Amazon and SpaceX--now the two biggest defense contractors... Silicon Valley is sure returning to its military roots.

The fact that SV was divorced from military spending for so long (80s-20s?) was really the anomaly.

Which is to say that instead of leveraging SV, military funding went through the primes.

The Steve Blank piece from Tuesday had a good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887699

tl;dr: a strategic military recognition that relying exclusively on full-custom, military-spec weapon systems is unaffordable (on either a dollar or time-to-develop basis), when your competitor is a vertically-integrated Chinese civilian+military procurement system