In a now-famous blog post from 2014, journalist Steve Cichon compared a Radio Shack ad from 1991 to the then-current iPhone. The difference was stark. Of the 15 items in the ad, 13 had effectively disappeared, all of them replaced by the singular smartphone.
The technology landscape embodied in 1991 was unrecognizable by 2014 — and vice versa. 1991 was also the year of the Gulf War. Looking at the defense platforms fielded that year compared to 2014 — or 2024, for that matter — shows a very different story.
Not only are the technologies entirely recognizable to a 2024 audience, but the majority of those systems are still in active service. By any measure, the development of novel technologies in the defense sector has slowed, lagging well behind the pace of commercial industry. Attempts to diagnose the problem are myriad.
We talk about intellectual property rights. We talk about commercial-off-the-shelf versus government-off-the-shelf software. We talk about vendor lock, open architectures, and application programming interfaces.
I’ve heard countless debates about traditional versus nontraditional defense contractors and about the idea of doing business differently — making it smarter and more agile. As part of the founding team of Striveworks , a company that does business with the Department of Defense, we have a vested interest in government acquisitions, particularly around AI. However, we have decades of experience in the commercial sector and have seen first-h.