Modernizing the American defense industry isn’t much for earning social capital, I’ve found, but it’s really, really important work. It’s the work they’ve done in Ukraine to defend their country and our values, and it’s the work that will reassert American leadership in chaotic times.

It’s also the work that promises to grow regional innovation economies. I suspect that’s the reason why states like North Carolina, Massachusetts, Indiana, and other states and local regions are stepping up.

Just a few weeks ago, the North Carolina Critical Technologies Alliance joined with the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce to launch its “First in Defense” coalition, bringing together universities, industry leaders, and group of bipartisan lawmakers to mark the state as a hub of defense manufacturing and innovation. Their goals are precise. An April press release noted that “North Carolina ranks 28th in defense-funded research and is among the lowest in the country in defense spending per capita,” and they’re out to change that.

The same commitment to the national security community is found in Massachusetts. Late last year Gov. Maura Healey launched the Massachusetts Strategic Hub for Innovation, Exchange and Leadership in Defense (SHIELD), a $47 million initiative to support military innovation, specifically focused on microelectronics and chips manufacturing with defense uses.

And in Indiana, with the leadership of the Defense Innovation Networking Group and the Applied Research Institute, lawmakers joined with leaders in research, defense, and private capital at its Midwest Defense Innovation Summit, held last month in Indianapolis. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun and several members of the Indiana congressional delegation spoke at the event, as did former Defense Innovation Unit director and Shield Capital Managing Partner Raj Shah.

When lawmakers and economic leaders saw a network of defense founders emerging in El Segundo, Calif. – called the “Freedom-Loving, Bible-Thumping Hub of Hard Tech” by Vanity Fair – they sought to accelerate its growth by supporting infrastructure improvements and preserving industrial zones and promoting networking and startup events, all with a focus on aerospace and defense.

Perhaps these states and local economic leaders are taking action because of a commitment to American strength. Or, perhaps, they appreciate the ability of the national security innovation community to grow local economies and create jobs.

Consider a recent report from George Mason University finding a 22-to-1 return on investment from Department of Defense Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards.

In an earlier commentary, I noted that Chicago ranks just 30th among the largest 40 municipal markets in attracting Department of Defense SBIR awards per STEM worker, one-sixth the volume of DoD SBIR dollars attracted by the average STEM worker top-tier tech markets. In my judgement, this speaks to a cultural aversion within the Chicago innovation community to target national security challenges – something that we’re trying to fix with Frontier Mission Network.

Imagine for a moment that we could attract a few more DoD SBIR awards. A Phase II award typically provides a recipient about $1.5 million. (That average has considerable variation, but hold that assumption for a moment.) Imagine Chicago startups could attract 10 more SBIR awards, or about $15 million in additional SBIR money, in one year. This is surely not too ambitious. According to public data I have analyzed, this would bring Chicago roughly in line with Atlanta, never mind more advanced defense tech communities like San Francisco and Boston.

What would attracting $15 million in new DoD SBIR awards do for the Chicago economy? Assuming work is reasonably localized and recalling the George Mason University study on DoD SBIR returns, a $15 million boost in SBIR awards directed at domestic manufacturing could yield more than $330 million in economic output. Consistent with U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis manufacturing employment benchmarks that approximate one job supported per $100,000 of output, this additional activity would support an estimated 3,300 jobs.

Any investment that would support even a quarter of that number of jobs would, with total justification, inspire any mayor or governor to host a press conference or a ribbon cutting. We believe, simply by understanding U.S. military problems and initiating a lab-to-market process to build solutions, we can drive far more headlining activity.

With the support of the Small Business Administration’s Growth Accelerator Fund Competition award, Frontier Mission Network has hosted five Frontier Briefing workshops (like the one I hosted at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern yesterday), three online discussions – including one with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank – and worked with 15 Chicago startups to scope the national security market and compete for awards. It’s a start. But we need help. Peer states and regions are not waiting to show leadership, and neither should Chicago and Illinois.

We are now seeing activity, albeit not in Chicago, that validates this argument. An early example came last summer when the U.S. military issued a $150 million loan to MP Materials, a Nevada-based company, to mine critical minerals domestically.

The story of the U.S. military and the defense industry investing in non-superstar cities has recently become clearer. Consider that just within the last few weeks:

• The U.S. Navy announced a $71 million award to Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company, to build an AI solution to monitor and maintain vessels. This deal alone is larger than any one venture financing round of a Chicago-based company that included a Chicago-based venture capital firm since October of last year, according to Pitchbook data I analyzed.

• Anduril Industries announced it will begin firing up its first production lines at its Arsenal-1 factory outside of Columbus, Ohio. This news comes just 14 months after Anduril announced the factory’s location.

• Hermeus, a venture-backed company based in Atlanta, successfully tested its uncrewed Quarterhouse Mk 2.1 aircraft at an Army installation in New Mexico. Hermeus received a $60 million Air Force Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) award last year and is making progress in supporting at or near Mach 5 hypersonic flight.

• Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) kamikaze drone made their combat debut in Iran just seven months after the Air Force posted a solicitation seeking the very solution it is providing. The lead contractor building the LUCAS drone is SpektreWorks, a startup based in Arizona.

• The Pentagon sent $27 million to R.E. Darling (REDAR) to expand domestic rocket motor production. REDAR is also based in Arizona.

I reemphasize: This is value creation initiated by the U.S. military outside of the superstar cities.

I argue this is just the beginning of the U.S. military reasserting itself as a central player in the American tech and manufacturing economy.

In my interview with Steve Blank last month, he noted that defense acquisitions officials who bring experience deploying capital at scale – namely Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg, the former CEO of Cerberus Capital – and that “now we have people who actually understand how to write tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in checks” at the Pentagon.

And so they will very soon. The New York Times reported last week that Feinberg is now recruiting Wall Street investment bankers to staff a 30-person team to manage the Office of Strategic Capital and its Economic Warfare Unit. Once formed, this team will deploy as much as $200 billion over the next three years to support R&D in critical industries.

The logical leap I’m asking you to make is that responding to national security problems and attracting federal investment, no matter how you may feel about the current White House occupant, will initiate follow-on private financing and economic growth. That understanding is at the foundation of what we’re building with Frontier Mission Network.

My questions in both interviews were admittedly self-interested. I wanted their thoughts on how we best support a local economy that expands the American defense industrial base.

Their insights deepened our understanding of how to grow Frontier Mission Network across three critical dimensions:

1. Initiating effective defense go-to-market strategies

2. Recognizing that this moment is genuinely different

3. Anchoring our work within a Chicago-focused context

“Starts with problems”

For founders we work with, I asked Newell to identify an entry point for the industry. His answer was direct: reach out to senior buyers, ask what their problems are, and then go solve them:

Newell referenced a directory that Blank produced, urging founders to “start ripping that thing apart.” In it you’ll find the contact information of senior technology buyers throughout the U.S. military. You can find the directory here:

So, I’ve since told several firms we’re supporting: Start by opening up Blank’s directory. Cold emailing and calling officers at the Pentagon, we’ve found, actually works. Many actual do respond and share their time.

Deploying capital at scale

Should we believe that the U.S. military will meaningfully increase engagement with venture communities?

Blank made two critical points that we should appreciate. First, several senior officials who have recently assumed leadership roles at the Pentagon come from large private equity firms and bring with them decades of experience deploying capital at scale. His thoughts on that development here:

Second, Blank noted that we may be entering a period of transformative change, with the entire defense acquisition regime being dismantled “root and branch,” in his words, in favor of the Acquisitions Transformation Strategy. These reforms could drive long-needed efficiencies at a moment when China, using “lean” methodologies Blank himself designed, threatens American technological leadership. His thoughts:

The intersection of quantum and national security … and Chicago

Chicago’s economic growth strategy has increasingly coalesced around a commitment to build a hub for quantum sciences. The U.S. military is, by some measures, the world’s single largest funder and investor in quantum research and development.

I asked Newell where the U.S. military’s interests intersect with the quantum sciences. His answer reached into on-the-ground military strategy in a way I had not yet encountered. He noted that no one yet knows how quantum capabilities will ultimately be deployed on the battlefield — and that this very uncertainty presents an opportunity for value creation in Chicago. Take a listen here:

You can find both of these conversations in their entirety on our YouTube page here.

You can watch our conversation on our LinkedIn page here:

FMN's LinkedIn page

This Monday we spoke with Steve Blank, Silicon Valley historian and co-founder of the Lean Startup movement, on a range of topics Monday. You can view the entire conversation here:

I’ll briefly highlight a few clips that might be especially valuable for our network here in Chicago.

I asked about how to draw more technologists into the national security industry. This sector remains a niche one, I’ve found, and no doubt political polarization and some unhelpful associations have worked against us. But, as Blank notes, this need not be. “These are some of the toughest and most challenging problems in the world,” Blank told us. “These problems, as a second-order effect if you’re non-military or haven’t served, would allow you and your family to sleep at night.” His full response is here:

A formative resource for us has been Professor Blank’s “Secret History of Silicon Valley” lecture, in which he explores the historical role of defense spending in building the Bay Area’s regional economy. We asked Professor Blank if that same story could be told in the present day, focusing the conversation specifically on Chicago. His response:

For founders, startups, and small businesses looking to enter the national security industry, Blank has published a directory of senior buyers, which you can find here. He underscores how fundamentally different the defense acquisition process is from the commercial market, going so far as to cast doubt on the viability of “dual-use” strategies. His thoughts:

Finally, we discussed a recent opinion piece he wrote in Defense Scoop. Professor Blank offered some commentary on extreme acquisitions regulations, which he argues is dramatically slowing the pace of defense innovation. “That was ok in the Cold War when our adversary was the Soviet Union, who had an equally complex and Byzantine system,” Blank said, adding “our system is essentially collapsing on its own weight.” His thoughts:

Steve Blank’s biography
Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford and a co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Steve consults for the National Security establishment on innovation methods, processes, policies, and doctrine.

