The Defense-Tech Bubble Is Headed for Consolidation
foxandlion.pub
foxandlion.pub
You can use AI to create slop using very simple, uninformed prompts, but you can also "collaborate" with it to write thoughtful pieces with good points.
One point not made here though that I think is one of the most important about the space: these companies are being valued like software companies but defense work doesn't produce software-like margins and it never will.
A company like Anduril being valued at $60+ billion is insane. Most of the major defense primes in the US trade at around 2x sales. Supposedly Anduril has a few billion in sales.
For comparison, Northrop did $42 billion in sales last year and has a market cap of around $75 billion. Even factoring in growth, which reasonably deserves a premium, there's really just no way to get to some of these valuations in the defense market because it's structurally limited on the margin side.
> Defense-tech startup valuations vastly outpace the real, contestable market.
> As valuations meet procurement reality, mergers, recaps, rollups, and acquisitions will reshape the sector
If you're working that closely with the piece you plan on publishing then you can go ahead and pick your own words too. This is a social skills test. You need to signal respect to your readers if you want them to engage with your output. That sense has clearly been eroded, or perhaps never developed, in the author if they consider this style acceptable.
You can spot the tell-tale signs even in major publications.
You're free to throw the baby out with the bath water if you'd like, but it's increasingly unrealistic to stop reading the second you encounter a suspected AI footprint unless you're willing to just stop reading.
Strongly disagree. It's incredibly nice, actually, for the mask to come off and get such an easy negative signal on low-effort content. There's more quality content than I could ever read in a lifetime, and it constitutes the slimmest fraction of all content that I will encounter. LLMs are highly effective honeypots for people who want to waste my and others’ time and attention.
And yet here you are engaging in an apparently pointless discussion about a post you apparently wouldn't care to read in the first place.
For those who haven't worked in defense, a lot of contracts are "cost plus" meaning the company's profits are legally limited to 15% of declared expenses.
And that actually makes sense. Even for something like hospital management, the government is going to be different. Epic's EHR system can sell to bunches of hospitals and amortize most of their development work across all of those hospitals- there is only VA system and it is very different from how even a large hospital system functions (no insurance claims! lifetime tracking!), so adapting it is going to be painful.