America’s 250th anniversary should be more than a commemoration. It should be a challenge.
For two and a half centuries, the United States has endured because each generation built what the moment required: ships, railroads, factories, aircraft, semiconductors, satellites, software. American strength comes from turning national purpose into real capability.
I have worn the flag in three different ways. I competed for the United States as an Olympian. I later served as a Navy SEAL. Today, I work with founders building technologies that will shape America’s future security and prosperity.
Those arenas are different, but they teach the same lesson. Winning is not an abstraction. It is preparation, adaptation and execution under pressure. In the pool, no one cared about your plan once the race began. In the teams, no one cared how impressive a technology looked in a briefing; if it failed when the environment got ugly, the bandwidth disappeared or the enemy adapted. The only question was whether it worked.
That standard matters now because America is entering a new era of strategic competition. Artificial intelligence is not simply another software category. It is becoming a foundation for defense, manufacturing, energy, cybersecurity, space, logistics and intelligence. The countries that lead in AI will have faster decision-making, stronger supply chains, more resilient infrastructure and more capable militaries.
Washington appears to understand the stakes. The White House AI Action Plan is organized around accelerating innovation, building American AI infrastructure and leading internationally on AI security. The Pentagon’s 2026 AI strategy calls for becoming an AI-first force. Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced Deal Team Six, an effort to bring private-sector negotiating talent into defense contracting and reduce the delays and cost overruns that too often slow modernization. The Pentagon is also moving forward after reauthorization of the SBIR/STTR programs, America’s seed fund for small-business innovation.
These are welcome signals. The larger test is whether America can connect policy ambition to technological reality.
The next arsenal of democracy will not be built only inside prime contractors or government labs. Much of it will be built by startups. The most important advances in autonomy, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, space systems, advanced manufacturing, energy resilience and software often emerge first in commercial markets. The founders building them do not wait for a 20-year requirements cycle. They ship, test, fail, improve and scale.
The faster those capabilities reach the field, the stronger the deterrent.
This is one thing venture investors see up close that policy debates often miss. The best founders do not begin by asking how to fit into an existing procurement category. They sit with users, learn where old systems break, then build around reality instead of around a slide deck.
That is also how the military should want technology to develop. A useful system is not the one with the most impressive demo, but one a young operator can trust under stress. It is the drone that can be assembled quickly, software that works on imperfect data, a cyber tool that catches an intrusion early, logistics that function when networks are degraded, and energy that keeps a mission alive when the grid cannot.
China has made clear that it sees private-sector technology as an instrument of national power. A CSET report on China’s military-civil fusion analyzed 2,857 AI-related defense contract award notices from 2023 and 2024 and found an emerging role for nontraditional vendors and research institutions in military AI procurement. America should not copy China’s model. Our advantage is different. It comes from free markets, private capital, open competition, world-class universities, risk-taking founders and a culture that still rewards invention.
But that advantage only matters if we use it.
For too long, too many promising American technology companies have treated government work as slow, confusing, or impossible. Too many government buyers have treated startups as interesting but peripheral. That gap is dangerous. If a company can help a warfighter see farther, move faster, defend a network, secure a supply chain, or operate more safely in a contested environment, the acquisition system should make adoption easier, not harder.
This does not mean lowering standards. National security technology must be secure, reliable and accountable. But rigorous does not have to mean slow. Commercial markets have shown that rapid iteration and high standards can coexist. Defense acquisition has to absorb that lesson.
The same applies to capital. Venture capital cannot replace government, and it should not try. But private capital can identify, fund and scale technologies before they fit neatly into a program office. It can take an early risk. It can back founders before consensus forms. It can help turn an idea into a company, and a company into a capability.
That matters in an AI-first world. AI depends on more than models. It requires compute, data infrastructure, energy, chips, sensors, robotics, secure networks and people who understand how to deploy technology in the real world. America’s advantage will come from the full stack, not a single breakthrough.
This is why America’s 250th anniversary is the right moment to think bigger. The country does not need a year of patriotic speeches followed by business as usual. It needs a renewed commitment to building.
Building means modernizing the industrial base, making it easier for the best commercial technologies to reach the military, and treating energy abundance, advanced manufacturing, secure software and space infrastructure as national priorities. It means honoring service not only by thanking veterans, but by giving the next generation of warfighters the tools they need before they need them.
I learned in the Olympics that preparation is invisible until the race begins. I learned in the SEAL teams that technology, training, and execution can decide who comes home. I have learned in venture that America still has the builders required to meet this moment.
The question is whether the country will move quickly enough to back them.
A 250-year-old republic does not stay young by remembering what it built. It stays young by building again.
Larsen Jensen is a combat-decorated U.S. Navy SEAL veteran, two-time Olympic medalist, and Founder of Harpoon Ventures, a venture capital firm with $300 million AUM backing early-stage technology companies. He is also co-Founder of defense-tech company Vector, equipping U.S. and allied forces with next-generation capabilities. He brings mission-driven leadership to founders building the next generation of innovation.