There’s an idea I had when I first started in this space: if you want to work in national security, you’re supposed to fit into a certain box. There’s a traditional path. A traditional résumé. A certain kind of background that makes you look like you “belong” in the room.
After my recent conversation with Jessie Levin from the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) on the Security Clearance Careers Podcast, I walked away thinking we need to throw that box out entirely. Because national security doesn’t just need one type of person.
We need the nerds. The creatives. The people people. The computer people. The big-brain problem solvers. The operators, storytellers, builders, entrepreneurs and the people willing to look at something we’ve been doing the same way for 20 years and ask: Why?
National Security Needs an Entrepreneurial Mindset
When we hear the word “entrepreneur,” it’s easy to picture a startup founder raising money and building the next defense technology company. But entrepreneurship can be much broader than that.
You can be sitting inside a government agency, military unit or defense contractor and still think entrepreneurially. You can identify a problem, question an inefficient process, connect people who should be talking to each other or find a better way to accomplish the mission. You don’t necessarily need to leave the system to change it.
And you certainly don’t need “founder” in your LinkedIn headline to bring an entrepreneurial mindset to national security. This distinction matters because the challenges facing the national security community are too complicated to be solved exclusively by people who have followed the same career paths.
Maybe the Talent We Need Is Already Here
We talk constantly about the national security talent shortage. Where are the cyber professionals? Where are the engineers? How do we recruit the next generation? How do we compete with the commercial sector?
But Levin raised an interesting point: a lot of what the national security community is trying to create or “modernize” already exists in the wild.
There are incredibly talented people throughout civil society who could contribute to national security challenges. The problem may not always be finding them. It may be helping them realize they’re allowed to participate.
The pathways into national security can still feel mercurial and opaque. If you didn’t serve in the military, grow up around the defense community or already understand government contracting, it can be difficult to figure out where you belong.
Imagine what could happen if more people understood that their skills could actually have an impact on the mission. Recruiting talent might suddenly look a lot different.
From “Someone Should Fix This” to “Maybe I Can”
One of my favorite ideas from the conversation was incredibly simple. There are people everywhere who look at national security challenges and think: Someone should fix this. What if more of them instead thought, “maybe I can help fix this.”
Organizations like DEF are helping create communities where people can explore those ideas, meet others working on similar problems and understand that meaningful contributions to national security aren’t exclusively reserved for a small group of “professionals.”
Everyday individuals are already having an impact in spaces that once seemed inaccessible from the outside. We need more of that.
Listen to the full conversation with Jessie Levin from the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum on the Security Clearance Careers Podcast to hear more about defense innovation, nontraditional career pathways and how individuals can make an impact on the national security mission.
