Tesla CEO, Pentagon Chief to Meet as DOD’s Tech Outreach Flops

I've been in uniform for around 19 years and I'm leaving to found a startup, so this subject is near and dear to my heart. I just don't think it's gonna happen. The peacetime military is fundamentally incompatible with startups.

An event that helped catalyze my desire to leave was a speech from a general where he literally said (for 15 minutes, making sure we got the point) that "loyalty is more important than cleverness." The peacetime military just doesn't accept failure, which means they can't accept experimentation, and they can't even conceive of hypothetically breaking/adjusting/creatively-interpreting the chain of command.

And that's not even a bad thing. That's how the military is supposed to work. It truly amazes me that so many people inside the military misunderstand the fundamentals of how it works.