The Honorable Michael Cadenazzi was sworn in as the Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy (ASD(IBP)) on September 23, 2025. In this role, he is the principal advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment on industrial base policies and leads the Department of Defense's efforts to develop and maintain the U.S. defense industrial base to ensure a secure supply of materials critical to national security.
Over the past two decades, Mr. Cadenazzi has served as a serial entrepreneur and consultant with experience in managing and addressing challenging issues across the aerospace & defense sector. He has launched multiple defense industry services and technology start-ups across the signals intelligence, program analysis, data analytics, and market assessment and strategy sectors, and executed two successful transfers of business ownership. His extensive sector experience includes work from the space to undersea domains and from aircraft and munitions to armor, weapons, ships, and services. His clients have included domestic and international firms from large prime contractors to all levels in the supply chain. His direct experience spans strategy, mergers & acquisitions, operations, supply chain and organizational transformation.
Prior to his civilian career, Mr. Cadenazzi served for ten years as an active-duty U.S. Navy cryptologic warfare officer. He completed the Cryptologic Division Office Course at Corry Station in Pensacola Florida before his first tour at Naval Communications & Telecommunications Area Master Station (NCTAMS) WESTPAC in Agana, Guam. Following graduate education, he was assigned to the staff of Commander, U.S. Navy SIXTH Fleet in Gaeta Italy. He completed his military service on the staff of U.S. Naval Forces Europe in London, the United Kingdom.
Mr. Cadenazzi holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Tulane University and a master’s degree in electrical engineering with an emphasis on RF communications and signals intelligence from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He was commissioned an ensign in 1995 through the Tulane Naval Reserve Officer Corps (NROTC) program.
I was fortunate to have attended NPS to obtain a master’s degree in electrical engineering. It was a fantastic experience with tremendous instructors and great colleagues from all the Services.
While I’m not currently doing actual engineering in my current position as Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy, I find that thinking about challenges from an engineering mindset helps the organization prioritize and take action in a methodical, planned fashion.
It also helps me address situations with the ‘five ‘why’s’ of engineering – asking ‘why’ five or more times helps me peel away symptoms and uncover fundamental issues.
The NPS network is fantastic. It never ceases to amaze me when I find a shared connection – we can approach things from a common background, which aids in understanding.
For me, the most enduring aspect of my electrical engineering education at NPS wasn't just the deep technical knowledge, though that was certainly world-class. It was the relentless focus on applying that knowledge to real-world, operational challenges.
In a typical engineering program, you might study signal processing in a purely theoretical way. At NPS, you're studying it in the context of a specific radar system on a specific platform, with a professor who has likely been involved in its development or deployment. You're not just learning the 'what'; you're learning the 'so what' for the warfighter. That mindset—that constant drive to connect the technical to the tactical—has been invaluable in every role I've held, whether in uniform, in a major defense corporation, or in a leadership position within the defense ecosystem.
First, it’s recognizing the challenge. That challenge as represented by the Chinese Communist Party is unlike any our nation has faced since we fought the British Empire in the Revolutionary War.
The Chinese have massive manufacturing capabilities and are already exercising surging their industry to wartime production. With their civil-military fusion laws, almost all their capability is dual-use. Their technology is as good as ours in many cases – and in some, probably better.
Second, it’s taking action now to revitalize our defense industrial base. 30 years of under-investment and outsourcing means the DIB provides the world’s best systems and weapons, but not at the scale and speed we need.
Fortunately, this Administration and Department have taken decisive action in reforming our acquisition system and setting stable demand signals to industry.
But we need a whole of nation approach to revitalizing our defense industrial base. This is a non-partisan issue, and I’m very encouraged by the way Congress has been approaching it in just that way.
The traditional defense acquisition process, for all its strengths in ensuring rigor and accountability, was not designed for the speed of modern technology or the urgency of the current strategic environment.
NPS can help break that mold and serve as an engine for acquisition reform. It can act as a trusted, neutral 'sandbox' where innovation can happen at a much faster pace.
In a way, NPS is a hub for de-risking technology. An industry partner, from a major prime contractor down to a small startup, can bring a promising but unproven technology to NPS. Here, in a classified, operationally relevant environment, my fellow students—active-duty officers—can put that tech through its paces.
They can integrate it into their research, test its limits, and provide immediate, candid feedback. This process rapidly validates concepts and weeds out non-starters, all before a formal Program of Record ever must spend a dollar.
NPS can also be a crucible for requirements definition. One of the biggest hurdles in acquisition is translating an operational need into a technical requirement. Often, by the time a system is fielded, the original need has evolved. At NPS, you have the warfighter, the engineer, and the academic in the same room. A student can articulate a problem they just faced on deployment, and a professor and industry partner can immediately start whiteboarding a potential solution.
My time in the startup world was a crash course in speed, agility, and the relentless pursuit of delivering value to the user now. The defense world values rigor, reliability, and scale. The magic happens when you blend the best of both, and that’s where entities like NPS spinouts, backed by venture capital, can become powerful accelerators.
From the startup perspective, there are two key concepts we can leverage: the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and the portfolio approach.
First, the MVP. In Silicon Valley, you would never spend five years and billions of dollars building a product in isolation before showing it to a customer. Instead, you build a Minimum Viable Product—the most basic version that solves a core problem—and get it into users' hands immediately. You embrace their feedback, you iterate, and you improve. This creates a tight loop between the developer and the end-user.
Now, translate that to defense. Imagine an NPS project that develops a novel algorithm for unmanned systems. The traditional path is a long, arduous journey through the acquisition system. The startup path is to create a spinout company—let's call it 'NPS-SpinCo'—that takes that algorithm and builds a 'Minimum Viable Capability.' Maybe it’s a simple software plug-in for an existing system. 'NPS-SpinCo,' funded by a venture firm that understands the defense landscape, isn't aiming for the perfect, gold-plated solution. It's aiming to get a 70% solution into the hands of a warfighter in the field or at an exercise in months, not years. The feedback from that warfighter is then fed directly back into the development sprint, and the product evolves in real-time based on actual operational needs. This is how you outpace the threat.
Second, the portfolio approach. Venture capital firms don't bet on a single horse. They invest in a portfolio of promising companies, knowing that some will fail, but the ones that succeed will deliver transformative returns. The DoW, by contrast, has traditionally been forced to pick a winner very early in the process and commit to a single, monolithic Program of Record. This is inherently risk-averse and slow.
Venture-backed spinouts allow the DoW to adopt a portfolio strategy without fundamentally changing its core acquisition model. By fostering an ecosystem where NPS research can easily spin out, the Department can let venture capital place the bets and assume the early-stage risk on a dozen different approaches to a problem. The DoW can then watch which of these agile companies gains traction, solves the problem most effectively, and finds favor with warfighters. At that point, the Department can make a much more informed decision to acquire the company or scale its solution.
