USA: US technology procurement in the national security innovation system

Abstract

Despite an influential view of the United States as a neoliberal state with a free market economy, its federal authorities have built the world’s most formidable technology development model based on procurement-driven innovation. Rather than a relatively discrete area of activity in which defence-intensive suppliers interact with security-specific procurers, the procurement system has evolved into a series of hybridised structures in which the lines between public and private, security and commerce, military and civilian have been thoroughly crisscrossed. The chapter concludes that US procurement activism and its entwinement of security and commerce is not an industrial policy, but rather a sui generis phenomenon that has emerged from profoundly strategic goals. While this makes it a powerful element in the national innovation system, it also makes it difficult to emulate or transpose to other settings.