In the dark, early morning of July 16, 1945, in the deserts of New Mexico, one of biggest gambles in American history paid off. If you haven’t seen Oppenheimer, I recommend at least watching the detonation scene. It exquisitely captures the anticipation, anxiety, hope and fear all at once, culminating in a wildly juxtaposed moment of silence as the successful Trinity test thrusts the world into a new nuclear age. In that moment, America also collected on a $2 billion bet such a weapon could be produced—a bet that pulled from every major pool of scientific, industrial and monetary resources. Adjusted for inflation, the Manhattan Project today would be about $35 billion. But this number doesn’t capture the scale of the project. In 1941, the year America was drawn into World War II, the entire War Department budget was $2 billion. An entire year’s war budget on one effort! Not on a major ramp-up of munitions or a plane we know we can build (no shade, F-35). The Manhattan project was essentially an educated guess. The funds were committed not knowing if we had the capacity or even the capability to get it done. In the end, $2 billion bought three bombs and an understanding that the American industrial base can accomplish the unimaginable.

Now with the new Golden Dome initiative, America is again considering a project that, depending on the design and source of the estimates, is likely to take up anywhere from one to several years’ defense budget. If you question the urgency, I’d draw your attention to the book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobson. (Quick sidetone, the recent Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, seems to be based on this same scenario. Don’t waste your time with the movie—the book is superior in every way, including the level of terror it instills. And I say that as someone who was a nuclear missile officer in a prior life.) In the book, which captures the second-by-second process of nuclear conflict, Jacobson paints the picture of the president’s state of mind through the excruciating responsibility of leading such a war. There is a scene where the president, at the worst possible moment, realizes that despite years of near trillion-dollar defense spending, the fate of the entire world comes down to a few underinvested programs from decades past.

Much like the Manhattan project, Golden Dome is asking America to gamble its treasure with high stakes to avoid this kind of future. This time, we come at the problem with a much more mature industrial base. I recommend reading the Economist article in this week’s edition, which captures the challenge ahead well. Sorry, you have to make a free account for that one, which I usually try to avoid, but this one is worth it. While I apparently cast a much wider net of what counts as a "startup" than the Economist, I agree with their point that the coming friction between primes and smalls pits capacity and experience against flexibility and innovation. Surely we will need all of it. My intuition is the coming years will have some major changes for the shape of the DIB, and the need for innovative thinking inherent to small businesses will be in high demand.

On Friday, Secretary Hegseth announced some major changes to acquisitions that are intended to meet this moment. We’ll dive into that next week, but the bottom line seems to be a call for speed. That call includes more than those inside the walls of the Pentagon. To paraphrase Robert Fehlen from his article, Why 2026 is the year you should absolutely leave defense tech, which you'll find in this week’s edition, we’re all here because the work is hard, but we also understand it will be the most important thing we ever do.

Happy reading.

| Beau Downey, Editor

‍

The views represented in this commentary are my own and do not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense or the US Government.

‍

Ok, so there is a lot of news this week. Either that’s because it was a very busy week in the headlines with the shutdown ending and all or because I’m getting better at finding them now. I guess we’ll find out together soon! If you didn’t catch all of the changes to acquisition policy Sec. Hegseth announced last week during his remarks at the National War College (followed by a flurry of supporting memos), I suggest starting with the Federal Drive podcast featured here this week. It’s a concise, commute-length-friendly readout of the changes. tl;dr—the order of the day is speed, which means portfolio-focused management and commercial-first solutions. You can almost hear the collective “finally!” being muttered in the background.

For your weekly dose of fear, I bring you the article from Anthropic in this week’s “More In Depth” section. (BTW, if you haven’t realized it yet, this section will always have the longer, more cerebral pieces.) In it, the Anthropic team recounts and assesses what it believes to be “the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention.” If you thought vibe coding was cringe, wait until you see vibe hacking! I won’t get ahead of this one, because our own Jerry Ramey is working on a forthcoming piece about the cybersecurity implications of AI as it gets exponentially more advanced. Suffice it to say this feels like a bit of a Rubicon moment for AI and cybersecurity.

But I mostly want to focus this week on the pushback against industry for “right to repair,” which is working its way through Congress. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling out industry for what she frames as self-serving scare tactics. This week’s Federal News Network article quotes the senator as saying "there is no real basis to oppose the defense right-to-repair effort other than to protect profits of some of the largest defense contractors in the country.”

Far be it from me to come to their defense. So I’ll let former Army secretary and current CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association Eric Fanning do it for me. Fanning penned an op-ed this week in the Washington Times. In it, he argues that right to repair would chill innovation by putting intellectual property at risk, not to mention the impacts to companies’ competitiveness in the market—impacts, by the way, that disproportionately hit small and mid-sized businesses. He says shortages of parts, maintenance personnel gaps, and regularly deferred maintenance are more to blame than intellectual property issues.

As with most debates, the best answer is somewhere at the mean. We cannot, despite the senator’s insistence, expect companies—to whom we’ve offloaded most of the innovative R&D—to happily give up their advantage. On the other hand, I have seen up close the mission-changing breakthrough of a small, 3D-printed component that could easily replace a part that otherwise gets jealously guarded by a prime making movie theater popcorn-level profit margins. In many cases, the military is asking service members to creatively solve tactical problems and then tying their hands at the source. There has to be a balance between the needs of the mission and the ability of companies to continue to produce the innovations those same warfighters need.

At the end of the say, I have a feel the “customer is always right” truism will win out.

Happy reading,

| Beau Downey, Editor

The views represented in this commentary are my own and do not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense or the US Government.