His book The Four Steps to the Epiphany is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He created the curriculum for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. At Stanford he co-created the Department of Defense Hacking for Defense and Department of State Hacking for Diplomacy curriculums.

His follow-on book The Startup Owner’s Manual described a process for turning ideas into scale and his Harvard Business Review cover story redefined how large organizations can innovate at speed.

Steve’s latest class at Stanford, Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition, is providing crucial insight on how technology will shape all the elements of national power.

It's a great honor to have an hour of his time and we hope you'll listen in and participate. Please register here: https://luma.com/qcdppnf3

Steve Blank’s biography
Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford and a co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Steve consults for the National Security establishment on innovation methods, processes, policies, and doctrine.

His book The Four Steps to the Epiphany is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He created the curriculum for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. At Stanford he co-created the Department of Defense Hacking for Defense and Department of State Hacking for Diplomacy curriculums.

His follow-on book The Startup Owner’s Manual described a process for turning ideas into scale and his Harvard Business Review cover story redefined how large organizations can innovate at speed.

Steve’s latest class at Stanford, Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition, is providing crucial insight on how technology will shape all the elements of national power.

Warren discussed the Pentagon’s new “commercial product mindset” and enforcing mandates that the military prioritize purchasing of commercial technologies:

George asked about the incentive structure for the U.S. military to best acquire new technologies, and “what’s it going to take to make a difference?” Here’s Warren’s response:

Then I asked about the new portfolio acquisition executive-driven structure of military acquisitions, and how startups might approach working in the national security sector. Warren’s response:

You can view the rest of our interview with Warren at our YouTube page here. Look out for more online content soon!

The U.S. military is overhauling acquisitions processes, emphasizing speed, reduced regulation, and strengthening the defense industrial base to meet urgent strategic needs. Next Thursday we'll hear from Warren Katz, chairman of The Alliance for Commercial Technology in Government, who will help us understand these coming changes and navigate new processes for building dual-use startups and solving defense challenges.

If you are interested in the national security sector, there is no more knowledgeable source of information than Warren Katz.

You can register for our online conversation here.

Earlier this month, the New York Times published a series of editorials examining the need to modernize the American defense industrial base, and mapping out the consequences of failing to do so.

I hope a few readers had a similar reaction that I did two decades ago after watching “An Inconvenient Truth”: startled by the threats, overwhelmed by the task confronting our political system, and inspired to effectuate change.

As important as the message was the source. The New York Times editorial board is, of course, not a wellspring of MAGA conservatism. It is a lens through which many Americans — often from the political left — understand the world. Few deny that the national security community has historically but not exclusively drawn from conservative social circles. The Times editorials provide a valuable resource for broadening that community at a moment when we need more people setting aside partisanship to collaborate on modernizing the U.S. military.

Below, I’ll summarize the Times’ key arguments and connect them to our work at Frontier Mission Network.

What should startle you

The Times warned readers that “America can’t make what the military needs.”

“Rebuilding America’s defense industrial base is crucial to preventing wars from starting and winning them if they do. If the United States can’t make what it needs to prevail in a long war — one lasting months or years — its adversaries are more likely to attack. As the military maxim goes: Industrial might is deterrence.”

The reality, well understood in the Pentagon and in Beijing, is that our defense industry has been so badly weakened that we couldn’t reasonably produce enough munitions to sustain major conventional combat operations beyond a few weeks. The Chinese manufacturing machine is simply far more secure and redundant than that of the United States.

That may seem like almost a theoretical problem, remote from our everyday lives. It isn’t in Ukraine, vividly illustrated in two recent PBS Frontline documentaries, “20 Days in Mariupol” and “2000 Meters to Andriivka.” And it’s surely well understood in Taiwan. If the United States and our allies cannot build a national security industry capable of parrying Russian aggression, we may be left with the economic consequences of Chinese aggression very soon.

Put another way: As former President Joe Biden put it recently, “if we don’t lead, who leads in the world? Russia? China? Who leads?” I would invite those who view the national security community as, broadly, inconsistent with their own values to answer Biden’s question. This is no time for a vacation from history.

What should leave you feeling overwhelmed

It’s easy to write a white paper and host a panel exploring how the Pentagon can acquire low-cost, higher-volume systems more likely to be employed in future conflicts. It’s far more difficult to implement plans in defense spending bills.

Fault can be apportioned to both parties, Congress and the White House, K Street and the Pentagon itself, the Times makes clear:

“Why have successive administrations, Republican and Democratic, persisted in investing in the old way of war?

“One reason is inertia in Congress and the Pentagon. The channels through which funds flow to weapons systems are deep and difficult to reroute…

“Another factor is military culture. Senior officers tend to be wedded to the technologies and tactics in which they made their careers…

“There is also a conceptual failure: the idea that more sophisticated is always better…The Army wants to field its own small drones — not for a few hundred dollars per unit, as in Ukraine, but a more sophisticated version of the same weapon for tens of thousands of dollars. Unsurprisingly, the more complex version takes much longer to produce.

To solve this challenge, the entire defense industrial base must be upended, the Times editorial board writes:

“The defense industry has consolidated from 51 major players in the early 1990s to five today … Those big five contractors, known as the primes, have built their businesses around government contracts. They have become masters of the bureaucracy but are incapable of churning out weapons quickly…Larger companies must adapt to the speed of modern conflict, while smaller ones need a chance to get in the game.”

Understand that the very structure of the national security industry has been defined over more than three decades, where the Pentagon (under presidents of both parties) has turned to large contractors to effectively manage the American defense industrial base. Reforming this system to facilitate entry of new dual-use suppliers will not be incredibly difficult, with conflicting interests fighting for every dollar of spending.

What should inspire you

Reform is difficult, and that’s exactly why we need more folks interested in and engaging with the national security community.

The Times urges readers to honor those who have launched entrepreneurial careers rooted in “old-fashioned patriotism, matched with a career that serves a greater purpose.”

Noting that participation in the national security sector has shrunk — only one in 16 Americans has served in the military, down from one in five in 1980 — the Times calls for a “new definition of service.”

“The shift away from widespread American participation in national security has left the Department of Defense isolated from two of the country’s great assets: its entrepreneurial spirit and technological expertise…

“The military will always need physically fit service members. But we are headed toward a future where software will play a bigger role in armed conflict than hardware, from unmanned drones and A.I.-driven targeting to highly engineered cyber weapons and space-based systems.”

We got plenty of entrepreneurial spirt and technical expertise ready to be activated in service of American strength here in Chicago. That’s what the Small Business Administration has charged Frontier Mission Network to go do.

American strength is defined by those engaging in the defense industry. It isn’t to be conflated with any one political party or any one person.

Have a great holiday break and we’ll see you in 2026!

This is not success in and of itself. Rather this is an investment and an opportunity for Chicago’s innovation community to build a lab-to-market process focused on solving national security challenges and strengthening America’s defense industrial base.

With the SBA’s support, we have already supported several informational seminars around Chicago’s innovation community — just last week, we hosted a seminar at mHUB — and will continue to build and expand programming focused on growing our region’s presence in the expanding and evolving defense industry.

We take our obligations to the SBA very seriously, and we committed to engaging stakeholders across our city — researchers, entrepreneurs, corporate and civic partners, and capital investors — and connecting with the Pentagon’s portfolio acquisition executives to bridge the gap between Chicago’s innovation community and America’s warfighters.

If you would like to learn more about what we’re building, please join us at 2112 on December 4 at 4:30 for an informational seminar. You can register here.

If you’re in Chicago, please join us at one of the briefings listed below:

• November 6, 11:30 a.m., at Northeastern Illinois University Business Innovation and Growth (BIG) Center. Link here to register:

  Join us at the BIG Center

• November 19, 4:30 p.m., at TeamWorking by TechNexus. Link here to register:

  Join us at TeamWorking by TechNexus

• November 20, 10:30 a.m., at mHUB. Link here to register:

Join us at mHUB

• December 4, 4:30 p.m., at 2112. Link here to register:

Join us at 2112

We are eager to get the word out. If your organization, company, or professional network is interested in hosting a briefing, please reach out—we’d be delighted to come and present.

That oversight left me looking rather foolish when I struck up a conversation with an event organizer, John—a trim, stately man with an unmistakable Wisconsin accent—and his gracious wife, Cate. She too had a distinguished quality to her, I noticed. After friendly exchanges about our families and work, we spent much of Saturday night focused on the Cubs and Brewers battle it out in Game 5 of the National League Division Series.

It wasn’t until the next day at the Packers game, after Cate made an offhand comment about her husband once serving as an elected official, that—after doing a quick search on my phone when no one was looking—I found out John was in fact John Gard, former Speaker of the Wisconsin General Assembly. My total lack of awareness I’m sure was evident. To both him and his wife.

