Verbica: As the Pentagon Re-frames Its Rigor, So Too Should America's Schools and Congress
The Californer/10353173

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Californer -- Congressional candidate Peter Coe Verbica today released a policy statement calling on Congress to extend the Pentagon's ongoing "warrior ethos" reforms upstream into K-12 and university education, arguing that the technical talent the Department of Defense needs has to be grown in American classrooms long before it reaches a recruiter or a contracting office.

"The courage and sacrifice of America's servicemembers remain the foundation of our national defense," Verbica said. "But modern warfare increasingly rewards innovation, software, electronics, and engineering. The Pentagon has already recognized that the technical workforce needs a warrior ethos of its own. Congress's job now is to make sure the classrooms feeding that workforce are up to the task."

Verbica was careful to frame the proposal as additive rather than a substitute for traditional readiness. Nothing in it diminishes the importance of physical readiness, discipline, or combat leadership, he said; the challenge is that tomorrow's military must combine those enduring virtues with world-class technical capability.

The Department of Defense is already moving in this direction. In November 2025, Deputy Secretary Stephen Feinberg directed a transformation of the defense acquisition system built explicitly around instilling a warrior ethos in the acquisition workforce, prioritizing speed, accountability, and mission outcomes over procedural compliance. Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the acquisition corps needs personnel who are "competent, qualified, agile, professional, aggressive, innovative, risk-taking, apolitical" — the same traits historically associated with warfighters. The Defense Civilian Training Corps, a scholarship-for-service program launched in 2023 and now operating at institutions including Purdue, Virginia Tech, and the University of Arizona, is the concrete vehicle built to carry that mindset into the acquisition workforce before graduates ever arrive at the Pentagon.

"Secretary Hegseth and Deputy Secretary Feinberg deserve credit for recognizing that acquisition professionals need the same competence and urgency we expect of warfighters," Verbica said. "That reform is right, and it's already underway. But DCTC currently reaches a handful of campuses. The problem starts much earlier than college — it starts in classrooms that have drifted away from rigorous math, science, and engineering instruction. Congress needs to fund and scale this effort so it reaches far more students, far earlier, not leave it as a boutique pilot program."

Recent research underscores the importance of strengthening America's technical talent pipeline. RAND Corporation researchers analyzing two decades of LinkedIn workforce records found that, during the period they examined, the Department of Defense attracted a substantially smaller share of technical hires from top-ranked computer science programs than leading technology firms — roughly 20 percent of DOD tech hires between 1998 and 2021 held degrees from top-ranked schools, versus more than 60 percent at major technology firms. The same study found the defense workforce loses far more technical talent than it gains, with over 75 percent of technical talent flows moving out of the Department of Defense rather than in. A separate RAND assessment of the Pentagon's commercial technology pipeline concluded that federal research spending alone is no longer enough to preserve America's technological edge over rivals like China, and called for deeper coordination between defense innovation offices and traditional acquisition programs.

The U.S. Army has drawn similar conclusions from history. A recent Army.mil analysis of the original World War II-era Arsenal of Democracy argued that today's defense industrial base has been hollowed out by decades of just-in-time logistics and a sluggish acquisition system, and that rebuilding it will require the same combination of national resolve, workforce mobilization, and rapid industrial innovation that won the last global conflict.

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The government already has proof of concept for pairing capital with innovation, Verbica noted. The CIA's In-Q-Tel, launched in 1999, and the Pentagon's own Defense Innovation Unit, established in 2015, were both built to connect commercial technology firms with national security missions — and both have since become permanent fixtures of the defense-innovation landscape. A 2025 GAO review found DIU has matured through multiple strategic iterations while continuing to move commercial technology into military use, and independent academic research published this year found that companies receiving DIU support saw a significant increase in both the likelihood and size of subsequent Department of Defense contracts.

Verbica pointed to the Pentagon's newly established Economic Defense Unit as a further step in the same direction. The DIU helps connect commercial innovation to military needs; the EDU, created this year under Deputy Secretary Feinberg to coordinate America's economic competition versus China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, is intended to integrate broader economic tools — including capital, procurement, and industrial strategy — into national defense. In Verbica's view, Congress should give the EDU a statutory foundation so it outlasts any single administration, paired with the workforce and educational investments that will determine whether that capital has anyone qualified to put it to work.

Verbica pointed to the growing importance of autonomous systems, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing in modern conflicts, arguing that America's long-term security depends on maintaining leadership in these fields.

His proposal calls for stronger partnerships among universities, community colleges, manufacturers, venture-backed technology firms, and the Department of Defense to accelerate innovation and strengthen the nation's defense industrial base.

The technical talent pipeline, Verbica argued, cannot be separated from what is happening inside the classroom. Capital and contracts are only half the equation; America ultimately competes through the quality of its workforce. Strengthening math, science, engineering, literacy, and problem-solving skills is therefore not simply an educational priority — it is a national security priority, and the talent pool this effort depends on is built in classrooms.

"The next Arsenal of Democracy will be built not only in shipyards and training grounds, but also in laboratories, machine shops, semiconductor fabs, and engineering classrooms," Verbica said. "America's greatest strategic asset has always been the ingenuity of its people."

