America's Industrial Reboot — A Massive Tech Opportunity (Coatue)
| Author | Sri Viswanath; Armin Kohan (Coatue) |
|---|---|
| Published | February 26, 2025 |
| Format | Report |
| Original | Read the original |
TL;DR — Coatue’s 2025 deck arguing that a consolidated, cost-plus US defense industry has stagnated, and that startups in drones, autonomy, space and nuclear can rebuild it.
A 62-slide deck by Sri Viswanath and Armin Kohan, published on Coatue’s site on February 26, 2025 with a short essay version. It has three sections. Stagnation in Defense opens with defense as the historic source of nuclear technology, space exploration, the internet and GPS, then argues the sector has turned bureaucratic. Its exhibits: the 1993 “Last Supper” dinner at which the Pentagon told contractors to consolidate; the collapse in the number of primes and the rise of defense specialists over commercial suppliers; the “Big 5” (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman) winning about 47% of major contracts; roughly 70% of contracts awarded without competition; prime P/E multiples doubling since 1993; and a comparison of cost-plus and fixed-fee contracting.
Need for Modernization covers China’s lead in highly cited research in areas such as hypersonics, the falling US share of semiconductor fab capacity and dependence on Taiwan, and the changed economics of war seen in Ukraine: a $10 million Abrams tank set against a $400 FPV drone, and cheap missiles draining Israel’s interceptor supply. Opportunity for New Players quotes a January 2025 Department of Defense memo on adopting unmanned systems, and charts falling costs for space launch, GPU training, lidar and robot motors and the growing Space Force budget. It contrasts an “old world” of cost-plus pricing and human-operated equipment with a “new world” of fixed pricing, swarms, clean nuclear power and robotic manufacturing.
The deck closes with a case study of Anduril: founded in 2017, contract growth, R&D spending and fixed-price work, and its selection with General Atomics for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. It notes that venture-backed startups won under 1% of about $550 billion in 2023 DoD, DOE and NASA awards. The last slide lists the hard-tech categories Coatue wants to back, from defense and aerospace to energy, construction and manufacturing, followed by legal disclosures.
What it is: An investment firm’s thesis deck, published as marketing for its own hard-tech investing. Its charts cite public sources, but the selection and framing are an advocate’s. This description comes from viewing the slides in Drive’s previewer; the file could not be downloaded.
Where this came from
- A copy shared on Google Drive.
- Published by Coatue: coatue.com — America’s Industrial Reboot: A Massive Tech Opportunity (February 26, 2025). The page embeds this same Drive file as its PDF.
62 pages. Not held locally: the owner has turned off downloading. The header links the original source.