🌌 Hi everyone, Robert here. I hope you’re enjoying The Deep End, a subsection of the Airframe newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed yet, join the pioneering aerospace executives, investors, and deep tech operators who read Airframe and The Deep End.
🌐 For my latest story—coming out next week—I sat down with former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz, who early on decided to commit United’s resources to two great future mobility companies: Archer Aviation and Boom Supersonic.
In our new era of great power competition—the U.S. and its allies versus China and Russia—defense tech is booming.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen an all-of-the-economy focus on shoring up the American-led democratic world order: World War II and the Cold War each provided a similar kind of motivation for the Department of Defense and the free market to supercharge their relationship. Although fraught with challenges, they make a formidable team, with the capability of producing the cutting-edge technology needed to deter a modern world war.
I started my career in VC and Big Tech, and it has taken some time—through grad school, deep tech ventures, etc.—to understand what’s going on in the world of national security-related startups. I’m still learning. So here’s my defense tech starter kit—a few articles I’ve been sharing with people who are on the same journey.
Read these pieces (and The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare) and you’ll know what it’s going to take to build a more democratic world.
The New York Times: Through Ukraine, Tech Start-Ups Make Their Move Into the U.S. Defense Industry
Each of these systems is getting real-world testing in the war in Ukraine, earning praise from top government officials there and validating investors who have been pouring money into the field.
When it comes to drones, satellites, artificial intelligence and other fields, start-up companies frequently offer the Pentagon cheaper, faster and more flexible options than the weapons systems produced by the handful of giant contractors the Pentagon normally relies on.
As the United States seeks to maintain its national security advantage over China, Russia and other rivals, Pentagon leaders are only now beginning to figure out how to bring a Silicon Valley ethos to the lumbering military-industrial complex.
The Wall Street Journal: Venture Capitalists Should Bet on America
We’ve invested billions of dollars in American Dynamism companies, and we call on other venture firms to do the same. As SpaceX reveals, partnerships between a company and the government can often lead to engineering feats faster and cheaper than government would be able to accomplish alone, and that private industry wouldn’t be able to achieve at all. To access needed technology, the Defense Department has experimented with startup incubators and trusted capital networks for small and midsize companies. We believe many of those initiatives are unnecessary, because venture capital is better able to assess talent and risk as companies form and grow. As the Economist recently pointed out, America is booming relative to the rest of the world. There’s never been a better time to invest in American Dynamism companies or for Washington and venture-backed companies to build together.
The Economist: AI-Wielding Tech Firms are Giving a New Shape to Modern Warfare
[Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey] are cut from similar cloth. They are Silicon Valley renegades. They criticise big tech for abandoning its historic link with America’s defence establishment. They lament the fast pace of civilian-military fusion in China, which they see as a potential threat to the West. To a greater or lesser degree, they are linked to Peter Thiel, a right-wing venture capitalist. Mr Thiel chairs Palantir and his Founders Fund was an early backer of Anduril (both names echo his love of J.R.R. Tolkien). To some that makes them creepy. Still, using different business models, both highlight how sclerotic the traditional system of “prime” defence contracting has become. They offer intriguing alternatives.