alt Hacker NewsI mean... the market was handed to the prime defense contractors on a silver platter for decades, and they utterly failed to deliver cost-effective or even working solutions.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs, they just finally realized the market was dominated by the most disruptable enterprises on earth. Good riddance.
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We'll still have plenty of utter failures. I was shocked hearing about the IVAS program when it was announced, it was such an obvious loser. I guess it's better to have burned 2billion rather than the full amount but whoever green lit that nonsense should spend the rest of their career peeling potatoes.
The question is whether SV will do better than the prime contractors or just become another one.
I hate to say it, but this is mostly true.
reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.
but that's not what's happening.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.
It was not just the VCs. There were also influential people in Pentagon who saw the inefficiency of the prime defense contractors, especially after having seen what SpaceX was able to do.
One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".
Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1HZAPPSrE