Decades of Lost Potential in Defense Research and Development
Amanda Bresler
December 4, 2025
America’s greatest national security threat is an enemy born from and nurtured by the Pentagon: crippling bureaucracy. It starves the oxygen from good ideas, good people, and good technologies while creating ideal conditions for mediocrity to thrive. It has permeated every corner of the system, including the defense-sponsored innovation initiatives — like the Small Business Innovation Research Program — that purportedly exist as its counter.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed the Small Business Innovation Development Act, creating the Small Business Innovation Research program. Its stated objectives include providing American small businesses with non-dilutive funding for research and development in areas critical to national interests and enabling these small firms to transition their technologies to government end-users thereafter. More than four decades and $68 billion later, a program intended to seed commercial innovation instead functions as a taxpayer-funded subsidy for entrenched players, including a handful of ostensibly large firms known as “SBIR mills.”
Mills have won hundreds of Phase I and Phase II awards courtesy of flawed size standards, bureaucratic wherewithal, and misaligned program incentives. By optimizing their businesses to capture maximum program funding, they make it nearly impossible for truly small firms to compete.
https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/decades-of-lost-potential-in-defense-research-and-development/
