The commission, led by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, offered 10 recommendations that ranged from encouraging tech companies to do business with the Pentagon to modernizing its budgeting documents.

Others say that rather than conceiving multidecade moonshots, as in the Cold War, the Pentagon should learn to quickly draw on existing innovations, as smaller allies have done, and Ukraine is doing.

“The Defense Department set itself up to export technology,” says James “Hondo” Geurts, a former assistant secretary of the Navy and Air Force officer with extensive acquisitions experience. “Now it needs to become a smart importer of technology.”