TALOS exosuit is the cautionary tale: promise, hype, but failure to field. The technical vision was compelling, yet cost, integration, and sustainment killed it.
By contrast, ScanEagle UAV started in tuna fishing. Marines borrowed it, Boeing picked it up. Today it’s a battlefield mainstay. That trajectory—from commercial roots to warfighter use—is the model, not the exception.
Those two stories frame the first thesis: you can’t force scale. The path from demo to system requires something more than a big contract.
Next, efficiency is fragility. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, convoys optimized for lowest cost collapsed under IED pressure. Logistics became a vulnerability, not a strength. In the commercial sector, FedEx and UPS learned similar lessons after 9/11 and COVID: redundancy, multimodal routing, contingency warehousing—all resiliency, not just cost cutting.
Dr. Martin’s domain—microelectronics—echoes this: when chips fail in a contested battlefield, repairability, modularity, diagnostics, and trusted supply become more important than raw throughput.
Then there’s capital and institutional heft. Predator drones scaled because General Atomics had the balance sheet, facilities, clearances, and scale. A small startup inventing a hydrogen battery or an advanced logistics sensor has zero runway to survive that scale-up without backing. The “valley of death” is real—not about tech, but about business survival.
Finally, policy and institutional friction tilt the playing field toward incumbents. Certification cost, cleared facility requirements, compliance regimes—those are fixed expenses that crush small firms. In practice, they become barriers to entry, not safety gates.
These stories point to the same structural gap: defense treats every innovation as if it’s ready for the majors. That’s wrong. We need a farm team model for defense tech.
Here’s how it should work:
Seed in commercial markets
Let innovations live first in commercial domains—where real customers, revenue feedback, scaling metrics exist. That’s your A/B league. It lets a company prove product-market fit, iterate rapidly, and harden design.
Bridge with capital & infrastructure
Use public/private partnerships, matched funding, cleared facilities, subsidized production lines, shared servicing/logistics chains to de-risk the jump from small scale to mid scale.
Call up only the proven
Only when reliability, maturity, resilience, supply chain security, and business sustainability are proven should the innovation be “called up” into DoD programs of record. At that point, reliability and scale are non-negotiable.
The Insitu → ScanEagle story is a perfect analog. The minor-league stage (commercial fishing, civilian use) gave that tech runway to mature before military adoption.
Under Gen. Van Ovost’s operational lens, this makes sense: defense logistics is about global mobility, timing, risk. You don’t want fragile novelty at scale; you want hardened, resilient systems. Her history leading transportation and mobility commands reminds us what failure looks like at system scale.
Dr. Martin’s microelectronics purview is the other half: trusted supply, modular repair, secure fabs. Without that domain, even mature mechanical systems can die when embedded electronics fail.