Uncle Sam the sole institutional investor behind a dedicated “national security” fund, run by a dream team of VC heavyweights recruited from venture capital’s epicenter, Sand Hill Road. (Bush White House Science adviser Floyd Kvamme, a senior partner at legendary Kleiner, Perkins would be an obvious choice for coach.) The CIA has already in effect done this with In-Q-Tel, the Silicon Valley venture shop it opened last year. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/inqtel/ Keeping the web safe http://www.safeweb.com/pr_inqtel.html .” Really out-there work often stays in-house, at Sandia or Livermore or one of the other industrial-strength National Laboratories left over from the Cold War. But more typically, a complex set of specs gets jobbed out to one of the remaining handful of defense megacontractors, who undertake delivery of a very tightly specified black box or aircraft or weapons system, for some version of cost-plus. If all this sounds vaguely Industrial Age and socialist, it is—R&D by Five-Year Plan. But virtually all the high-tech weaponry now being tossed at Afghanistan was developed this way. This is also the system that gives you the $400 toilet seat.