Is The Government Backing Young Startups?

It seems like the Army Secretary putting out this request for defense solutions via YC and going straight to startups instead of traditional procurement is something different and maybe big. I'm curious, what do you think this implies for the startup ecosystem?

And when I read this, I was like, these are problems that if you're already working on, you should probably be excited that there's an audience for. But if you take this as a list of things you should start, my hunch is you're probably too late. And if I think about many of the great companies that I've met through YC, many of them were pioneering new categories, were taking advantage of things that had just become feasible but weren't yet well understood to be big ideas. The irony is we're going back to the future, back to the days where the government was a really big funder and early customer of innovative entrepreneurial technology products. It wasn't always the big primes.