Innovating for the Homeland

The first house my wife and I lived in was built in 1918. It was part of the first federal war housing development for shipbuilders at the Newport News Shipyard during World War I. It was a beautiful neighborhood lined with oak trees as old as the houses. Our house was built in 1918 and was a small duplex under the shade of one of those trees. It was a beautiful place to begin a life together. It also had no dishwasher.

Our first year of marriage could be described as a constant battle against the oncoming horde of dishes. We were far too poor at the time to afford to install a dishwasher and doing so would have been difficult given the age of the home. In our second year of marriage, we moved to a Washington DC apartment that had a dishwasher and suddenly found ourselves with some available time that had previously been taken up washing dishes. As we marveled at our new appliance, we wondered how we lived without it before. It wasn’t a case of not knowing what you have until it’s gone but of not knowing what you were missing.

In the United States, we have the defense industrial base. According to CISA:

The Defense Industrial Base Sector is the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development of military weapons, systems, subsystems, and components or parts.

The defense industrial base (DIB) enables the military hardware our forces need to project power beyond our shores and is so vitally important, it is considered a critical infrastructure sector. Companies in the DIB innovate specifically to answer the needs and requirements of warfighters in service of keeping a worldwide military advantage that seeks to make any fight unfair in the US’s favor. In the defense sector, we’ve always had a dishwasher, so we couldn’t imagine life without it. It is so central to our lives that we hardly notice it or question its existence. But there is another area where we have no dishwasher and are losing the battle against the oncoming hordes of dishes. Homeland Security. The US has no Homeland Security Industrial Base (HSIB), and its absence is felt every time the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) needs technology and innovation specific to its mission. The lack of an HSIB leaves our homeland more vulnerable and is an issue that should be rectified through a recognition of the current threats we face.

Built for Counterterrorism

DHS was born in 2002, a product of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, in turn a product of the tragic 9/11 attacks. The manner of DHS’s birth was a mandate to never allow another foreign terrorist attack on US soil again. Disparate parts of the federal government were brought under one roof to create the US’s newest cabinet department. Resources, training, and mission were all focused on the counterterrorism threat and that focus remained for two decades. As the threat of foreign terrorist attacks on the homeland waned (though did not disappear) the geopolitical era where the US found itself was one dominated by great power or near peer competitors like Russia and China. This shift in the threat landscape is not outside the scope of DHS’s authorities or capabilities but it presents a cultural challenge to an organization that was born and built for one specific mission. What it means to secure the US homeland has been evolving for years and the department has been working to keep pace. It does not suffer from a lack of authorities or lack of mission dedication from its workforce. It suffers from a lack of custom-made hardware and software that are commonplace for the defense sector.

New Threats, New Realities

In recent years, the US homeland has become a target for state actor attacks. Russia has openly attacked critical infrastructure kinetically and with cyber weapons during its invasion of Ukraine and liberally used cyberattacks to forward its priorities. A February 13, 2025 report details how Russian cyber actors attacked critical infrastructure in the US, UK, and Canada. For those keeping track at home, that’s an attack on the US homeland, and it’s just one of many. Chinese backed actors made news in November and December of 2024 with the discoveries of their hack of the US telecommunications system (which is also critical infrastructure) and of the US Department of Treasury. These are just the most recent and famous examples. Cyber threats to critical infrastructure go much further and go back years.

Drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) bring deadly fentanyl into the United States killing hundreds of thousands of people. Cocaine trafficking has been fueling cartel violence for decades, but the introduction of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is not constrained by the same supply chain challenges as cocaine, is killing Americans inside our homeland. The fentanyl threat demands a new way of viewing a serious problem and demands innovation to give our homeland security professionals the tools they need.

Across the homeland, other threats are emerging from supply chain vulnerabilities to threats to our economic security. Plainly, what it means to secure the homeland is now multi-dimensional and multi-faceted. Projecting military power around the world is likewise complex, which is why there is an entire industrial base that supports it. As threats and complexities continue to proliferate in an era of great power competition, homeland security needs innovators that are specifically building for the homeland security mission and its requirements.