After I got home, I did some more research on Gard and found that Cate too had a notable career in Wisconsin politics. Cate Zeuske served as Wisconsin State Treasurer from 1991 to 1995 and Wisconsin Secretary of Revenue from 1996 to 2001. I had no idea.

I very much enjoyed meeting Speaker Gard and Secretary Zeuske, and I hope they feel the same about me—though they probably (and understandably) think I’m a bit clueless.

I find it notable that I—a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat—enjoyed a long conversation with two former Republican elected leaders before I had any idea who they were. Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because the occasion that brought us together was an event that served the unifying purpose of American strength. It’s a common cause that I hope many others recognize.

Understanding our divisions and finding solutions

Perhaps if we learned more about the roots of our divisions, we might better understand how to heal them. I don’t pretend to have all the answers for why Americans are so divided, but I’m certain I learned a lot after watching a PBS documentary about a 1970 clash between anti–Vietnam War protesters and roughly 200 construction workers building the World Trade Center just blocks from the rally:

Watch "Hard Hat Riot"

Please invest an hour of your time to watch this documentary, but if you cannot, here is a quick summary: The “Hard Hat Riot” marked a turning point where white, blue-collar workers turned away from the Democratic Party, which increasingly gained energy, ideas, and core voters from (often elite) college campuses. Carrying American flags in the face of at least a few protesters waving North Vietnamese flags, the construction workers became a symbol of Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” — voters who have become a pivotal force in American politics during the Trump Era.

The PBS documentary shows—blow by blow—how Nixon harnessed social division for his own political benefit, and it traces our current cultural rifts back to that clash in New York’s Financial District.

It seems clear to me that Democrats might want to spend the remainder of the Trump administration working to recapture the working-class voters who began leaving the party after the Hard Hat Riot—even at the risk of alienating some of its college-educated base. But I’ll leave that debate to others. What I do want to suggest is this: might this moment—when we are all heavily invested in reindustrializing America’s manufacturing economy and maintaining our technological leadership— mark the end of a political era that began 55 years ago?

A platform for bipartisanship

I’m not asking anyone to abandon principles—I’m certainly not. What I’m asking is that, when it comes to national security work, we set aside the culture war that no one is ever going to win anyway.

No serious historian would suggest that a single political party protected Europe from a Soviet advance from 1945 through the fall of the Berlin Wall. American strength in the 20th century was led by Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, and Robert Gates.

And it was led by a bunch of Democrats too. I would hope those on the left take inspiration from a long line of Democrats who helped win the Cold War—Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Sam Nunn, and William Perry (Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, not Mike Ditka’s nose tackle). I just can’t stress enough: Democrats — from aspiring 2028 presidential candidates down to the rank and file — should not turn away from the national security community and leave the work of defense modernization to political opponents.

While I am a Democrat, most of the people I spent last weekend with at the Midwest Defense Forum were not. Speaker Gard and Treasurer Zeuske are longtime and respected leaders in the Wisconsin Republican Party. So too is former Congressman Mike Gallagher, a cohost of the event.

No matter. In the discussions I joined, partisan politics were far less of a factor than the Packers–Bears rivalry. (I was alone in rooting for the latter this weekend, of course.)

During a Sunday conversation with Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens, I raised the point that defense modernization should be a bipartisan effort. Yes, the national security community leans right, but the R&D community certainly does not—and we need to work together if we’re going to get the job done.

I’ll admit I was a bit anxious about raising the point. To my pleasant surprise, I hardly needed to worry. As I spoke, Gallagher nodded in agreement. About a half-dozen other attendees sought me out later in the day to thank me. I even earned a hat tip from longtime Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer.

What we are building with Frontier Mission Network—and the broader effort to reindustrialize domestic supply chains and modernize the U.S. military—must exist outside cultural divisions and partisan politics. With Frontier Mission Network, we are asking researchers at academic institutions, many of whom are deeply skeptical of the current administration, to set aside differences, recognize our shared interests, and engage in the national security enterprise.

I urged Midwest Defense Forum attendees to remember that the work of strengthening America is something we must do together. They hardly needed reminding, and I hope others recognize the critical need to turn the temperature down and get to work.

With Frontier Mission Network, we are admittedly focused on building an upstream institution — one that seeks to unify laboratories, entrepreneurial communities, corporate and civic stakeholders, capital investors, and the U.S. Department of Defense in a lab-to-market value chain. Two points are worth emphasizing:

1. Upstream institutions do not represent success in and of themselves, and we will be no different.

2. For organizations like ours, success is only evident through downstream economic production. That means completing a succession of steps: a research idea funded, a patent granted, a technology licensed, a startup seeded (often through a federal grant), follow-on private capital invested, and a prototype delivered to a U.S. military customer that meets a specified need. Only when a solution is delivered to the American warfighter can success be claimed. Though we may enter this process midstream — for example by helping a startup explore dual-use applications of an existing technology — we measure outcomes at the point of adoption, not intention.

Let’s drill down deeper. How do we recognize progress along this chain? If we define a funded research project as the starting point, how should we measure subsequent milestones?

TechLink, a long-standing R&D partner for the Department of Defense based at Montana State University, released a report yesterday on the downstream economic output of the U.S. Army-sponsored Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) with private sector partners and research laboratories. CRADAs are just one of several R&D engagement tools available to the DoD, but TechLink’s analysis offers a detailed look at how the national security community contributes to the broader U.S. technology economy.

Evaluating 4,816 CRADAs with 2,799 partners, TechLink draws a line from the laboratory to the Department of Defense with remarkable precision. They noted that over 20 years, U.S. Army-sponsored CRADAs supported nearly $4 billion in follow-on R&D activity and attracted more than $700 million in outside capital invested, leading to $1.7 billion in sales to the Department of Defense and another $9.9 billion in commercial sales.

Read that last paragraph again and visualize how Department of Defense research funding initiated this lab-to-market process.

These outputs are precisely what we aim to facilitate in the Chicago regional economy through Frontier Mission Network. TechLink’s findings provide both a roadmap and quantifiable validation of our thesis: that aligning regional innovation with national security problem sets has proven successful elsewhere.

Our organization is building an economic function that should be judged by what we produce, not by any single enabling variable. We welcome that standard.

In recent weeks, the market pull from the defense sector has become increasingly clear. In response, my organization, the Frontier Mission Network, is continuing to marshal economic leaders across Chicago to engage with this emerging opportunity.

Market pull

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was so unprepared for major combat that GIs were forced to train with wooden dummy rifles. What’s keeping officials at the Pentagon up at night is the sense that we’re facing a similar moment today—where the American defense industrial base is struggling to keep pace with growing operational and strategic threats.

Recently, former New York Times Baghdad bureau chief Dexter Filkins captured the scope of this national emergency in a piece for The New Yorker.

I highly recommend taking a read through the article here.

The answer to the question posed in the headline, Filkins writes, is a resounding ‘no.’

Technology push

So what are we doing about it in Chicago, America’s third-largest city?

We are building a focal point for the stakeholders needed to drive solutions that meet the urgency of this moment. Frontier Mission Network is a Chicago-centered, lab-to-market community—connecting research institutions to Department of Defense funding programs, linking entrepreneurs to cutting-edge research, helping startups engage corporate and civic partners, and facilitating access to U.S. military personnel responsible for acquiring emerging technologies.

Frontier Mission Network continues to operate at both ends: clarifying market pull from the defense sector and supporting small businesses and startups to push their solutions in front of Department of Defense end users.

We’ve already helped two Chicago-based companies directly engage with DoD acquisition officials—securing critical feedback on operational needs and learning how to position their technologies for military use.

We’ve worked with university-based principal investigators to explore federal defense funding opportunities for their research.

We continue to engage corporate partners in support of MDS-Rely, a National Science Foundation-funded materials research consortium that includes Case Western Reserve University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh, and has built numerous partnerships in the defense industry. We are working to expand its impact into Chicago’s defense technology ecosystem through Northeastern Illinois University.

And we’re growing. Just last week, we hosted 20–25 attendees at Proskauer Rose LLP for our Chicago Tech Week event—another step forward in building a thriving regional defense innovation community. (Thanks also to Creative Advisors for your support.)

The party’s just getting started. If you are…

• …in the research community, we can provide support in understanding how to attract Department of Defense funding.

• …an entrepreneur or startup, we can help in identifying federal funding channels and getting in front of relevant Department of Defense personnel.

• …a corporate or civic stakeholder looking to participate in the defense sector and explore dual uses of technologies, we would love to engage!

Please follow us on LinkedIn and contact us if you want to join our community.

My argument is simple: if regions like Chicago want to build competitive innovation economies, we must establish strong connections to the world’s largest funder of R&D and purchaser of early-stage technologies. This linkage is essential to any serious regional growth strategy.

But how? This is the question that drove us to build the Frontier Mission Network. How do we put a big-picture idea – connecting Chicago to the Pentagon – into activities and programs that drive downstream value creation?

Frontier Mission Network (FMN) is a business consortium dedicated to serving the Chicago region's national security and defense technology sector. Our mission is to bridge the gaps between research, new ventures, corporate and civic partners, and the critical needs of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Put simply: we aim to drive more national security deal flow from Chicago.

We operate with a targeted approach that addresses the unique needs of key stakeholders, including academic institutions, research labs, early-stage ventures, and the investment community. After years of engagement with leaders across these sectors, we’ve come to understand their challenges — and have designed programs that solve them by aligning value-creating activity with national security priorities.

