The American private sector innovates and produces like no other nation in the world. And with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the challenges it presents to democracies around the world, there is renewed urgency to finding ways to quickly leverage U.S. innovation and ingenuity to defend our values at home and abroad.
At the Pentagon, the challenge of transitioning technology to the battlefield is well known: It’s called the “valley of death.”
When American startups, often from Silicon Valley, are funded to develop cutting-edge technology demonstrations for our nation’s defense, their innovations tend to languish in government bureaucracy, without ever getting integrated into Defense Department operations—and without moving promising technologies from the lab to the battlefield.