Robert McNamara's efficiency-focused systems in the 1960s unintentionally suffocated the US's industrial capacity. By introducing massive friction and layers of "bean counters," it made building anything slow and expensive, a systemic problem that persists today and which Anduril was built to counteract.

Despite the NIH budget more than tripling since 1998, the U.S. has not seen a proportional rise in breakthroughs, a phenomenon known as Eroom's Law. The core issue isn't the amount of money, but a lack of innovation in how science is funded and conducted, with incentives that discourage risk.

The market is currently ignoring the long-term impact of deep cuts to research funding at agencies like the NIH. While effects aren't immediate, this erosion of foundational academic science—the "proving ground" for new discoveries—poses a significant downstream risk to the entire biotech and pharma innovation pipeline.

Many call for more large-scale societal projects like the Apollo or Manhattan Projects. However, these were not just public works; they were military or quasi-military efforts born from an arms race. Replicating them requires a more militarized society, a trade-off that is often overlooked.

Lucrative civilian markets, not government deals, drive frontier tech. By making the defense side of a business a major political and legal liability, the Pentagon risks pushing top companies to completely shun government work, reversing a decades-long, successful dynamic for dual-use technology.

The greatest threat to US innovation is not simply cutting NIH funding, but imposing political litmus tests on which research gets funded. This mirrors the disastrous Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union, where political ideology replaced the scientific method, guaranteeing the destruction of true innovation.

The foundational U.S. science policy was created in 1945 when the government funded 70% of all R&D. Today, that ratio has inverted, with industry funding 70%. This dramatic shift requires a new government strategy focused on funding only the basic, pre-competitive research that the private sector won't.

Beyond market cycles, the real danger of scarce capital is that it cuts funding for fundamental, non-narrative-driven science at the university level. This research, often supported by government grants, is the engine of the entire biopharmaceutical ecosystem, and its decline poses a long-term threat to innovation.

The U.S. defense research agency DARPA funds moonshot projects it knows may fail. The real value comes from the secondary innovations and materials created along the way, which are often more impactful than the original goal.