I spent my formative adult years in service to my country—from seventeen to twenty-nine—and the core of how I identify myself remains that of a United States Marine. When I separated, the playbook was clear: suit up for the boardroom. Investment banks and consulting firms were the promised land, where top talent was expected to go.
It was not an easy transition. Few banks at the time viewed a Marine infantry officer's background as preparation for a career in finance. Frustrated by what my peers and I experienced, I helped found Veterans on Wall Street in 2009—a consortium of Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs, led by veterans at each institution and focused on veteran hiring, transition support, and charitable giving. It was the right response for that moment.
That moment has passed.
The world has shifted decisively beneath our feet. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cybersecurity, space, and advanced manufacturing are reordering the global balance of power and creating one of the most acute talent shortfalls in modern economic history. America's strategic competition with near-peer adversaries is no longer primarily a contest of battalions. It is a race to build, deploy, and operate AI systems, autonomous platforms, and secure communications infrastructure faster and more effectively than any rival. The conflicts unfolding today across the Middle East and beyond are shaped as much by autonomous systems, electronic warfare, sensors, and AI-enabled targeting as by boots on the ground.
The organizations building these systems need people who understand not only the technology, but the operational environments in which it will be used. Veterans who have worked in signals intelligence, operated in contested communications environments, or commanded logistics chains in austere conditions bring something no computer science curriculum can replicate: they have been the end user. They understand which failure modes matter.
The numbers are striking. More than 200,000 servicemembers separate from active duty every year. Meanwhile, technology occupations are projected to grow roughly twice as fast as overall employment over the next decade, with particularly acute demand in AI, data science, cloud infrastructure, and information security—roles that remain structurally undersupplied.
Yet the existing Transition Assistance Program (TAP) often functions as a checklist rather than a tailored pathway. Only about 52 percent of servicemembers complete the recommended one-year TAP timeline—a program designed for an economy that has itself moved on from the jobs it was built to funnel veterans into.
The irony is that veterans may be better positioned for the defense-tech economy than almost any other talent cohort—if we invest in the translation layer. Their skill sets naturally lend themselves to roles where human judgment, leadership under uncertainty, and adversarial thinking are most valuable: precisely the roles least susceptible to AI disruption and most critical to national security. They did not just study modern conflict. They fought it.
This is not a resume-translation problem. It is a strategic investment problem.
I learned this in a different context. In October 2004, my battalion deployed in support of what would become Operation Phantom Fury—the Second Battle of Fallujah, the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War. Eight days before the assault, we received an attached Iraqi Army company: 36 men out of an original 146, the rest having deserted. I didn't speak Arabic. My interpreter was a 55-year-old former physics teacher. Their weapons handling was dangerous. Their loyalties were uncertain. The decision before me was whether to lead them into combat or tuck them behind our movement through the city, as my peers planned to do. I led them from the front. And what emerged was an effective fighting unit—clearing houses alongside us, gathering intelligence no one else could access, saving lives on both sides.
The lesson I carried forward: the hardest leadership decisions are rarely about resources or capability. They are about the will to build the bridge between what you have and what the mission demands. That is exactly where we stand today on veteran transition.
The emerging defense-tech sector is already recognizing this. Firms such as Anduril and Shield AI—both co-founded by veterans—are hiring aggressively from military ranks. Organizations like MVA Foundation (MilVet Angels) have backed these up and coming defense tech startups, along with others like Hermeus, Ursa Major, and Cowboy Space Corp—a portfolio that maps almost precisely onto the Pentagon's own list of mission-critical technology priorities. What makes their model distinctive is its structure: all carried interest from exits flows back into a foundation funding veteran transition and entrepreneurship programs, creating a self-reinforcing cycle between investment returns and the next generation of veteran technologists. Palantir has taken a complementary approach through its American Tech Fellowship—a high-intensity program recruiting transitioning veterans and enlisted leaders, requiring no tech degree, and connecting graduates directly with defense tech employers. The core insight mirrors the best veteran transition efforts: the most persistent barrier is translation, and veterans routinely underestimate how directly their military experience maps to the roles AI-era employers can't fill. These are promising efforts. They are not yet at scale.
What would scale look like? Three things.
First, rebuild TAP around defense technology pipelines. The NSCAI and CNAS have argued for years that the program underdelivers, but they frame it as a workforce-quality problem. It is a national security routing problem. Statute already requires counseling to begin twelve months before separation, yet GAO finds 70 percent of servicemembers miss that threshold and commanders routinely waive attendance against their own services' rules. The answer is not another reform package layered onto a $500 million interagency program. The Secretary of War should use existing authority and appropriated dollars to redirect counseling toward critical-technology tracks, strip waiver discretion below the general-officer level, and replace completion rates with twelve- and twenty-four-month placement metrics tied to commanders' evaluations.
Second, fix SkillBridge's throttling problem. More than 25,000 servicemembers participated in fiscal year 2025 across 6,000-plus partners, but GAO's 2024 review found commanders deny or discourage participation because losing someone for 180 days reads as a readiness hit while the national security benefit accrues elsewhere. The Department of War should change how participants are counted against unit manning in their final 180 days, set a service-wide floor on approval rates with denials reviewable above the immediate commander, and require outcome reporting tied to placement in critical-technology sectors. The talent bench exists; the accounting rules are what keep commanders from releasing it.
Third, the private sector must signal that this is a strategic priority, not a corporate social responsibility initiative. Emerging defense tech companies competing for government contracts should be first movers. They have both the operational need and the patriotic case. When I helped found Veterans on Wall Street, the animating insight was that the private sector had to lead—that institutions with resources and relationships had to build the bridge before the government could cross it. The same logic applies now, in a sector with far higher national stakes.
A generation ago, top talent was expected to go into finance and consulting. Today, technology—and America's defense-tech companies—are building the arsenal of democracy for the 21st century. The people who know best how that arsenal must perform are already among us: 200,000 men and women separating from service every year, looking for someone to show them where they fit in the new economy.
The answer is in front of us. We just need the will to build the pipeline.
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