Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide.
A foundational, and increasingly dangerous, tension defines the American defense enterprise. It is a narrative that pits industrial mass against digital velocity, the physics of building weapons against the logic of deploying software. On one side stand the titans of the traditional defense industrial base who forge the steel of American power. On the other are the venture-funded trailblazers of the tech world, who promise to blitzscale an intelligent, autonomous nervous system. For years, policymakers and pundits have framed this as a necessary competition. Yet this is a false dichotomy that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of modern conflict and, if left unaddressed, only helps America’s enemies.
We write about this tension between the trailblazers and the titans because it is one we notice in our daily work. Stephen, in his roles at Blue Forge Alliance and Booz Allen Hamilton, sees this battlefield from the perspective of a traditional integrator and legacy shipbuilders. This is in addition to his role as an investor at the Palo Alto-based venture fund, DCVC. Austin, on the other hand, has been on the fast, restless end as a venture-backed founder of a maritime autonomy company. We have a commercial interest in ensuring our own companies find a favorable playing field, but also approach the landscape with bias from these experiences.
As the United States confronts the dual challenges of a pacing threat from China and brutal, acute wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the notion of fostering an internal war between our own industrial players is not just counterproductive; it is a strategic vulnerability. In the critical case of naval power, America can only match Chinese force generation through the combined efforts of technology and manufacturing sectors. China is explicitly pursuing a state-directed, military-civil fusion strategy to achieve technological dominance. The United States cannot afford a fractured industrial base where its greatest strengths are siloed by culture and contract type. The future of American deterrence depends not on picking a winner, but on deliberately engineering a more resilient, collaborative, and unified industrial ecosystem composed of titans, trailblazers, and the translators who can bridge the gap between them.
The legacy of American military-technical supremacy was built by the primes; the titans. Companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics mastered the immense complexity of building exquisite, capital-intensive platforms. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is not merely an aircraft; it is a globally integrated production ecosystem, a testament to the monumental challenge of bending metal, managing secure global supply chains, and integrating thousands of hardware subsystems. But the value of these titans extends far beyond the factory floor. They manage the multi-decade lifecycle of these platforms, providing the sustainment, logistics, and modernization necessary to keep them relevant. They possess the deep institutional knowledge required to navigate the nation’s most highly classified programs and the physical infrastructure to build at a scale that a startup, by definition, cannot. This is the domain of industrial might, and without it, the United States simply cannot field the physical mass necessary to project power globally.
In stark contrast, the trailblazers emerged from Silicon Valley, a world where consumer-facing software companies measure progress in weeks, not years. While companies like Anduril Industries, Palantir Technologies, and ShieldAI should speed-match with their Pentagon customer, they emulate this software-first, product-led, venture-capital-funded culture. They are willing to risk private money to solve public problems, fast. They attract a different kind of talent: software engineers and AI experts who want to see their code deployed. They want to make a difference in months, not decades. But while they can accelerate complex product development for autonomy and battle management software, they cannot code through the reality of laying keels and producing ammo: building hardware en masse takes time. The most complicated hardware, such as warships, are not only time- and capital-intensive to produce; They face hard constraints in workforce, infrastructure, and supply chain. The Silicon Valley entrants — their currency is not steel, but code — can only generate so much raw military power with their software.
The peril of the false dichotomy is that these two worlds are profoundly complementary. A myopic focus on one at the expense of the other hobbles the entire enterprise. A next-generation bomber is a diminished asset if its mission-planning software takes years to update. This was the genesis of the Software Defined Warfare strategy that one of us spent 18 months campaigning for and is now foundational to the Pentagon’s software strategy. A brilliant algorithm is strategically irrelevant if it cannot be securely integrated onto a global network of platforms. The titan provides the resilient hardware, the “edge.” The trailblazer provides the adaptive software.
But for this fusion to occur, a third type of actor is essential: the digital integrator or translator. This is a role often filled by firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, which possess a unique history and skill set. Booz Allen is not a prime hardware builder, nor is it a venture-backed product company. It is a firm that, for over a century, has embedded itself with the government to solve complex operational and strategic problems. During World War II, when the Navy was grappling with the immense challenge of a two-ocean war, it turned to Booz Allen to help conceptualize its war plan and organize its forces. This legacy of acting as a strategic partner, a civilian brain trust for the armed forces, defines the modern role of a translator like Booz Allen.
Today, Booz Allen acts as the crucial connective tissue in the unified paradigm. They and their contemporaries exist to step into a void that neither titans nor trailblazers desire to address: subscale integration and development services that require significant non-recurring engineering funding. They are the translators who can speak the language of both the Pentagon’s Program Executive Offices and Silicon Valley’s engineering scrums. When the Department of Defense seeks to implement a zero-trust cybersecurity architecture through its “Thunderdome” program, it turns to Booz Allen to act as the systems integrator, hardening commercial technologies to meet military standards and scaling them across a vast enterprise. Such integration is one of the capabilities sought by leaders like Army Futures Command Gen. James Rainey, who explained on a recent podcast that “all the pieces of the puzzle are there.” What he really needs: companies “to quit trying to sell us pieces of the puzzle and somebody to pull that team together with the sum of those capabilities purpose-built.”
When the military needs to accelerate its adoption of artificial intelligence, a firm like Booz Allen provides not just algorithms, but the data science, digital engineering, and mission expertise required to integrate AI into actual military workflows. They bridge the gap between a trailblazer’s innovative software product and its effective, secure use by a titan’s platform, ensuring the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This role is not about building the ‘what,’ but about delivering the ‘how.’ At a moment where the government is cutting such translator contracts, the connective mission of a Booz should be internalized by government leaders — leaders who understand the challenges of building navies and the culture of product development.
The primary obstacle to achieving this unified ecosystem remains a bureaucracy that incentivizes division. The Pentagon’s acquisition system, with its siloed “colors of money” separating research and development from procurement, creates a notorious “valley of death” where promising innovations from newcomers often fail to transition into fielded capabilities. The system is still structured to buy ships, not software subscriptions. And in enterprise software acquisition offices, they have no mandate to help accelerate shipbuilding.
The same bureaucracy also assumes it can create a better equilibrium by insourcing business functions currently delivered by translators. Yet, good-intentioned efforts to remove this component of the defense industrial base will deliver a worse outcome for American citizens.
Meaningful reform requires more than just tinkering with the Federal Acquisition Regulation. It means demanding open systems architectures on major platforms from the outset, allowing software from a variety of sources to compete and be integrated. It means creating contracting mechanisms that facilitate, rather than forbid, partnerships between primes, startups, and integrators. And it requires a cultural shift where program managers are rewarded for speed, adaptability, and successful integration, not just for staying on budget for a hardware platform whose requirements were set a decade ago.
As China aggressively pursues its state-directed military-civil fusion, the United States cannot afford a fractured industrial base where its greatest strengths are isolated from one another. A divided ecosystem is a gift to Beijing. The strategic imperative is clear: Harness the industrial might of the titans, fuse it with the digital velocity of the trailblazers, and leverage the deep integration expertise of the translators. Forging this unified paradigm is the central industrial challenge of our time. America’s ability to deter and, if necessary, win future conflicts depends on it.
Austin Gray is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Blue Water Autonomy.
Stephen Rodriguez is a commission director at the Atlantic Council, chairman of Blue Forge Alliance, and chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton’s Defense Technology Board.
