[ska]

"Is your position that when the government brings in a whole company from the private sector to do work, then that's perfectly fine"

I don't know about "perfectly fine", more of a "has significant problems with revolving door corruption and lobbying" but be that as it may, the conflict of interest seems pretty clear to me.

Given your premise that the NSA is necessary and it is in our general interest that it is effective, then the NSA's CTO is exactly the guy who should be playing companies off against each other to get a better deal for the public money he's spending. It's pretty hard to do that well if have any ties with one of the companies in question, let alone strong ones.

It would be a different story if part of the deal was that IronNet would never bid for, or in any way be involved in any NSA contract, but that doesn't seem to be the case (unless I missed something?).