We point to Austin, Texas, as an example of a mission-focused city that has mobilized regional economic leaders around a commitment to provide value for the American defense industrial base. From Austin, defense tech superstars like Saronic Technologies have built a national intersection of technology and national security. Austin’s success helped attract Army Futures Command and its four-star leadership to a location adjacent to Capital Factory, the city’s flagship entrepreneurial support center.

Though we admire the Austin community, let’s be clear: Austin need not be the only platform for defense industry collaborations. Not with so many avenues to support the American technological leadership.

Over the past ten years, the Department of Defense has gained new spending authorities and support programs to grow the defense industrial base and engage more commercial suppliers:

As new defense programs reshape the industrial base, Chicago is poised to capture recent DoD actions and drive regional growth — and FMN exists to help make that happen. We are not the first to recognize the opportunity this moment provides. For Chicago, our competitors are not distracted. Other organizations, like the Pacific Northwest Mission Acceleration Center in Seattle, are fighting to establish their own regions as mission-focused cities.

Here’s how we’re mobilizing to keep pace:

For Universities and Research Laboratories

As you may have heard, the federal government is cutting back on research funding. For research institutions, there’s not much we can do to change the environment we’re in. All we can do is adjust.

With universities we’ve worked with, I’ve noted the current administration’s apparent interest in funding research that directly enhances capabilities – and advised that principal investigators look to connect research with usable systems, not “abstractions,” as a Pentagon official recently told a prominent defense publication. (Again, I’m only the messenger.)

I cannot predict how the federal funding environment will evolve over the next three and a half years. Yet Congress will continue to have a vote on these matters, and we remain confident in our thesis that the Department of Defense will continue to be a robust funder of basic and applied research.

With that in mind, FMN will continue to provide support for universities and research laboratories to enhance interaction with the national security sector. This includes support for researchers looking to compete for research funding opportunities from the U.S. Department of Defense. Often these opportunities are rooted in the Pentagon’s 14 critical technology areas. For universities that do not have a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), the Department of Defense processes and programs can be unfamiliar; we demystify the DoD’s support for R&D and help principal investigators compete for research dollars.

Recently I gave an overview of Department of Defense funding programs to about a dozen University of Illinois Chicago principal investigators. I noted three ways to more deeply engage the Department of Defense, as I see it. One is to gain a UARC at your university, and that is probably a matter to be decided well above the pay grades of the PIs I was briefing. Second is to proactively engage program managers and respond to solicitations posted by the National Security Innovation Network, among other sources.

Yet most of my presentation focused on the third avenue: execute a concentrated push to erase the lines between research and development, engage startups with research, and drive dual-use commercialization pathways. In other words, I asked researchers to be active participants in the growing defense tech community.

For New Ventures and Small Businesses

From the end of World War II through the Cold War, the Pentagon’s search for advanced technologies rarely extended beyond the major defense contractors. These multinational firms spared no expense recruiting top engineers and routinely translated research from defense labs and universities into marketable technologies.

But in the 1990s, a wave of mergers among the largest defense primes reduced competition and weakened incentives for independent R&D. A DoD report published in the Biden administration noted that “aerospace and defense companies are among the lowest R&D spenders compared to other critical sectors,” adding:

“America’s six biggest defense contractors have spent on average 2.5 percent of their sales on R&D each year. This compares to 10 percent of sales for ‘big tech’ firms like Facebook, Amazon, and Google.”

As a result, the responsibility for research, commercialization, and product development is increasingly shifting to smaller defense tech firms. That’s why FMN focuses much — though not all (!) — of its business support on startups in the Chicago area.

For new ventures seeking to engage with the national security sector, we offer a structured pathway to align technologies with urgent defense needs, craft competitive early-stage funding proposals, identify public- and private-sector partners, support outreach to potential DoD customers, and provide ongoing access to an advisory board of national security experts who offer strategic guidance, industry insight, and hands-on support throughout the venture’s engagement with the Department of Defense.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact us:

For Chicago

Chicago isn't traditionally associated with the defense industrial base. As best I can tell, neither was Austin, Texas, before it became central to the American defense industrial base. FMN is building platforms of engagement that reach across the lab-to-market process, setting the context from which our city’s local defense community can grow.

Our vision begins with a cross-cutting platform for product development, one that welcomes involvement from larger industrial firms. A critical element of this platform is a relationship with MDS-Rely, a research consortium that includes Case Western Reserve University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh, and includes industry partners like Parker Hannifin. Together with our friends at Northeastern Illinois University, we hope to soon provide Chicago partners with MDS-Rely research in the fields of materials science and digital twins, two topics of central importance to the American national security community.

Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about our work with MDS-Rely:

FMN’s relationship with MDS-Rely is rooted in a commitment to “build what we invent,” a central challenge not only to the American defense industrial base but also in maintaining American economic and technological leadership. Chicago is a city built on manufacturing, and we are ready to help recapture our manufacturing strength through national security-focused technology development – much like what’s happening in Ohio, where Anduril is building a nearly $1 billion manufacturing facility outside Columbus.

And we are also committed to doing all of this through teamwork. We want to be contributing members of the Chicago innovation community whenever and wherever they’ll have us. I was reminded of the importance of engaging with similar organizations weeks ago at the Chicago XR Summit on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus. There I shared my own insight into current XR business opportunities in the national security sector, but no doubt learned more than I gave from the many other organizations and firms that also attended the conference.

Everyone in the region has a strong incentive to grow our presence in the American national security sector. As I explained (with a coauthor) in Crain’s Chicago Business a few months ago:

‘“Regions that have successfully activated innovation ecosystems to respond to the U.S. military’s technology needs have enjoyed economic success. Consider that the headquarters of the 10 largest defense contractors closely correlate to the ZIP codes with the highest median incomes.”

We’re not competing with anyone in Chicago. We understand well that there are other organizations far more qualified than FMN to offer support for partners in designing and executing a commercial go-to-market strategy.

Our domain expertise is in national security and dual-use product development, guided by nuanced insights into the most urgent challenges facing the national security community. FMN is ready to leverage our professional networks to put the Department of Defense users in the room and guide new ventures in developing solutions to our national security community’s most urgent challenges. And though likely not in the short term, we hope to be able to present investor-ready deal flow for Chicago investors who are ready to bridge financing gaps.

I observed months ago that there are regions that have demonstrated an ability to contribute to the American national security community and there are those who haven’t – and Chicago is quantifiably in the latter category. But I remain convinced that much of our region’s challenges in contributing to the national security community can be solved by demystifying the sector. That’s what Frontier Mission Network is doing.

REMINDER: On July 24, we will be joining our friends at Proskauer Rose LLP to host the Frontier Mission Social. This event will be from 5:00-7:00 p.m. and is scheduled during TechChicago Week. Secure your spot here.

“I’m interested in buying what I need, not buying what you’re selling,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith told attendees at an April defense industry conference in Washington.

Smith’s candor put into words the central challenge of building a mission-focused city. I don’t deny that new ventures successfully take ideas incubated outside of the national security community and sell technologies to the Department of Defense. But to scale a regional economy capable of building solutions for the national security community, we need to rethink how we build regional innovation economies.

That is, rather than building a supply-focused support structure, let’s also channel energy toward identifying Department of Defense needs – then go activate regional economic assets to build solutions. Let’s put less focus on technology push and more on the national security community’s market pull.

National strategic challenge

As I mentioned in my most recent commentary, quoting from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, the United States economy must build what we invent if we are to assert and maintain technological leadership. That requires bridging the “valley of death” familiar to anyone in the technology venture space. But even if American industry could rapidly build American inventions at home, that provides no guarantee that technological uses of inventions precisely address national security needs. To state the obvious: It is in our national security interests that more American-funded inventions map to commercial and military uses, not just the former.

I believe that the crux of this national strategic challenge is the discordance between the American national security community and its innovation economy. And I have begun placing blame squarely on one side of that divide.

The U.S. military has done its part to reach into innovation communities long estranged from the defense industrial base, mobilizing billions of dollars and legions of programs aimed at acquiring technologies from new and commercial vendors. I’m perplexed by what I perceive as a reluctance on the part of technologists to respond to the Department of Defense’s outreach and engage with the American military.

We should be heartened that a new crop of defense firms has emerged in the last ten years: Anduril, Shield AI, Vannevar Labs, to name a few. But these firms hardly represent a larger story of American innovation economy that has finally recognized the unstable world we live in. As national strategic challenges continue to close in on American security, historians may well look back at our innovation economy built during the 2010s and early 2020s as serving a vacation from history. Worse yet, the (mis)orientation of the American innovation economy, if not corrected, will continue to draw entrepreneurial talent away from national security problem sets.

An investor I spoke with recently compared the lack of interest in national security within the Chicago innovation economy to a similar lack of interest in emergency preparedness before the initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak. Once the pandemic hit, startups raced to build products like personal protective equipment and ventilators, but it was far too late.

So let’s focus. The country needs you. Now.

Department of Defense actions

Any new venture has a go-to-market strategy that, logically, must first identify customer demand. For defense tech ventures, there’s a parallel process that the Department of Defense has pieced together through a series of programs that, put together, could lay a golden path toward business sustainability.

Where does this process begin?

I asked that question to the Army Sustainment Command in an email not long ago. Among other tips, they noted that the Department of Defense regularly hosts all-day Advance Planning Briefs to Industry (APBI) to communicate business opportunities to vendors. The U.S. Army’s Mission and Installation Contracting Command recently hosted an APBI in Texas, and early next month, the Army Sustainment Command will host an APBI in Moline, Ill.