Verbica argued that two wartime allies offer the clearest evidence of what this model looks like in practice. Ukraine's experience illustrates how rapid feedback between operators and engineers can accelerate adaptation under wartime conditions, a cycle now being studied by the U.S. Army and NATO for lessons applicable to acquisition reform. Israel has built a parallel advantage through its military-to-venture pipeline: elite technical units such as 8200 recruit teenagers through rigorous math and cryptography screening, train them on live intelligence problems, and have become one important contributor to Israel's broader technology ecosystem, alongside universities, technology-transfer offices, and venture firms organized to convert that training into companies.

Ukraine and Israel demonstrate the innovation-culture side of the equation, according to the policy statement — one showing what speed looks like when engineers and operators are one phone call apart, the other showing what a talent pipeline looks like when a nation's schools, military, and capital markets are aligned. Neither model works in isolation. It takes capital ready to back what innovators build, a culture that rewards speed over paperwork, and an education system rigorous enough to produce the innovators in the first place. The piece still missing in the American system, the statement argues, is the one inside the nation's own classrooms — and until that is fixed, the country will keep relying excessively on imported talent while failing to develop more of our own.

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"Talent without capital remains an idea. Capital without talent remains idle," Verbica said. "America's competitive advantage has historically come from combining world-class universities, deep venture capital markets, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and an industrial base capable of scaling innovation. Preserving that ecosystem is as important to national defense as any single weapons program."

Verbica pointed to Alfred Lee Loomis as a historical model of what that combination can produce under pressure. A Wall Street financier and lawyer, Loomis built a private laboratory at his Tuxedo Park estate in the 1930s, funded early microwave radar research out of his own pocket, and became a driving force behind the founding of the MIT Radiation Laboratory, which developed radar systems credited with helping turn the tide of the Second World War. "Loomis wasn't a general or a career scientist. He was a financier who understood that capital, deployed with urgency behind the right people, could change the outcome of a war," Verbica said. "That's the tradition we need to revive — not just in a research lab, but in classrooms across the country."

Verbica closed by framing the stakes in terms of what has always set the United States apart: not low-cost labor or centralized planning, but the ability to connect ideas, capital, entrepreneurship, and manufacturing faster than any competitor. National defense, he argued, should strengthen that advantage rather than bypass it.

"The next Manhattan Project will not begin with a laboratory," Verbica said. "It will begin with a fourth-grade classroom where a child first discovers the joy of mathematics."

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Sources cited:
- "Transforming the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System," Office of the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment, November 2025. https://media.defense.gov/2025/Nov/10/2003819439/-1/-1/1/TRANSFORMING-THE-DEFENSE-ACQUISITION-SYSTEM-INTO-THE-WARFIGHTING-ACQUISITION-SYSTEM-TO-ACCELERATE-FIELDING-OF-URGENTLY-NEEDED-CAPABILITIES-TO-OUR-WARRIORS.PDF
- "How to Foster a Warrior Ethos in the Workforce," Defense One, October 2025. https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/10/how-foster-warrior-ethos-workforce/408776/
- Gehlhaus, Ryseff, and Corrigan, "The Race for U.S. Technical Talent: Can the DOD and DIB Compete?" RAND Corporation / Center for Security and Emerging Technology, 2023. https://www.rand.org/pubs/external_publications/EP70254.html
- "Strengthening the Defense Innovation Ecosystem," RAND Corporation, 2023. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1352-1.html
- "Forging America's 21st Century Defense Industrial Base: Applying Lessons from the Arsenal of Democracy to Modern Great-Power Competition," U.S. Army, 2025. https://www.army.mil/article/288967
- "DOD Officially Launches New Economic Defense Unit to Mesh Military Aims with Global Financial Sway," DefenseScoop, April 2026. https://defensescoop.com/2026/04/10/dod-economic-defense-unit-edu-steve-feinberg-pentagon/
- GAO-25-106856, "Defense Innovation Unit: Actions Needed to Assess Progress and Further Enhance Collaboration," U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2025. https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-106856/index.html
- "Defence Innovation and Procurement Reform: An Empirical Evaluation of the US Defense Innovation Unit," Bruegel Working Paper, 2026. https://www.bruegel.org/working-paper/defence-innovation-and-procurement-reform-empirical-evaluation-us-defense-innovation
- In-Q-Tel background: https://www.iqt.org/
- "Build at Scale, Innovate at the Edge, Close the Feedback Loop Fast: Transforming Acquisition for the Drone Age," Modern War Institute at West Point, 2026. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/build-at-scale-innovate-at-the-edge-close-the-feedback-loop-fast-transforming-acquisition-for-the-drone-age/
- "Israel Mobilizes Tech Talent Through Unit 8200," Bismarck Analysis, 2022. https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/israel-mobilizes-tech-talent-through

(Image source: Grok 2026 with inputs by P. Verbica.)

About Peter Coe Verbica

Peter Coe Verbica holds a Master of Science from MIT, a JD from Santa Clara University School of Law, and a BA from Santa Clara University, and is a graduate of Bellarmine College Preparatory. He is a principal and Managing Director of Silicon Private Wealth®, a fiduciary and Registered Investment Advisor. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Northern California.

Paid for by Verbica for Congress.