Startups Are Now on the Front Lines

A recent Air Force contract to help screen small businesses applying for federal research funding reflects a growing national security concern: foreign access to American innovation.Screening applicants is one part of that challenge. Protecting the technology those companies develop is another.Startups are part of great power competition, even when their founders do not see themselves that way. Some of the technology the military may rely on over the next decade is being developed by small teams working on specialized components, software and materials.Consider a hypothetical eleven-person quantum sensing startup, a team writing drone autonomy software for GPS-denied environments, or three researchers prototyping a radiation-hardened chip. None is building an entire weapons system. Each could hold a piece of technology valuable to a foreign intelligence service.An adversary does not have to steal a complete system to benefit. Access to a component design, source code or test results could help it understand a capability, accelerate its own development or identify a weakness.Intelligence officials have publicly warned about this exposure. At a Five Eyes gathering in California in Oc...