This is a very interesting article. We see a number of parallels between the technological health of nations and that of industries. How do think defense would fare in a side-by-side comparison with other industries?
Following are some interesting excerpts:
Science fiction author William Gibson’s famous quip that the future is already here but unevenly distributed is the quintessential encapsulation of the fact that we differ in our stages of Technik.
–
However, the U.S. share of global R&D, like global GDP, has fallen to around 20%, and since not enough of those funds are devoted to commercialization initiatives, the United States sometimes has to buy things it invented a decade ago from competitors abroad.
This phenomena should sound familiar to defense insiders… How many promising technologies spawned from the previous decade of conflict have actually traversed the gap to formal DoD program of record? How long did it take DoD to internalize Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) first successfully demonstrated in Vietnam into the permanent force structure?
Innovation without productization, commercialization, and transition is just an interesting aside. Unfortunately, we can count on having to reinvent many of the same military technologies that so impacted the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq down the road.