For many in industry, today’s scenario is common. A new group of leadership, a renewed pitch for the need for government and industry to collaborate. Today, however, in an era marked by rapid technological advancement, evolving threats, and complex societal challenges, the relationship between industry and government is imperative. From cybersecurity to infrastructure protection, emergency management to artificial intelligence, the public and private sectors are completely interdependent. It’s time to take this opportunity to break through the cultural, bureaucratic, or strategic divides and integrate collaboration to move us forward faster and better.
It is a national imperative that we close this gap.
The Private Sector: First Line of Defense
Over 85% of the nation’s critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector. From financial institutions and telecommunications to power grids and water systems, these industries are on the front lines of both innovation and vulnerability. When ransomware disrupts a hospital, or supply chains grind to a halt, the impacts ripple across the economy and national security landscape.
Industry holds ownership, but also provide the means necessary for our prevention, response, and mitigation, as well as the expertise needed in the event of a disaster – manmade or natural.
Government cannot secure what it does not control. Industry cannot protect what it does not understand about emerging threats. Industry cannot align its resources if it does not know what it’s aligning to.
Only together can we build a fortified, resilient system.
Why Engagement Matters
Parsing through LinkedIn, it’s sad to see the comments on posts about events and other collaborations between government and industry. Reducing information exchange to just “partying” or “junkets” misses the point. You don’t build a relationship overnight. And, you don’t build understanding through the internet. In-person collaboration matters for numerous reasons.
1. Shared Situational Awareness
Threats today are asymmetric, fast-moving, and often transnational. The traditional intelligence pipeline was never designed to include the CEOs of tech companies, manufacturers, or utilities. Yet those leaders need insight to protect their operations—and the nation.
Effective engagement builds a two-way street: the government gains real-time insight into threats affecting private networks, and industry gains clarity on risks that may not yet have hit the headlines. Situational awareness is not a product; it’s a partnership.
2. Policy That Reflects Reality
Good policy requires real-world input. Without engagement, regulations can become disconnected from operational realities, stifling innovation or failing to protect what matters most. Input also helps understand the art of the possible. As clearly stated by the 9/11 Commission report, there was a “failure of imagination” on America’s part—and that can be mitigated with everyone participating. When industry is at the table – not just as an afterthought – governments can craft smarter, more adaptive policies that strengthen security without strangling progress. More importantly, it gets us to the goal faster.
3. Rapid Innovation, Responsibly Applied
Government often lags behind the speed of innovation in sectors like AI, quantum computing, and autonomous systems. Industry brings not only technical expertise but also deployment experience that can shape ethical frameworks, safety standards, and practical use cases.
Engagement ensures that cutting-edge tools are aligned with the nation’s broader goals and avoids unintended vulnerability or worse, harm. We don’t have time to trudge through a 6-month process—we need mechanisms in place so government and industry are working and collaborating side-by-side, real-time, producing results.
4. The Power of Small Business Innovation
We cannot shut small business out.
The arguments for small companies have been made numerous times. Small businesses are started by innovators with great ideas and often, in our field, innovators who have served in government and want to solve a problem. Small businesses are often more agile, risk-tolerant, and mission-driven than their larger counterparts and generate breakthrough technologies in cybersecurity, AI, robotics, bioengineering, and more. Many of the tools used by defense and homeland security agencies today originated in startups and SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) programs.
Government should be looking for ways to find and draw-out the innovators. Those too small to even know about the “maze” of federal acquisition. We must be able to “crowd source” great ideas and companies and support them from day one (faster and better than existing mechanisms). We must stop the unwillingness to reward companies creating solutions to our most pressing challenges.
True engagement must prioritize these innovators—not as subcontractors, but as strategic partners. Their innovations, insights and inventions fundamentally reshape how the government responds to threats, manages crises, and serves the public.
5. Preparedness and Response
From wildfires to pandemics, disasters test the seams of society. Public-private coordination is critical for logistics, communications, and continuity of services. Industry engagement ensures that response plans are realistic, roles are understood, and critical capabilities are not left untapped in moments of crisis.
How to Make It Work
Engagement is not a one-off workshop or quarterly meeting. It’s a culture. It’s a cadence of collaboration.
- Establish consistent, trusted communication channels. These must be secure, but also flexible enough to enable timely collaboration.
- Create shared goals and needs. Whether it’s supply chain resilience or countering disinformation, alignment starts with clarity and frankly, sharing information. Industry can only align and innovate when it knows what government needs.
- Value and leverage nontraditional partners. Small businesses, startups, and nonprofits often hold key insights that legacy systems overlook. Nonprofits curate and collect critical groups of stakeholders that allow government to reach hundreds of interested parties and provide the best path to assuring the best outcome.
- Break down silos. True engagement happens across disciplines – tech, legal, comms, policy – not just at the executive level. Cross-collaboration is critical to imagine the art of the possible and introduce new ways of thinking.
The Risks of Disengagement
Without meaningful collaboration, both sectors suffer:
- Government risks outdated policies, underinformed strategies, increased vulnerability, missed threats, and unintended consequences.
- Industry risks overregulation, reputational damage, and preventable disruptions.
Worse still, our adversaries – nation-states, transnational criminal networks, and cyber actors – will exploit every seam in our lack of collaboration and coordination.
Conclusion: A Homeland and National Security Imperative
Industry engagement with government is essential. It is the connective tissue that enables national resilience, economic vitality, and public trust.
Critically, that engagement must be inclusive of the entire ecosystem—from multinational corporations to the smallest startups. Small businesses are not a side note; they are where tomorrow’s national security solutions are born.
The challenges ahead are too great for any sector to face alone. Through greater collaboration, industry and government can secure America’s future. We just need to do it, today.