Need for speed: How Israel, US are rethinking defense innovation - opinion

When Hamas rockets rained across Israel in October 2023, Israeli engineers, reservists, and entrepreneurs didn’t wait for formal contracts before responding. Within days, ad-hoc teams of software developers and defense technologists were adapting commercial drone systems and sensor algorithms for battlefield use – and passing them on to friends to test.

Testing, failing, and relaunching prototypes is just another day’s work in Israel, especially in wartime. Picture a civilian engineer loading new devices into his car and hand-delivering them to a unit commander on the front line. Or an officer in enemy territory updating a colleague’s drone firmware on his phone, to adapt to shifting conditions.

The “build fast, deploy faster” ethos has long defined Israel’s innovation culture, where engineers operate in high-pressure, resource-constrained environments. By contrast, the United States has a more accountable, top-down approach which, while producing robust systems, can stifle agility.

In Washington, DC’s defense circles, scenes such as these are unfathomable.

Different laws, contexts, and cultures aside: What can Washington learn from Israel’s speed, and what lessons in structure and sustainability can Israel take from Washington in return?

Across the Atlantic, Nic Adams, a former US Army officer and Senate staffer, describes the defense acquisition system as a relic of the Cold War, “a structure designed to reward compliance, not speed.” Decades of regulatory layering under the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations (DFARS), combined with contractor consolidation in the 1990s, produced an industry dominated by a handful of primes.

That model worked when America faced no peer adversary. “But when China started pouring money into critical technologies,” Adams said, “our luxury of time evaporated.”

The notorious “valley of death”-- the gap between prototype and procurement – can last 12 to 18 months, far longer than most start-ups’ cash runways.

Back in 2024, Adams helped craft legislation to bridge that gap by creating a small revolving fund within the intelligence community, enabling agencies to keep promising companies afloat while waiting for congressional appropriations.

“You don’t have to fully fund them,” he explained. “Just give them something to take back to investors. That’s how you align business and government languages.”

In the past year, two bipartisan proposals – the SPEED Act and FoRGED Act — advanced through Congress, aimed at accelerating contracting timelines, reducing lead times, and synching budget cycles with commercial innovation. Building on that momentum, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth introduced the Acquisition Transformation Strategy in early November to modernize procurement and strengthen the Defense Industrial Base.

Meanwhile, venture investors, once wary of “war tech,” are reversing course. Dual-use defense technology has shifted from niche to mainstream, fueled by geopolitical instability and a renewed sense that innovation itself is national security. Even Silicon Valley’s cultural resistance to defense work has faded.

Still, Adams warns that the Pentagon’s culture changes slowly. “We need to move from a requirements mindset, where the government dictates every bolt, to a capabilities mindset that lets industry innovate,” he said.

“Israel gets that instinctively.”

“You had software engineers from fintech firms suddenly coding drone algorithms,” he said. Within days, civilian developers were collaborating with IDF units to adapt commercial technologies for tactical use.

That proximity between innovators and end users is Israel’s not-so-secret advantage. Reservists often straddle both worlds, moving from a combat zone to a design sprint in 24 hours, collapsing the loop between problem and prototype. “A US start-up might wait months for test authorization,” Yahid said. “Here, it’s battle-tested in three days.”

The results speak for themselves. Between 2023 and 2024, over two dozen Israeli defense start-ups moved from development to production during the war, and roughly half of the anti-drone technology used by the IDF came from these young companies. Many of those firms are now expanding to international markets.

Yet even in the Start-up Nation, bottlenecks persist. Israel’s defense market has long been dominated by three state-aligned primes – Elbit, IAI, and Rafael – and venture capital historically viewed defense as low-yield. That perception is shifting as conflict accelerates demand, and alliances with US partners deepen.

If Israel’s edge is speed, America’s is scale.

“The US has a structured pipeline for getting a warfighter’s needs up the chain,” Yahid acknowledged. “It’s slow, but it exists.”

On the other hand, “In Israel, everything depends on who you know. If you don’t have the connection, it goes nowhere,” he said.

Conversely, Israel’s high risk-tolerance, shaped by existential threats, permits experimentation that would alarm American compliance officers.

“Here, if a drone isn’t fully tested but could save lives today, we’ll use it,” Yahid said. “In Washington, they’d be running simulations.”

That difference, Adams argues, reflects governance as much as culture. “Our system is designed for accountability. Israel’s is designed for immediacy.”

The challenge for both countries is to balance agility with assurance.

In terms of what each side can learn from the other, Yahid puts it simply: “America needs a procurement overhaul. Israel needs institutionalized processes over personal connections.”

In a recent CET Sandbox workshop, Israeli founders were asked to solve US defense challenges in real time. “When we flipped the question from ‘What do you have?’ to ‘Here’s the problem, how would you fix it?’ collaboration clicked,” he said.

For Adams, the lesson is mutual.

“Israel proves that speed saves lives. But America’s structure ensures sustainability. Combining these strengths would enable the United States to out-innovate any adversary.”

Both the US and Israel face the same paradox: The faster technology evolves, the slower bureaucracies seem to move. Yet reforms such as the SPEED Act and Israeli’s wartime innovation surge show that the landscape is shifting.

“For defense innovation in the US; to keep pace with modern threats; it’s not about inventing faster,” Adams said. “It’s about closing the gap so innovators and soldiers work in sync, at the speed the world now demands.”

Or, as Yahid put it more bluntly: “When you’re getting shot at, there’s no time for red tape.”