They have always been lots of startups and small companies in defense, but very often focusing on one very specific thing leveraged by a main contractor that interacts with the government.

For example a company of a dozen people that make just a laser sensor which is then integrated into defense products.

What would be nice is more like defense contract interaction as a service. How to navigate the defense contract acquisition and compliance environment is hard and boring and part of why defense systems actually work and why they’re so expensive.

Military contracting will always be frightfully hard.

Generals have to make judgement calls about what will work in the next conflict - talk about incomplete information - while the future enemy’s preparations and even identity is unknown. Then this has to be translated into something that can slot into existing military systems.

To say nothing of political and career considerations, moving budgets, revolutionary new ideas that will come along, training and culture.

And if they get it wrong, the bad guy wins the next war.

Yes exactly. There's entire classes of contracts reserved exclusively for small companies and startups even. Many exist only because of the constant pipeline of SBIR/STTR money.

>What would be nice is more like defense contract interaction as a service

it's called bribing politicians and generals

One of my best buddies is a mid-level exec at Boeing/Lockheed/Northrop. I just met him a week ago and we had a discussion about the utter waste of Tax Payer dollars in these companies. He was getting compensation beyond his contributions (par for the course in large corporations), but his job was to make sure billable hours continue to exceed the budget - like a boiling frog, projects continue to get delayed bit-by-bit and after 10 years you realize that your program is 3x over budget (F-35 Program?).

I want SV/Texas enterpreneurship to completely dismantle the MIC and start afresh. Even if you disagree with defense applications and its ramifications, simply from ROI perspective (tax payer dollars), instead of increasing military budget, we should be asking how can we do more with current budget. Or even cut down the budget and expect 2x more productivity from these fat military contractors with moats like no other.

Yeah, that's just what we need, Tech company's approach to defense.

"Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"

"Sorry, we just didn't see enough users of this product, so we remotely bricked it."

"We didn't QA this properly and now people are dead."

Move fast and break things is supposed to apply to the missile, not the process to write the guidance system.

> Yeah, that's just what we need, Tech company's approach to defense.

> "Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"

Yes, that’s how we won WWII: we shipped prototypes based on the new ideas, and improved them based on the lessons from the field. In war, stakes are higher, and you can’t always afford to delay for a long time to ship perfect product: by the time it arrives, the war might already be lost.

We also shipped torpedoes that didn't detonate reliably (Mark 14/15) for the first part of the war (1941-43).

Although that was more of a Bureau of Ordnance / Congressional fault, for insufficient interwar funding and testing.

This is one end of the extreme, the other is spaceX. New tech companies are very capable of iterating quickly and producing well tested reliable hardware far better than existing versions of it.

An extreme but absolutely relevant and potentially devastating example of the current system is the F-35.

They did not "iterate," SpaceX, from the start, had a very senior engineering team which they got on a wave of layoffs in aerospace undustry, and NASA basically doing their V1 work.

>They did not "iterate,"

SpaceX has absolute massively iterated in every single thing they do, what the heck are you talking about? The Falcon 9 more than doubled it's payload from v1.0 to FT Block 5, and gained first stage landing/reusability through a host of iterative improvements. Starship's development has been all about hardware rich iteration with plans to enable it right down to the basic material level. They've been big on MVPs and then iterating from there.

> They've been big on MVPs and then iterating from there.

They were not "big on MVP"

Their engineers from the start delivered a very solid vehicle tested, and re-tested probably more than NASAs own rockets.

All improvements they had since were enhancements over the original masterplan, nothing like "throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks"

Not really a convincing argument. Had most of those engineers worked on reusable rockets before? It's like saying stripe, netflix, uber, or Facebook did nothing new because their software engineers had written software before. No one is suggesting that the company needs to compromise of novices in the field, only that they are a new aggressive organization that seeks to upset the status qou.

> "Hey the missile doesn't work in v1, but we still shipped it"

Isn't the F35 developed like that though?

There are plenty of counter examples: Stripe, Cloudflare, etc.

And you think that doesn’t happen at Boeing & Lockheed?

The Germans did pretty well.

It sure was not a lack of technology.

The discipline for program management on the government side is shit and as a result contractors can be too. Some in a malicious or wasteful way. SV startups don’t operate with that mindset (during their scrappy phase). It’s just two ends of the spectrum. There is opportunity it’s just not going to produce these headlines.