The U.S. national security case for deep-tech big bets
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Innovation is a weapon. But in a defense world pockmarked by delays, it typically doesn't come fast or cheap.
Why it matters: The largest leaps ahead are accomplished by butting heads with the hardest problems.
- And, oftentimes, whoever corners a market as it emerges sets its rules.
The latest: Axios spoke with a half-dozen business executives, financiers, former defense officials and more who made the national-security case for patient capital and argued the government should play riskier hands on technologies that may not come to immediate fruition but, given enough time, can change the game.
- "The next decade of geopolitical competition is going to get boiled down to frontier technology," Adam Hammer, CEO of Roadrunner Venture Studios, told Axios. "Which technologies dominate and where they are built will decide some of the most important questions facing humanity."
- Roadrunner springboards deep-tech endeavors. It works closely with scientists and scholars at national labs and universities.
- "Today it's like, 'Hey, we discovered something in the lab. It's at a bench top.' Great. It needs a team. It needs a business model. It needs to be productized. It needs marketing. It needs all of these things to make it scale," Hammer said. "But we as a country have not figured out that early valley of death."
Zoom in: Areas of opportunity include advanced materials and manufacturing; energy production and storage; compute; quantum; and agritech.
- Some of these sectors are incredibly capital-intensive.
- "You're unlikely to have a lot of commercial investors fund something super, super early, where they don't know if the basic science has been figured out," Jason Lapadula, a former Pentagon official and Marine infantry officer now at LeoLabs, told Axios.
Zoom out: Michael Kratsios, President Trump's chief science and tech policy adviser, in a speech at the Endless Frontiers summit last week said there is "nothing predestined about technological progress and scientific discovery."
- "For a future stamped with the American character, the federal government must become an early adopter and avid promoter of American technology," he added.
- "Our industrial might, unleashed at home, and our technical achievements from AI to aerospace, successfully commercialized, can also be powerful instruments of diplomacy abroad and key components of our international alliances."
State of play: Some promising avenues already exist. Sources pointed to the Office of Strategic Capital, Defense Innovation Unit and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as well as the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program.
- "The only question is how do we structure this," Anshu Roy, the founder of Rhombus, said in an interview. "It's not a matter of if."
Threat level: China's goals for 2035 include boosting economic and science-and-technology strength, "new-type industrialization" and having "national defense and armed forces modernization basically achieved," according to a translated version of its 14th five-year plan.
- Also mentioned in the document are space and polar exploration — two fronts of security competition.
The bottom line: "If the U.S. wants to win the next era of aerospace, we need to fund the hard problems very early. That means prioritizing technologies still in the R&D-to-product transition, not just scaling what's already proven," Venus Aerospace CEO Sassie Duggleby told Axios.
- "Let me be specific: If China fields hypersonic systems that can circle the globe in under two hours while American companies are still chasing SBIR Phase II grants, we've lost the game."
