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....