The huge issue that’s keeping Silicon Valley and the Pentagon apart

For over a year, top military leaders have been quietly conducting a charm offensive in Silicon Valley, in hopes that the tech industry might want to work with the Pentagon again like it used to during the Cold War. A lot has changed since then; some in tech don't want to be seen as being too close to the US government for fear of alienating international customers in a globalized world.

Still, Defense Secretary Ash Carter seems determined to rebuild that relationship, making trips out to California, founding a new office meant to get cutting-edge tech into the hands of soldiers and meeting everyone from Facebook to Andreessen Horowitz, one of the Valley's signature venture capital firms. Now one of the partners at Andreessen Horowitz says he's diagnosed a huge challenge that the Pentagon will have to overcome if it wants to woo the tech industry back. "You hit a product cycle problem," said Martin Casado, a former Defense Department researcher who is one of nine partners at the firm, at a Washington conference Friday. "The procurement cycle is too baroque." Casado's putting a finger on a choice that he says faces every start-up that wants to sell its goods to the military, be it software or hardware. At some point, the bureaucratic demands placed by the military on private-sector suppliers become so complicated that tech companies can either 1) stop chasing after government contracts so that they can keep selling to regular consumers like you or me, or 2) agree to focus all their energies on the government, effectively making the Pentagon their only customer.