For growth-oriented ventures located far from military installations, the Defense Innovation Unit (DUI) will soon go live with its Digital OnRamp that will use AI to connect tech companies directly with Department of Defense acquisitions needs and business opportunities. You can sign up to be a test user this summer here. Once operating, Digital OnRamp will notify vendors of opportunities that match their profiles.

Those are just two starting points in identifying and responding to Department of Defense needs.

Once needs have been understood, tech companies can move onto other DoD programs to finance initial product development. Perhaps the most notable is the more than $1 billion in Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants that the Department of Defense awards each year.

DoD clearly identifies challenges that can be addressed by small businesses and new ventures at this website. To get even more granular on operational challenges, the U.S. Air Force’s AFWERX Open Topic SBIR process requires that awardees first identify a specific Department of Defense customer, obtain a memorandum of understanding, and interview a source within that command to identify pain points that the vender can solve.

This customer discovery process closely resembles the “lean startup” model, popularized by Silicon Valley legend Steve Blank. Speaking of Blank, for the past ten years he and several colleagues have supported their Hacking 4 Defense program, provided at more than 70 universities across the United States, including at the University of Chicago.

Then the financing valley of death. But here too the U.S. military is doing its part to drive business growth. Months ago, I gave an overview of new spending authorities and grant programs that the Department of Defense has sponsored to bridge financing gaps. I would also flag annual events like the Joint Warfighting Assessment and the U.S. Army’s Project Convergence that allow defense tech firms to test technologies with soldiers, and with it, reduce business financing risks.

Project Convergence’s first phase was held a few months ago at the National Training Center in California, bringing about 6,000 military personnel – including contracting officers, front-line soldiers, and commanders from allied militaries – together with vendors to test technologies in an operational setting. Vidisco, an Israeli company, brought its new X-ray scanner system to test with Army Explosive Ordinance (EOD) technicians in detecting potentially lethal bombs. The Rhode Island-based HavocAI brought its unmanned autonomous vessels. Palantir came with its interactive command-and-control system to guide communications and precision targeting.

I don’t mean to oversell this curated defense go-to-market strategy. It is not a fail-proof way to grow a business. No doubt bureaucracy remains an impediment to more commercial suppliers entering the defense market – and there are no shortage of ideas and initiatives to streamline processes.

Watch for efforts to diffuse authority to purchase systems. Commentator Justin Johnson has advocated that combatant commands receive billions of dollars annually in discretionary budget authority to quickly purchase commercially available technology solutions.

“(T)he defense system in the U.S. functions more like a centrally-planned command economy than like the free market that is driving American prosperity,” Johnson said. “To better deliver capabilities to warfighters rapidly and affordably, the Pentagon should decentralize and accelerate decision-making.”

I believe in the coming years, they will. If I’m right, the Department of Defense will become a much better customer.

Opportunity for regional economies

I previously noted a quantifiably stark difference between cities and participation in the national security industry, as measured by the Department of Defense SBIR awards sent to municipal regions. To my disappointment, my home city of Chicago ranked near the bottom. I was hardly surprised that Washington, D.C., ranked near the top. Of course, entrepreneurs operating within eyesight of the Pentagon are better able to identify and respond to Department of Defense demand signals.

What about everyone else?

It is admittedly tough to engineer interest in working with the Department of Defense among people who have never closely engaged with or been exposed to the military community. Almost surely a consequence of nearby installations, the American veteran population has notably gravitated toward some municipal areas like Virginia Beach (16.8 percent of that city’s population), Jacksonville (12.4 percent), and San Diego (8.2 percent), and not so much toward others – like Chicago (2.6 percent).

How can regional economies – especially those with abundant economic resources, including top-tier research universities, federal laboratories, entrepreneurial support organizations, large corporations, and capital investors – activate a lab-to-market innovation pipeline that produces technology solutions for the U.S. military without a strong, established relationship with the national security community?

It's a question we’ve wrestled with in building the Frontier Mission Network. Admittedly, we’ve had limited success and abundant frustration. But as I’ve argued before and I am arguing in this commentary: the onus is on regional economic leaders to reach out and bridge the geographic, social, and yes, political divides. That is, at least, if regional economic leaders want to actually support value creation and not just talk about it.

Look, defense tech is tech. The “Secret History of Silicon Valley” was written with by the national security community, as Steve Blank has argued. No leading regional innovation economy has been or will be built after excluding the U.S. military. Nearly half of federal spending on R&D is programmed for national security.

Military modernization is a bipartisan imperative. While they may not acknowledge it, there is every indication that Vice President Vance and Secretary of Defense Hegseth (to their credit) are continuing a military modernization process that was initiated by Secretaries of Defense Chuck Hagel and Ash Carter during the Obama Administration.

Join this cause.

Earlier this month, I was at a National Defense Industrial Association conference in Milwaukee. Discussions at the event were chock full of acronyms that even I – after several decades of various career pursuits within or adjacent to the U.S. military – had trouble following. Attendees at the conference spoke about CMMC – that is, the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification that the Department of Defense requires contractors to have before working with sensitive information. They also spoke about ITAR compliance, referring to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations that the U.S. Government places on contractors to control exports and imports of military-related products. And there were a few field-grade officers, in uniform, at the conference.

What I witnessed at the conference was more than just an informational seminar for active and potential defense contractors; it was the kind of discourse that regional innovation economies should be facilitating with the national security community. Milwaukee, after all, doesn’t have a very strong military community either (about 3.5 percent of Milwaukee residents are veterans) and the conference room was full.

If you are in tech-based economic development, don’t just learn to speak the language of national security but operationalize it. Support companies to get qualified to work within the national security industry, interface with defense users, and help rebuild our defense industrial base. That may include inviting U.S. military purchasing commands to events to discuss requirements and evaluate prototypes.

The Department of Defense has spent the last ten years driving overdue reforms, mobilizing personnel and building programs, and extending a hand toward new innovation communities. It’s about time that innovation communities extend a hand back.

Frontier Mission Network announcements

This week, with our friends at Northeastern Illinois University, Frontier Mission Network hosted MDS-Rely, a materials science research consortium that includes Case Western Reserve University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University. Highlights here.

If you’d like to learn more about our support for MDS-Rely and opportunities to engage with their defense-relevant research, please contact me.

Next week we will be joining our partners at VRAR Chicago for their Chicago XR Summit 2025. As VRAR Chicago founder Matthew Wren has noted, the Department of Defense is one of the world's largest adopters of VRAR technologies. This event is free to attend and you can register here.

And finally, please circle July 24 on your calendar and join us at the Frontier Mission Social, hosted by Proskauer Rose LLP. This event will be from 5:00-7:00 p.m. and is scheduled during TechChicago Week. Secure your spot here.

I came to Chicago after a five-year stint in the Army to pursue a master’s degree at Northwestern. Around that same time, walking the same campus as an undergraduate, was Derek Thompson, who nearly two decades later has co-authored a book, Abundance, that I hope marks the beginning of a new movement in American public policy.

Thompson and his co-author, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, lay out an agenda that embraces modernity through a “liberalism that builds.” A central element of their vision is a call to accelerate progress by eliminating unnecessary regulations and requirements that stifle scientific advancement and slow economic growth.

I took particular interest in their commentary on the apparent R&D stagnation in the United States. “For too long, the US has been enthralled by the eureka myth – the idea that flashes of individual genius are the most important moments in the history of technology,” Thompson and Klein write. “This mind-set governed our approach to economic growth in the last forty years. In the next generation, the US needs a plan to build what it invents.”

Build what we invent.

Let me be clear: I too support funding knowledge creation – not only for its potential to drive economic growth but also for its broader, non-economic benefits. Yet there is a natural limit to the social value of research that isn't advanced further. Frankly, I see no national security value of scientific discovery if it is not realized with new American made technologies.

If such a plan to build what we invent soon emerges, I offer there will be one indispensable actor that can fuel and fund research commercialization: the U.S. military. Regional economic leaders should read and reflect on Abundance and note how the national security community can put Thompson and Klein’s ideas into practice.

National strategic challenge

According to Thompson and Klein, sluggish economic growth has left political progressives in the wilderness—but the consequences reach beyond economics and partisanship. As long-term growth continues to stagnate, we resemble the proverbial frog in a slowly boiling pot.

“Stuck with low growth, waning productivity and an aging work force, the world economy is in a rut,” economic historian Aaron Benanav wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “This shared economic predicament lies behind the political and social conflicts the world over…When people no longer assume their or their children’s living standards will improve, trust in institutions erodes and discontent rises.”

Let’s pause to clarify something: science enables new technologies, and new technologies enable sustainable economic growth. One. Two. Three. And right now, the United States isn’t doing well at bridging the gap between the first and second—rendering any discussion about the third moot.

“The US has more Nobel Prizes for science than the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Austria, and Canada combined,” Thompson and Klein write in Abundance. “But if there were a Nobel Prize for domestic deployment of technology – even technology that we invented – our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling.” No, that kind of Nobel Prize would likely go to our strongest adversary.

In 2013, one of China’s largest privately owned companies acquired A123, an American startup commercializing a novel battery composition developed with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. Department of Energy grant funding. (The acquisition was approved, not without controversy and regret, by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal interagency committee responsible for reviewing transactions that could result in foreign control of a U.S. business.) A123 is now fueling China’s lead against the U.S. in building electronic vehicles.

