Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift

The U.S. military

is broken. Young

Americans want

to fix it. Bailey Baumbick traded a

career as a national security

consultant to build tech

solutions

for the challenges

she saw at the Pentagon. Elias Rosenfeld left a job

in social

impact consulting

to start a career aimed

at revitalizing America’s

industrial base. Lee Kantowski spent

eight years in the

Army before

switching to defense tech,

where

he hopes to fix the

military’s outdated tools. Opinion The Editorial Board America Needs

a New

Definition of

Service

Bailey Baumbick knew she wanted to serve her country when she graduated from Notre Dame in 2021. Ms. Baumbick, a 26-year-old from Novi, Mich., didn’t enlist in the military, however. She enrolled in business school at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ms. Baumbick is part of a growing community in the Bay Area that aims to bring high-tech dynamism to the lumbering world of the military. After social media companies and countless lifestyle start-ups lost their luster in recent years, entrepreneurs are being drawn to defense tech by a mix of motivations: an influx of venture capital, a coolness factor and the start-up ethos, which Ms. Baumbick describes as “the relentless pursuit of building things.”

There’s also something deeper: old-fashioned patriotism, matched with a career that serves a greater purpose.

In college Ms. Baumbick watched her father, a Ford Motor Company executive, lead the company’s sprint to produce Covid-19 ventilators and personal protective equipment for front-line health care workers. “I’ve never been more inspired by how private sector industry can have so much impact for public sector good,” she said.

Ford’s interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic hark back to a time when public-private partnerships were commonplace. During World War II, leaders of America’s biggest companies, including Ford, halted business as usual to manufacture weap