"Bailey Baumbick traded a career as a national security consultant to build tech solutions for the challenges she saw at the Pentagon. Elias Rosenfeld left a job in social impact consulting to start a career aimed at revitalizing America's industrial base. Lee Kantowski spent eight years in the Army before switching to defense tech, where he hopes to fix the military's outdated tools."
"Ms. Baumbick is part of a growing community in the Bay Area that aims to bring high-tech dynamism to the lumbering world of the military. After social media companies and countless lifestyle start-ups lost their luster in recent years, entrepreneurs are being drawn to defense tech by a mix of motivations: an influx of venture capital, a coolness factor and the start-up ethos, which Ms. Baumbick describes as the relentless pursuit of building things."
"I've never been more inspired by how private sector industry can have so much impact for public sector good, she said. Ford's interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic hark back to a time when public-private partnerships were commonplace. During World War II, leaders of America's biggest companies, including Ford, halted business as usual to manufacture weapons for the war effort. For much of the 20th century, the private and public sectors were tightly woven together."
Young Americans are shifting careers into defense technology and industrial revitalization, trading consulting and military service for startups aimed at modernizing the Pentagon's tools and industrial base. A Bay Area community of entrepreneurs and recent graduates seeks to apply high-tech dynamism, venture capital, and startup ethos to longstanding military problems. Motivations include patriotism, the pursuit of purposeful work, and belief in private-sector impact on public good. Historical examples include Ford's rapid production of Covid-19 ventilators and World War II industry pivots, reflecting a past era of close public-private integration. In 1980, nearly one in five Americans were veterans.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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