If we don’t build what we invent, Chinese firms that answer to Xi Jinping will.

Department of Defense actions

The 2018 National Defense Strategy issued a call to action, and not just to those outside the five walls of the Pentagon. "Success no longer goes to the country that develops a new technology first,” the document noted in a section on procurement reform, “but rather to the one that better integrates it and adapts its way of fighting."

That American industry is insufficiently commercializing our research presents clear national security concerns. But no one should point fingers solely at the private sector for this dysfunction. As the Pentagon has turned away from the commercial market in favor of defense specialists, it has arguably lost some of its historic, central role in the American innovation engine, that of the assumer of risk as new technologies move into production.

As Thompson and Klein note, penicillin was proven effective in treating bacterial infections only after it was deployed to the front lines in World War II. They also trace the current solar energy boom to Vanguard 1, an American satellite sent into space in 1957 and powered by solar panels, then a mostly unproven technology. Vanguard 1 was a U.S. Navy program; there was no NASA at the time.

The need to invent and implement technologies – the problem Thompson and Klein identify – has long intersected with national security. In the current times, I argue that as the Department of Defense attracts more commercial partners into its problem sets, it can again play a central role in building what we invent. But it will require a much greater social connectivity between hitherto largely estranged communities.

In their recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of War, Alexander C. Karp, CEO of Palantir, and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska, note the “construction of any technology, including military software systems, requires an intimacy between builder and user – an emotional and often physical proximity.”

For the U.S. military, Karp and Zaminska add: “The gulf, between user and developer, had grown too wide to sustain any sort of productive cycle of rapid iteration and development.”

Could that soon change?

I have previously noted the Department of Defense’s commitment to dramatically expand procurement volume from the commercial market. That imperative has since become clearer.

Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order that requires DoD procurement officials to purchase products from commercial providers (not defense specialists) if a commercial vendor is able to solve the military need. If the Department of Defense acquisitions authorities do purchase from a defense specialist, the executive order notes that it might not reflect favorably on future performance reviews. While critics might contend that whoever delivers the best solution for the cheapest price even if it came from a defense contractor, Trump’s EO recognizes the more critical need to expand the defense industrial base through purchases from more non-defense specialists. The government’s purchasing power is a dynamic thing — more on that later.

Might the executive order mark the beginning of a geometric increase in commercial purchases from the Pentagon? If so, could it reassert the Pentagon’s role in building what America invents?

Just a few weeks ago, the Defense Innovation Unit began the process of awarding contracts to eight eligible vendors to provide military installations with micro-nuclear reactors small enough to fit in a shipping container. None of the vendors, to my knowledge, can be considered defense specialists. If these firms can provide U.S. military with safe, zero-carbon energy without prohibitive front-end costs that have historically slowed nuclear energy projects in the United States, imagine what might follow.

Opportunity for regional economies

Technological progress isn’t just the Eureka moment. It isn’t the moment when the first venture capital checks arrive, or the first sale is made. It’s everything in between too. Regional economic leaders need to focus attention and a few dollars on the space between an invention and a sustainable business.

The defense market and the legion of Department of Defense innovation programs can provide the bridge to build what we invent, but only after their very existence is recognized. Regional economic leaders should prioritize engagement with organizations like the National Defense Industrial Association, the Defense Innovation Unit, and the National Security Innovation Network. Think of ways regional innovation ecosystems can serve as an engine to produce national security technology solutions.

As I’ve written, if you’re doing tech-based economic development without deep engagement with the national security community, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re building a regional innovation ecosystem, the American national security community has recognized the importance of supporting you—but let’s be clear: you need to support them, too!

How so, specifically? One idea might be for local governments to support local small businesses and startups by more frequently purchasing technology solutions from vendors commercializing early but verified technologies.

I’ll give an example: Frontier Mission Network supports a startup with Chicago roots that provides a novel fingerprint identification technology, usable by national security users and law enforcement. They have effectively engaged and sold to the former; the latter, I’m told, has been far more of a challenge.

I believe a great way to support local tech startups is for local governments to explore ways that they can serve as a technology implementation partner to supplement support from the Department of Defense. Everyone should be thinking of ways to build what we invent.

Look, if the Trump Administration has ordered fundamental changes to how the Department of Defense procures technologies – changes that recognize broader economic goals and how the public sector can assume risk when the private sector won’t – can’t local lawmakers do a bit of the same?

This somewhat unsettling reality has forced the U.S. military to purchase commercially available solutions more quickly and directly, and to guide suppliers in developing technologies with both military and commercial applications.

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For much of the past three years, Ukrainian troops have logged onto Amazon and Alibaba, purchased unmanned aerial vehicles, and sent drones from their cardboard packages directly into combat. They have relied on low-orbit satellites owned and operated, and at least once shut off, by Elon Musk. And they continue deploying commercially available software, machine-learning algorithms, and facial-recognition technologies on the front lines.

We exist in an environment where the private sector is leading new frontiers of innovation. In the mid-1960s, the American federal government supported two-thirds of R&D done in the United States; that figure now hovers around 20 percent.

No doubt there are benefits to private-sector-led innovation, but as military forces rely on technologies available to private individuals, the very primacy of force that provides the foundation of nation-states is threatened.

During the Cold War, the U.S. military asserted technological dominance by acquiring bespoke technological solutions that far exceeded those possessed by any adversary or private company. No longer.

Today we see the national security challenges in the seas and the skies. The U.S. military is now charged with safeguarding shipping routes where pirates are threatening cargo ships with uncrewed underwater vessels (UUV). It has created an entirely new branch to safeguard commercial satellites that support our electrical grids, financial markets, and cellular networks. To safeguard our economic stability—both sustained and threatened by commercial innovations—the U.S. military must be among the first to procure and deploy commercial technologies.

For the American national security community to retain its technological leadership, solutions can come only through more actively participating in points of intersection where technologies are addressing defense and commercial needs. And regional economies stand to gain from building those points of intersection.

National strategic challenge

Perhaps the root cause of the Pentagon’s headaches is the simple reality that commercial sectors often present clearer demand signals with easily recognizable paths to sales and scalability. The U.S. military might be the greatest fighting force the world has ever known, but it has proven no match for the commercial sector’s market pull.

Take biotech, a sector that receives about $10 billion in research funding from the National Institute of Health each year. These dollars could very well lead to new discoveries in stronger and more lightweight body armor or sensors that can near-instantaneously recognize the presence of a chemical or biological weapon, but are instead often deployed to lead new pharmaceuticals or agents to enhance crop yields.

Of course, it’s not a bad thing that biotech startups are developing new and exciting innovations in sectors outside of the defense industrial base! However, if the American tech industry fails to engage meaningfully with the national security community, the U.S. military—arguably the linchpin of global stability since World War II—could soon be outmatched by adversaries with far more deliberate industrial policies.

To understand why so many new ventures turn away from, or never even consider turning toward, the national security industry, think like an entrepreneur. New ventures entering defense and commercial markets must follow different development milestones and seek different funding sources. Convenience factors are pulling new ventures away from the defense industrial base.

Startups entering commercial markets work to establish relationships with customers as soon as they can, rapidly innovating new products based on feedback. In contrast, new ventures entering the national security industry frequently respond to pre-established requirements and military specifications and develop products that meet the rigid needs of warfighters.

The regulatory environment for defense tech startups is far, far more onerous than those purely commercial ventures.

Startups looking to enter commercial markets and scale almost invariably turn to private, dilutive of capital. National security-focused startups very frequently turn to non-dilutive federal grants in the earliest stage of business development, then work their way up to sub-contracts with larger vendors. Perhaps this sounds more enticing to enter the national security industry, but private venture capital frequently provides a great deal more strategic autonomy and scalability than the grants-and-contracts development plans familiar within the national security industry.

Then there are the questions of government purpose rights and intellectual property controls.

Taken together, the Department of Defense has arguably earned a reputation as a really bad customer for new ventures. But there’s an effort afoot to change that.

Department of Defense actions

The U.S. military cannot reverse decades of technology diffusion or channel all American R&D into its acquisition pipelines. Instead, it must engage research institutions and commercial ventures to steer American R&D toward more rapidly addressing its challenges.

Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and congressional allies are pushing a massive defense spending bill, the Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense (FoRGED) Act. The FoRGED Act is perhaps the most important piece of legislation in recent memory that nobody’s talking about. If signed into law, the act would add as much as $200 billion to annual defense spending and enact a series of reforms to allow for more non-traditional suppliers to work with the Department of Defense.

One particularly notable reform in the FoRGED Act is a provision requiring the Department of Defense to acquire commercially available products through more streamlined procurement methods. This change eliminates rules that have forced non-traditional vendors to stand up separate infrastructures to sell to the U.S. military. The legislation also empowers contracting officers—referred to as “portfolio acquisition executives”—to adjust contract schedules and requirements to more quickly and efficiently acquire new capabilities.

Understand that the defense industry has, for more than 30 years, been largely defined by specialists, namely five mega-contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. This is arguably the legacy of a directive, made by Clinton Administration Secretary of Defense Les Aspin in 1993, to the Pentagon’s largest vendors to consolidate ahead of the looming Pentagon budget cuts. The “big five” has spent the last three decades pushing out commercial vendors.