A Shoe that Doesn’t Fit

DHS has a Directorate for Science and Technology (S&T) that serves as the S&T advisor to the Secretary. It is not a DARPA analog for homeland security and has a laughably small percentage of DARPA’s budget. Often, when DHS has a requirement for technology that is outside of law enforcement channels (i.e. bullet-proof vests), it looks to the DIB. Companies in the DIB are happy to gain a new customer base and resell something they already sold or developed for a defense application giving DHS a capability that may work with some modifications but is at best a 70% solution to the requirement DHS has. While DHS can, and does, get serviceable technology this way, it is missing the critical component of a dedicated national effort to build technology for the challenges and complexities of its mission.

The authority structure of DHS is also more complex than DOD encompassing everything from US Citizenship and Immigration Service to the US Coast Guard. Within these authorities are more than 90 Congressional committees and subcommittees that oversee DHS operations. DHS’s authorities include direct interactions with and the personal data of US persons, which creates a host of issues that DOD nor the Intelligence Community must contend with. These authorities and oversight challenges must be a part of the technology innovation that DHS uses to prosecute its mission. Using or reusing technology built for a defense purpose runs the risk of causing problems within DHS’s authority structure and risks erosion of trust with the American public. One misused drone or cyber tool by DHS would be front page news.

Leaving the technology to address the most prominent threats to our homeland to an industrial base that is designing and building for another mission leaves us with vulnerabilities. An HSIB more closely aligns with the threats that our homeland faces and would bring the right solutions to our homeland security professionals.

Innovating for Mission and Purpose

The economic potential of building for the defense market is immense and this fact is not lost on companies large and small. Building for the homeland security market is fraught with peril. DOD has multiple programs for startup incubation and investment. The Office of Strategic Capital within DOD provides debt financing and investment fund financing for companies that are innovating in technologies in 31 categories. There is no equivalent for homeland security and that is a single example. The closest analog is DHS’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP), which has zero open opportunities as of this writing. The stark contrast between innovation aimed at the defense mission versus the clearly distinct homeland security mission illustrates a disparity that is causing repercussions at home. DHS was built to secure the homeland against a specific threat. Now that we are redefining what homeland security means, we need to redefine what it means to innovate for that mission. We need the realization of what we were missing like doing that first load of dishes in our first DC apartment.

An HSIB does not need to be as sprawling as the DIB, but it does need to provide some level of realistic economic incentive to design and build for the mission. In 2023, then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced an AI Task Force that would:

• Integrate AI into our efforts to enhance the integrity of our supply chains and the broader trade environment.  We will seek to deploy AI to more ably screen cargo, identify the importation of goods produced with forced labor, and manage risk;

• Leverage AI to counter the flow of fentanyl into the United States.  We will explore using this technology to better detect fentanyl shipments, identify and interdict the flow of precursor chemicals around the world, and target for disruption key nodes in the criminal networks;

• Apply AI to digital forensic tools to help identify, locate, and rescue victims of online child sexual exploitation and abuse, and to identify and apprehend the perpetrators of this heinous crime; and

• Working with partners in government, industry, and academia, assess the impact of AI on our ability to secure critical infrastructure.

This direction was given two years ago and the progress against these goals has been minimal. Since that time, DHS S&T had its budget cut by $24 million in 2025 compared to its 2024 appropriation. The bottom line is that technology innovation for the homeland security mission is not viewed as a priority by budget allocators and as a result is not viewed as a priority by innovators. This misalignment on prioritization is out of touch with the realities of threats to our homeland in the face of cyberattacks and threats against critical infrastructure. The mission of securing the homeland against threats is not hard to sell to people that want to build technology for a purpose. Doing so for free is.

DHS needs the kinds of minds that work on defense applications to think about missions like stopping the flow of fentanyl into the US. DHS needs customized, specialized tools, hardware and software, that its officers can use at our airports, borders, territorial waters, and across our critical infrastructure. The homeland will always be vulnerable as long as we force DHS to take what little funding it retains and apply it to technologies that were not built for its mission. Creating opportunities to bring smart and fit for purpose technologies to DHS with privacy and security as core features is a core requirement of security of the homeland. Part of DHS’s mission in 2025 is to secure our innovation ecosystem. The department should also benefit from it.

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Nick Reese is the cofounder and COO of Frontier Foundry and an adjunct professor of emerging technology at NYU. He is a veteran and a former US government policymaker on cyber and technology issues. Visit his LinkedIn here.