Private equity firms are involved in the space, mostly to profit from the acquisition of smaller (but still somewhat established) defense firms by larger ones :

Private equity firms are involved in the space, mostly to profit from the acquisition of smaller (but still somewhat established) defense firms by larger ones :/ In any case, I recently left the defense industry after a 20-year career and am working in the private sector (financial-sector stuff using Clojure) now. It's a completely different world. Tech that was just being introduced in the govt space is old hat out here in the real world -- and my last defense job was working in the R&D space on ML/AI projects where we were allowed to experiment with "cutting edge" (i.e., only 5 years behind state of the art, rather than the usual 10-20) tech. I had a brief stint as a SETA contractor several years ago, during which I learned what a clownshow the acquisition process is. I was supposed to be providing technical expertise and evaluating proposals - but really I was there to justify decisions that had already been made, and to be the "technical guy" that decision makers brought along to meetings to support them :)