Over the past decade, a wave of venture-backed defense tech startups have emerged with bold promises to disrupt the national security ecosystem. They called the legacy primes bloated, slow, and risk-averse. They wore hoodies instead of lanyards. They talked about code instead of capture. And they pledged to outmaneuver the Beltway giants by moving fast and delivering capability on Silicon Valley timelines. But something happened on the way to the obligation.
The moment these companies started winning real contracts, not SBIRs, but actual programs of record, they began to replicate the same structures, incentives, and behaviors they once claimed to disrupt. They staffed up with BD veterans. They spun up internal color teams. They hunted subcontractor work on prime bids. They celebrated IDIQ wins like IPOs. The aesthetic changed. The playbook didn’t.
This isn’t failure. It’s absorption. The insurgents were inducted into the system they were meant to replace.
Innovation, Captured
What we’re seeing is the consolidation of a GovCon monoculture: a defense industrial base where old and new players converge on a shared set of behaviors optimized not for mission delivery, but for navigating a brittle, zero-sum contracting environment. Innovation, in this context, becomes less about building better tools and more about learning how to write better proposals.
The monoculture isn’t just a hiring pipeline from Big Biz Prime A to Big Biz Prime B to Big Biz Prime C. It’s a mindset. A reflex. A gravitational pull toward compliance-heavy growth strategies, paper-first pipelines, and the valorization of BD over engineering.
And it’s not surprising. The ecosystem rewards the familiar. FAR-based contracting selects for firms that can mirror the posture and language of incumbents. Even OTAs, meant to break the mold, are now dominated by vehicles where the same 10 integrators partner with new logos that look good on slide 3 of a proposal.
Even the venture capital backing these firms begins to echo the monoculture. Defense-only funds start requiring cleared BD leads before Series B. Startups start building out proposal teams instead of test teams. Tech-focused founders quickly find themselves surrounded by former acquisition officers teaching them how to survive color team reviews.
When the market tells you that the fastest path to scale is to look like Northrop but sound like Netflix, most companies comply.
Clone Wars at Scale
The result is a national security tech landscape that looks competitive on the surface, dozens of startups, hundreds of demo days, infinite mission statements, but behaves with remarkable uniformity once real money enters the picture.
Team structures? Standing proposal teams and BD ops centers.
Growth strategy? Win the OTA, then chase the IDIQ.
Product focus? Whatever the program office said in last year’s industry day.
Differentiation? Mostly in pitch design and talent decks, not in operational models.
Even the pitch language converges: dual-use, deployable, scalable, secure. For all the noise about reimagining the defense-industrial base, we’ve mostly built better fonts on the same architecture. The sameness becomes self-reinforcing. The reward structure favors compliance. Divergence becomes risky. And over time, startups stop imagining what’s possible and start optimizing for what’s fundable, safe, and pre-approved.
The irony is sharp. Many of these firms were funded, backed, and publicized on the claim that they would reduce dependency on legacy primes. But the current market structure ensures that they either adopt legacy behaviors or get bought by those who perfected them. The promise of disruption ends not with victory, but with an exit.
The Danger of Looking Competitive
Why does this matter? Because the illusion of a competitive marketplace can be more dangerous than an acknowledged monopoly. When everyone looks different but acts the same, decision-makers overestimate diversity of thought, approach, and risk profile.
This leads to what we might call "synthetic competition," a situation where the ecosystem appears pluralistic but is actually shaped by a handful of incentives that drive everyone toward the same contracting, compliance, and delivery behaviors. It's market theater, not true variation. This is especially risky in areas like autonomy, AI-enabled targeting, and cyber resilience domains where experimentation and divergence are critical. If every "innovative" player converges on the same risk posture, contracting path, and delivery cadence, we aren’t iterating. We’re just executing the same doctrine in parallel.
It’s also a cultural risk. The same companies that attracted engineers with promises of speed and mission focus are now burdening teams with four-month capture cycles and PowerPoint deliverables. And in many cases, they’re reproducing the same internal silos and CYA workflows that drove talent away from legacy integrators in the first place.
The monoculture doesn't just impact what gets built. It shapes who shows up to build it. And increasingly, the most mission-driven talent is finding itself back in the same environment it left.
What Would It Mean to Mutate?
If the problem is monoculture, the solution is mutation. We don’t need more companies that look like Lockheed but hire like Google. We need players that rethink how product gets built, how capital is deployed, how delivery risk is owned, and how accountability is enforced.
We need firms that:
Build capabilities before contracts
Say no to non-mission-aligned work
Reject compliance theater
Own full delivery, not just the first prototype
Operate with single-threaded leaders who ship, not just coordinate
Create open architectures with defined interfaces, not lock-in
Share code with allies and partners, not hoard it in enclaves
Real competition in defense innovation won’t come from better branding. It will come from structural divergence: new funding models, new teaming norms, and new philosophies of ownership and trust. It means flipping the incentives: rewarding shipping over scheming, clarity over compliance, and outcomes over optics.
It also means building companies that aren’t just venture-scalable, but mission-resilient willing to stay weird long enough to bend the system instead of being reshaped by it. Because if everyone’s reading from the same playbook, the mission isn’t evolving. It’s just wearing a new logo.