Now, taken together, the FoRGED Act could swing the doors wide open for new entrants into the American defense industrial base, introducing new competition to the national security industry long dominated by the “big five” — but only if research institutions and technology companies are willing to engage the national security industry.

That’s where regional economic leaders must help push technologies into the American defense industrial base.

Opportunity for regional economies

Regional economic leaders can work with the national security community to facilitate dual uses of technologies that create value for both military and commercial markets. That’s easier said than done.

The institutions and communities that drive the national security lab-to-market process are often culturally unfamiliar with one another, if downright adversarial, and operate with some inaccurate assumptions. Researchers frequently recoil at any suggestion that their work could aid in destruction, an unfortunate association with the national security industry in my judgement, but one that I know is prevalent and needs to be addressed. Capital investors view defense tech ventures as living under a valuation roof; this too is unfair – just three weeks ago, Anduril, the most celebrated of a new class of defense tech companies, signed a term sheet with a $28 billion valuation.

To drive more dual-use tech pathways, regional economic leaders (and my own organization) must demystify the national security sector and facilitate engagement early in the R&D process between researchers, new ventures, capital investors, and commercial and defense users.

We need to build tech development platforms with stakeholders across commercialization pathways seated at the table. These platforms would help license inventions from research laboratories — how to do this was the subject of a previous post — then engage corporate partners and investors in national security problem sets at early stages of R&D. As these platforms are solving national security challenges, with sufficient engagement with corporate partners, we could also understand and address the problems of commercial end users.

Specifically, these platforms could bring commercial and defense stakeholders into applications for federal grants, field tests, and bridge financings. They could support research that allows the national security community to act as an enabler of innovation for commercial and defense purposes — a great example is the Center for Defense Medicine in St. Louis — and not the sole end-user of new technologies. They could facilitate engagement with defense and commercial users in developing new products that meet the unique needs of both.

Perhaps these platforms could just help create an environment where the national security community is embraced by stakeholders who never before considered working with the Department of Defense.

There are several successful programs that help ventures engage with defense users and develop technologies to address national security challenges. With ongoing Department of Defense acquisition reforms, regional economic leaders have a unique opportunity to strengthen these programs by involving commercial partners, capital investors, and both commercial and defense end users more deeply and earlier in the R&D process.

Innovation in the commercial sector is thriving, but the national security community should play a key role in advancing technological frontiers. Regional economic leaders must also do their part to integrate national security professionals into innovation communities.

Are venture capital firms stubbornly refusing to locate and invest outside of the Bay Area and the other superstar cities and missing out on value creation elsewhere, as many advocates for non-superstar insist? Or are venture capital firms simply choosing to locate where value is being created?

It’s the latter, according to a 2010 paper by Harvard Business School’s Josh Lerner, looking at fund performance and geographic location of more than 1,000 venture capital firms.

“(V)enture capital offices are concentrated in locales where previous investments by venture capital firms were successful,” Lerner wrote, adding that “moving from the 25th percentile of the regional success rate for venture capital investments over the past five years to the 75th percentile of the regional success rate increases the number of offices in a (Combined Statistical Area) by a factor 2.3.”

Put simply, according to Lerner, first startup communities must demonstrate they can create value, then comes VC – not the other way around.

As venture capital funds raised dramatically more capital during the low-interest rate environment of the 2010s, it’s possible that countervailing evidence of Lerner’s thesis has emerged. But I haven’t seen a shred of evidence that civic efforts to attract VC into non-superstar cities have fundamentally changed the economic and business dynamics that have agglomerated so much venture activity in the superstar cities.

I believe the evidence is clear. Venture capital is not elevating non-superstar cities to economic parity. Regional economic leaders need to fundamentally rethink the standard venture community model that directs startups to pitch businesses in front of investors who are often unwilling or unable to support high-risk technologies.

Regional economies outside of the superstar cities should instead focus attention on more patient sources of capital and federal funding programs designed to advance high-risk technologies through small businesses. Federal dollars – especially a new suite of national security-focused funding sources – can and should serve as a bridge to later private capital financing.

In this commentary, I will explain how regional economies can reorient venture communities toward more effective early-stage financing pathways, specifically those that lead into prime defense contractors and the doors of the Pentagon. As I have explained previously, defense tech is tech and any regional economy that would like to call itself a superstar should aspire to more deeply engage the national security community.

National strategic challenge

The sustainability of defense tech ventures has become an urgent national security matter, and Washington lawmakers have only recently begun equipping the Pentagon with the tools to protect critical vendors.

After World War II through the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon’s search for technologies didn’t need to go any further than the large defense contractors. Multi-national defense companies were an essential element not only of America’s defense industrial base, but of the entire American innovation engine. They spared no expense to hire America’s top engineers in leading technology fields, and commercialized research from defense and university laboratories.

The market changed in 1993 after new Clinton Administration Defense Secretary Les Aspin urged the Pentagon’s 15 largest defense contractors to consolidate ahead of the looming Pentagon budget cuts. By consolidating defense suppliers, Aspin had hoped the industry would gain efficiencies without losing capacity. And on command, a wave of mergers conjoined the Pentagon’s suppliers into five mega-contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, collectively called the “big five” in defense circles.

The legacy of Aspin’s directive is a more consolidated defense market that, to many observers, has undermined incentives for supporting R&D. The big five were awarded nearly two-thirds of the Defense Department’s R&D contracts in 2006; by 2015, that number dropped to just 33 percent.

Make no mistake: The big five are far from middlemen. Indeed, the Pentagon has come to rely on the big five to effectively manage the defense technology market, with R&D projects largely done by smaller, alternative suppliers.

The F-35 program tells the story. Lockheed Martin was the prime, but more than 200 subcontractors, some big but many small, provided designs and technologies to ultimately complete the F-35. Small contractors provided essential elements of the F-35 control panel, enabling software, chemical coatings, and a host of other F-35 components.

Take also hypersonic missiles capable of traveling faster than the speed of sound and hitting a target within inches anywhere on the globe. Logically, no startup can design and produce this kind of advanced technology. But smaller elements – such as advanced materials capable of withstanding extreme heat – are the domain of smaller suppliers, selling wares to the primes.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that this prime-sub relationship that forms the framework of the entire national security industry yields a large volume of mergers and acquisitions, which have reached record levels in recent years.

Yet by leaving itself at the whims of the market, the Pentagon is virtually powerless to prevent acquisitions that result in the shutting down of R&D projects by the acquired firm. This often occurs when continuing development of the technology does not align with the acquirer's business interests, regardless of the technology’s national security importance.

The Department of Defense has also learned how sources of capital from adversarial sources, namely China, can strip critical capabilities from its control. Their concerns were most vividly illustrated in 2017 after Neurala, a Boston-based AI company that had been working with the Air Force to develop sensory capabilities for robots. Unable to raise necessary capital in the United States, Neurala could only find capital from a state-backed investment firm in China.

Department of Defense actions

Across the Obama, Trump I, and Biden administrations, the Department of Defense has initiated successive programs to expand the defense industrial base and protect non-traditional vendors. Yet programs in themselves are not enough. The Pentagon has also gained new authorities to streamline acquisitions for nontraditional suppliers and directly provide bridge financing to cross valleys of death. In doing so, the Department of Defense is pushing into new frontiers of American industrial policy, discarding free market absolutism.

In 2016, Congress granted the Pentagon Middle Tier of Acquisition (MTA) authorization, enabling acquisition officials to work with suppliers of technologies considered ready for deployment within five years, using a more streamlined acquisitions process.

The Air Force’s AFWERX introduced its Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) program in 2020 to provide an additional layer of funding after the two-phase Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Firms that had received an SBIR Phase II award, typically around $1 million, receive as much as $15 million in additional support under STRATFI to complete development of a technology.

In 2022, the Department of Defense launched the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) to act something like a bank, issuing loans and loan guarantees to firms operating in critical technology areas. OSC was provided nearly $1 billion by congressional appropriators in 2023 and issued its first public solicitation last September.

The Defense Innovation Unit pushed Congress to approve a $1 billion “hedge portfolio” in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to fund development and field systems within three years that directly address front-line operational challenges.

The Pentagon is now making dramatically more frequent use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contracts each year – more than 15,000 OTA contracts since 2016 and more than $15 billion in OTA contracts in 2023 – that provide acquisitions officials greater flexibility in writing terms of awards that typically permitted.

Just two weeks ago the Department of Defense announced its first 18 Small Business Investment Company Critical Technologies Initiative (SBICCT) Licensed and Green Light Approved funds. The Pentagon projects these funds will invest as much as $4 billion into 1,700 companies in 14 critical technology areas. Notably, 11 of these funds will maintain offices in non-superstar markets, including five funds who will operate exclusively outside of the superstar cities.

To state the obvious: These actions, viewed collectively, assert the Department of Defense as a central actor in the American technology economy, whether or not regional economic leaders recognize it as one.

Opportunity for regional economies

As the beginning of this commentary, I noted the clear futility of efforts to attract venture capital into non-superstar cities. This is precisely why non-superstar cities should be so aggressive in building their own defense-tech communities. Department of Defense programs can and are taking on early-stage business and technology risk, leaving value on the table for corporate partners, private equity firms, and regional economies.

Indeed, small defense contractors rarely receive venture financing and instead frequently support initial growth with federal grants and contracts. Without the need to share ownership with venture capital investors, defense tech firms do not need to locate in major VC hubs, namely the Bay Area, Boston, and New York. They can instead commercialize research done closer to home – R&D done at universities and federal laboratories is far more diffuse than the VC market – and engage Department of Defense initiatives put in place to expand the American defense industrial base and find technologies that the Pentagon urgently needs to acquire.

