Apparently the crux of the article is that the military wants more private capital to flow in the defense industry and an healthier ecosystems because the few large companies which have become keys to the military complex have become really inefficient.
It’s interesting but a different point entirely.
There has been such a healthy ecosystem of smaller companies in the defense industry, but the pentagon has forced the companies to consolidate. See: "last supper" of 1993 for example, but even before that there have been decades of mergers.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/merger-mania-should-the-p...
This report has also some nice graphs showing that this has been a very long trend, see Table 1 and figures 2 and 3:
https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...
<https://steveblank.com/secret-history/>
Algolia search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>
Came here to say this! Malcolm Harris wrote a book about this history (https://bookshop.org/p/books/palo-alto-a-history-of-californ...), recently discussed on an interesting episode of Tech Won't Save Us (https://techwontsave.us/episode/155_the_untold_history_of_si...).
Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third World petrodollar recycling options, who knows) - seems to avoid discussing how the current gigantic military government budget is being spent.
Fundamentally, military expenditures don't have much in the way of additional positive economic effects. Say you're producing construction cranes, for example - each crane facilitates further economic activity, in building projects. If you're producing tanks - well, unless your economic model is to raid other countries for raw resources, it's not going to have that same effect. There's also little likelihood for a large consumer market for your product.
The flush-head rivets were developed by Howard Hughes, ostensibly for his racing H-1, but his aircraft company was keen to sell to the military (air war was highly anticipated during the interwar years, so speed and endurance were first order motivators).
I mean, the list goes on and on. It's true, we invest in war machines, but as a percent of GDP, it's been going down for quite a while and now rivals the EU at something in the vicinity of 2% (we're over, they're under): https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941...
Turns out out, not dying is a hell of a necessity that mother'd a lot of invention. And at a national scale, sovereignty is the equivalent. And the enemy gets a vote. See Putin.
Working in this space on projects ranging from cancer to comms, I'm hear to tell you, biologists have a much harder job than weaponeers, but it's human nature, not US defense policy that's an issue.
Historically, there has been no shortage of entrepreneurs chasing defense dollars. Lots of iconic weapons, from the Thompson submachine gun to the Spitfire to the Colt revolver, were developed speculatively and later sold to militaries that hadn’t initially requested them.
> Fundamentally, military expenditures don't have much in the way of additional positive economic effects. Say you're producing construction cranes, for example - each crane facilitates further economic activity, in building projects. If you're producing tanks - well, unless your economic model is to raid other countries for raw resources, it's not going to have that same effect. There's also little likelihood for a large consumer market for your product.
Lots of military procurement expenditures have resulted in products with immediate civilian applications: rockets, radios, first aid equipment, antibiotics, encryption, highways, helicopters, jet engines, radar, sonar, Kevlar, canned food, computers.
https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/how-does-chinas-defense-spendin...
What is this based on?
while we were blowing up the Middle East, they were building shipyards
We should definitely do so with AI now.
They also have different goals. America spends to maintain global hegemony, which means a huge fleet of aircraft carriers meant to operate around the world. China isn't (yet) spending in that way, they're a lot more focused on regional objectives.
We screwed up and lost decades on crap like the Zumwalt class, the LCS and numerous other boondoggles that easily cost us a decade and $100 bln++. The LCS really deserves special mention for a unique level of stupidity - we are scrapping them pretty much as they come off the line. Its crazy - we don't want these ships, have committed to scrapping them...and we're still ordering them! Only in America.
Let's not forget how much we built and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many subs and carriers could have been built with the resources squandered? We sure did buy a lot of Humvees that never came back.
Even without those epic failures, it isn't clear we could beat the Chinese in manufacturing. Throwing bodies at a problem is definitely in their wheelhouse.
While we were bombing, they were building. Now we get to deal with it.
Additionally, we need to deal with people who come to our country and then only exclusively hire people from their country of origin. I can point to the page of multiple Chinese professors in the US who were trained by Americans in American universities, then start their own labs in American universities and only hire Chinese graduate students (and I’m not talking about labs of 2 students, I’m talking about massive labs of 15 - 20 students). Our country is getting taken advantage of and the last thing we need to do is give away more visas.
If the other half of the company were Chinese nationals (which certainly isn't the case) a team of 30 by pure happenstance would be 0.5^30 = 9.3 * 10^-10. Real fucking unlikely, yet I've seen that scenario happen more than once. Nobody says anything about it of course, everybody knows how HR would respond.
I worked for a startup where DARPA had given a fairly generous grant when I started my career (they made a medical training device that the military was interested in). I was jr, so I wasn't privy to the financial details of things, but overall it was very "waterfall-y" and a lot of form filling and box checking. WLB was overall pretty fair, but the key thing is that processes really hamstrung everyone (think MISRA style of coding standards) and morale was rather low. Pay wasn't great either so I left.
I just wonder now that I am more senior and have more financial responsibilities, is defense a financially safe space in case more tech keeps RIFing, even if overall comp levels are low.
Most of what I work with is Databricks, Python, Pyspark, etc. So most coding is done in notebooks. I haven't felt that there was a lot of restrictions coding wise, but getting access to different databases, clusters, and especially on boarding can be a pain.
Environment wise its been pretty good, you find even the clients are often contractors themselves, but if you dislike them you can always roll off and onto another project, it seems everyone needs more devs
But you'll also see SBIR/STTR funding topics (program run by the Small Business Administration) [2]
You can also try checking out some of the bigger Defense contractors, some have incubator programs and are looking to expand their small business ecosystem for subcontracts, part of that includes funding. (Disclaimer, I work here) [3]
[2] https://www.sbir.gov/node/2214225
[3] https://www.boozallen.com/expertise/innovation/ventures.html
U.S. NAVY | UNITED STATES MARINES | COMMERCIAL | BUILDSUBMARINES.COM | NAVY'S 'NEXT-GEN' SUBMARINES
HN archive search-fu fails me.
Closest I'm finding is 5 months old, "State Department Urges Silicon Valley to Aid National Security Effort": <https://archive.vn/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fst...>
https://acquisitiontalk.com/2022/08/does-dod-not-actually-wa...
Also, since I am always right and anybody who disagrees with me is wrong, I didn't want to bother reading the text. Luckily, there was an audio version by a not-so-hostile narrator.
TL;DR: China has already wooed their equivalent of SV.
I'm just wondering when one of these startups commits to making things that kill people.
Even then, a company isn't just limited to selling to the military...way waaaay more Sig P320s have been sold to civilians than will ever be sold to the army, and I expect the Spear to likewise be much larger for civilian sales than government sales (yes, a civilian Spear is coming).
Yes. The Pentagon didn’t bail out depositors. And they aren’t looking for incompetent bankers. If anything, letting SVB collapse and opening e.g. USAA business accounts for contractors would have been the moustache-twirling move.
