Mike Brown on How To Ensure The US Leads Defense Innovation

Village Global's Venture Stories

Mike Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:
- It can easily take 10-20 years for tech to make its way into the Department of Defense. The Defense Innovation Unit helped speed that process up dramatically.
- Some of the most important technologies being used in the war in Ukraine are commercial technologies. Mike thinks that the Department of Defense should be focusing on commercial technology much more often.
- Many founders don’t realize that government dollars are allocated for specific uses, i.e. marketing, or research and development, and those dollars can’t be used in another area, even within their company.
- Commercial synthetic aperture radar technology used in satellites made a big difference in Ukraine. The US played a large role in developing that game-changing technology and Mike wants to keep it that way.
- It’s estimated that there will be 1000 commercial satellites for every government satellite in the future.
- Defense primes are great at integrating several technologies into a single solution.
- Mike says that CIFEAS should be harmonized with our allies so that China and other countries can’t go to a different country and find the same tech.
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