I believe, given the extraordinary scale of activity, regional economies need to build centers to bridge their own regional innovation communities with the Pentagon. The Pacific Northwest Mission Acceleration Center in Seattle and the Defense Alliance in St. Paul, Minnesota, are two such centers. My own organization, the Frontier Mission Network, aims to become a similar center in Chicago.

What functions could these centers provide (perhaps already are)? Specifically, they could:

• Build relationships with Department of Defense contracting officers and program managers on behalf of local innovation communities.

• Understand and guide small business and new ventures through Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) and non-FAR contracting mechanisms.

• Monitor and communicate Department of Defense funding programs for non-traditional suppliers and requirements.

• Provide a cross-regional platform to facilitate technology licensing for new ventures, then engage experienced R&D professionals to review development plans before seeking licensing agreements from research institutions and submitting funding proposals to the Department of Defense.

• Engage corporate and civic stakeholders to support funding proposals with clear roadmaps toward dual-use product development.

The end product of this activity would be investor-ready deal flow. And we’re getting to work to provide it:

Next challenge: By definition, “dual-use” technologies operate at the intersection of national security and commercial challenges. An urgently pressing example is the need to safeguard economic choke points – whether satellites or trade routes – where adversaries are attempting to disrupt the flow of critical information and goods.

As blogger Noah Smith wrote last month, “manufacturing is war now.” I’ll take it a step further: War is manufacturing and manufacturing is equitable economic development. If manufacturing is war — and, as I’ll explain, it is — any effective effort to expand economic opportunities in communities most affected by deindustrialization must focus on enhancing manufacturing productivity and bolstering American strength.

National strategic challenge

By 2030, nearly half of the world’s industrial production will happen in China, according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. The United States supported one quarter of the world’s industrial production at the beginning of the century; according to the UN, our share will decline to 11 percent in five years. As Xi Jinping sets his sights on Taiwan, he is surely aware that right now the United States simply cannot manufacture the munitions necessary to defend the island in a protracted war. We do not have the manufacturing base to match the extraordinary Chinese manufacturing machine.

Anyone living in the industrial Midwest or following outlets like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal recognizes that the United States has relinquished much of its manufacturing capacity – from pharmaceuticals to cars to, incredibly, components of defense systems. Think of that: American troops could march into combat against adversaries who produced the very weapons in their hands.

I do not need to add any more commentary on the topic of deindustrialization. What I will do is caution against fatalism, then propose at least a small component of a solution.

First, let’s be clear that our manufacturing base has not withered away because of the uncontrollable force of technology. You shouldn’t accept that facile explanation of deindustrialization at face value. The Upjohn Institute’s Susan Houseman didn’t, and in 2018, published a paper that explained how manufacturing of computer products – automated long before recent advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence – served to artificially boost aggregate manufacturing productivity statistics. Houseman’s conclusion: Manufacturing productivity hasn’t really increased that much in the United States in the last four decades.

“Since the 1980s…the apparently robust growth in manufacturing real output and productivity have been driven by a relatively small industry—computer and electronic products,” Houseman found. “Without the computer industry, there is no prima facie evidence that productivity caused manufacturing’s relative and absolute employment decline.”

Second, let me state as clearly as possible: We can advance our manufacturing facilities to the cutting edge of technology and make progress work for people, especially for residents of our communities most impacted by deindustrialization.

American manufacturing workers were never the only ones confronted with automation technologies. In Germany, policymakers, business leaders, and economic stakeholders embraced productivity advancements. Rather than resisting automation, they collaborated with organized labor to train existing workers to keep pace with technological changes. While some jobs were lost, the decline of the German manufacturing base never approached anything like we saw in the United States.

I am not and would never argue for blanket protectionism (though I do want to acknowledge without endorsing the arguments of commentator Michael Pettis that we should impose tariffs on all imports to counter Chinese dumping, then use revenues to subsidize domestic production).

Rather, I am simply stating what should be obvious: We need policymakers, business managers, academics, and our very best engineers at the table to remake America’s manufacturing economy and sharply, sharply reverse decades of deindustrialization. That means bringing back manufacturing by enhancing productivity through technology and productivity gains. In this pursuit, the Department of Defense is playing a central role.

Department of Defense actions

It’s not enough to simply manufacture systems with precision. We need the capability of manufacturing at scale.

At the cost of less than $600 each, Chinese-made first-person-view (FPV) drones continue to defend and attack the Ukrainian lines, supporting both sides of the conflict.

Last year the U.S. Department of Defense placed an order for 127 “Rogue 1” drones at the cost of $94,000 each. To be clear: The Rogue 1s have functionalities that drones available on Amazon cannot offer. But to defend the lines in Ukraine, mass must be prioritized.

Recognizing the urgent need to expedite delivery of capabilities to American and allied militaries, outgoing Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks launched and oversaw the “Replicator Initiative,” supporting a series of operational sprints to design, produce, and deliver new defense systems at scale within 18 to 24 months of inception. Major defense programs simply do not operate at this speed, at least not recently. For context: The F-35 entered full production only after more than two decades of planning and development.

In the current environment, the U.S. military does not have two decades to mobilize American industry to produce capabilities and field systems. It must produce and deploy tens and hundreds of thousands of systems within the hyper-fast Replicator timetable.

To build products quickly and at scale, there are a number of actions and industrial policies American policymakers and economic leaders should take – and I couldn’t possibly cover them all in this commentary. I can flag one solution: Enhance manufacturing productivity by moving product design, prototyping, testing, and life cycle management into the virtual space.

“Digital twins” provide detailed digital replicas of physical products and allow developers to modify designs before production. The concept of digital twins was introduced by Dr. Michael Grieves in 2002, yet with technology limitations, could not actually be employed through the 2000s and into the 2010s. That’s now beginning to change, according to Grieves, with dramatically enhanced compute and data storage space.

Suppliers like Siemens and Nvidia-backed MetAI can now provide manufacturers the ability to visualize systems, simulate environments, and test performance under different conditions before physical production.

A 2023 McKinsey report estimated that “the global market for digital-twin technologies forecast to grow at about 60 percent annually over the next five years, reaching $73.5 billion by 2027.”

The movement toward digital twins seems inexorably more cost effective. As Grieves has noted, “(t)he cost of physical resources continues to grow over time, even if it is simply at the rate of inflation…Virtual costs will continue to decrease over time as Mooreʹs Law and its corollaries continue to remain in effect.” Unlike physical systems, digital twins do not require a manufacturing plant, materials, or overhead.

Digital twins also seem necessary as advanced products, particularly defense systems, become more complex.

I believe are at the front end of Department of Defense activity in integrating digital twins into the American manufacturing economy. The Pentagon awarded Wichita State University’s Aviation Research Institute $100 million in 2023 to create digital twins of the F-16 and B-1. Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth lent his support to digital twins during his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

What about smaller systems, like the drones sent to the Ukrainian frontlines? Could we facilitate more cost-effective prototyping, testing, and production with digital twins? I believe that is precisely where national security imperatives interact with economic development goals of communities impacted by deindustrialization.

Opportunity for regional economies

As the South Side of Chicago reeled in the early 1980s after the closing of the Wisconsin Steel plant, a young man drove into the city with a beat-up sedan, fleeing an unhappy job in New York and ready to get to work organizing community members in desperate need of leadership. That man was Barack Obama.

Elected officials and nonprofit organizations have followed our 44^th President in channeling energy toward growing Chicago communities that lost everything during the decades of deindustrialization. I believe manufacturing plants in Chicago and the Midwest have closed over the past few decades because it no longer made business sense to keep them operating. While countless books and peer-reviewed papers have analyzed the reasons behind this trend, significantly enhancing manufacturing productivity today could help shift those business dynamics.

I view the current push to reindustrialize the American economy as a real opportunity to fire back up communities long rooted in manufacturing. But to reindustrialize, Chicago and similar communities require a vision to modernize.

On behalf of my organization, the Frontier Mission Network, I have engaged several Midwest universities, including one in Chicago to support a digital twins research institute. (We hope to have news soon.)

Our vision is to support universities in the Chicago region to interface with industry partners and the Department of Defense, understand problems, and quickly build solutions to urgent needs. We would like to provide small businesses, new ventures, and larger corporate partners a resource to design and test systems virtually, eliminating front-end costs, hastening product development, and supporting local prototyping and manufacturing.

If we’re successful, I think we could take a small step toward bringing at least a few manufacturing jobs back to Chicago. And we would be supporting reindustrializing our regional economy and at the same time supporting American strength – like they are apparently doing in Ohio.

Earlier this week, Anduril Industries, considered the vanguard American technology company of the new defense industrial base, announced it will build a massive, near-$1 billion manufacturing facility in Columbus. I can’t help but wonder what such a facility would do for the Chicago economy if this facility were built on the South Side.

Next challenge: New ventures rooted in regional economies without large venture capital firms – and that’s all of us outside of the Bay Area, Boston, New York, and perhaps a handful of other cities – struggle to raise private financing necessary to build and validate a product. The “Valley of Death” is more than just an inconvenience for tech startups; it’s a fundamental defect in the American model and it threatens our national security. At every step in the technology development process, the Department of Defense supports financing programs to bridge this gap.