of problems. DARPA continues to be home to interesting challenges[2]- multi-fuel quiet hybrid personal transit, cancer detection, new X-planes, integrates sensors & mems programs, and plenty of other militarily focused efforts. The idea of funding interesting work, heavily, seeing what shakes out, is constant allure to me. The article points out what seems like much the trend of the world: the very big doing more work, less competition, less diversity in thinking & ways: > The 10 largest defense companies account for upwards of 80 percent of the industry’s revenue. Nearly two-thirds of major weapons-systems contracts in the United States have just one bidder. Frustrating. This definitely feels weak. Being willing & able to iterate more rapidly, to experiment, to make programs which run shorter with more risk of failure & higher rewards of success; that's key. The article talks about software first- it feels like that's increasingly going to be a crunch point: something the very big entities have internal systems they can deploy, & others needing Commercial Off-the-Shelf have less well structured software environments, less ability to integrate & get making hardware. The authors background (at the end of the article) is in-line with who we'd expect to be pushing for more diversity & competition, > Trae Stephens is co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, a cutting-edge defense technology company, and a partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, where he invests across sectors with a particular interest in startups operating in the government space. / Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion. Prior to Palantir, Trae served as a computational linguist within the United States intelligence community. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA#Active_projects |