If you're as functionally science-illiterate as I am, your only point of reference for Michael Faraday might be the box you put your phone in before going into a SCIF. The "Faraday cage' blocks your device's electronic signals and, for the purposes of national security, turns potentially threatening smartphones into temporary paperweights. Faraday, however, is much, much more than his namesake container. Neil deGrasse Tyson has called him perhaps "the most important person many people have never heard of." In the mid-19th century, he discovered electromagnetic fields (and the concept of fields more generally) and with it, the modern foundation of our understanding of electromagnetism that gives us everything from kitchen magnets to x-rays. There's a particularly interesting story I heard recently about Faraday that captures his intuitive genius. On the occasion of giving a lecture in 1846, having concluded his remarks early, Faraday engaged in some idle speculation with his audience during which he inferred that light as we know it might simply be disturbances in the electromagnetic field he had discovered. Were that to be true, we would never have really seen anything, right? We'd just have seen the change to the medium between us and the thing we're 'seeing.' It would take decades for his offhand thought to be proven true—a reality that raises an interesting metaphor beyond physics. An entity you can never truly see but only experience based on changes to the medium between you. I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot like the relationship between the Pentagon and its industrial partners who often don't get to sit in meetings inside the five-sided box and are instead left to interpret signals at varying degrees of fidelity. This seemed particularly relevant to the recent NDIA Emerging Technologies report, which specifically called out the need for clearer demand signals from the government, especially as they relate to mobilizing private investment. To borrow the phrase from Mike Dodd, head of the Office of Strategic Capital, this requires the government not just to put out requirements, but rather to holistically "speak the language of the markets," which signals longer-term stability in the defense sector. That really comes down to incentive structures. In this week's featured opinions section, we included a commentary from two members of the American Enterprise Institute who see that gap in action in the way incentive structures influence what the government communicates compared to what it needs regarding production capacity. Take, as an example, requirements writers who are "measured on specifying the most capable system, not the most buildable one." The result, the authors argue, is a system that often does not demand the 'buildability' that the requirements owners will need during phases of scale. Despite the department's efforts to speed acquisition efforts, its ability to clearly communicate at multiple levels simultaneously is as much a challenge of the medium as it is the communicators themselves. Where can the government go to have holistic conversations about end states rather than means? How can it overcome the rigidity of the solicitation process while maintaining due diligence? How can it access broader parts of the industrial base who are often functionally in a contractor's Faraday cage, unable to even receive the message? The better they can tune the signal of the actual desires of the department to something its recipients can process, the better the ecosystem can produce for its needs. As simple a thought as that is, it remains, and I believe will stay, a challenge.

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

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