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 moment 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 some 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

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

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