Labor Day traditionally marks the unofficial end of summer. In much of the country, beach crowds thin, pools close, and lifeguard stands begin to go empty. Where I live in Florida, water safety doesn’t really have a season. The water is always there.

That means children learn about it remarkably early. Infants and toddlers can be taught survival swimming skills—how to roll onto their backs, float, breathe, and remain there until someone reaches them. Watching a very young child learn to survive in water is both unsettling and remarkable. The lesson comes long before they can understand the danger: when you find yourself in water over your head, knowing what to do matters.

Most of us also have the wrong mental picture of what drowning looks like. Television taught us to expect shouting, splashing, and arms waving desperately above the water. Real drowning is often much quieter. A person struggling to breathe doesn’t have the spare capacity to yell for help. The body’s instinctive response takes over. The victim becomes vertical, with the arms down near the surface, pressing against the water in an attempt to keep the mouth above it. Enormous energy is being expended, but almost none of it produces forward movement.

Then, sometimes remarkably quietly, the person slips beneath the surface.

I’ve been thinking about that image as I listen to companies describe the current federal business environment. Everyone appears to be in the same body of water.

They aren’t.

A K-Shaped Capacity Base

Industry gatherings tend to begin with the same macro story. Defense spending is growing. Munitions production must increase. Shipbuilding must accelerate. New technologies need to reach the field faster. Acquisition reform is intended to compress timelines. The demand signal appears almost overwhelming.

For some companies, it is.

They are swimming remarkably fast. Funding is flowing, contracts are accelerating, and customers are asking for deliveries sooner. In shipbuilding, I’ve heard from suppliers that Electric Boat and Newport News are asking whether planned delivery dates can be moved to the left. Look at the projected shipbuilding workload and it’s easy to understand why. For companies already firmly embedded in those supply chains, the challenge is increasingly one of capacity: people, facilities, equipment, materials, suppliers, and time.

But walk a few booths down the aisle at the same industry conference and you’ll hear a very different story.

Other companies have real customers, real requirements, and apparently real demand, but they’re waiting on an appropriation, reprogramming, contracting action, award, or decision that keeps sliding to the right. They may have engineers they can’t afford to lose, inventory they bought in anticipation of an award, or investments they made because the government’s demand signal seemed unmistakable.

The government experiences another six-month delay as a scheduling problem.

The company experiences those six months as cash.

That’s why I’ve come to think of the federal marketplace as increasingly K-shaped. At one end are companies that can’t produce fast enough. At the other are companies consuming enormous amounts of energy simply staying above water while waiting for promised demand to become funded business.

How Deep Is Your Water?

There’s another problem with describing everyone as swimming in the same federal market: the water isn’t equally deep.

Some companies can put their feet down.

They’ve spent years building a foundation beneath them—programs of record, backlog, contract vehicles, recurring revenue, customer relationships, access to capital, and credibility earned through execution. The water may rise from waist deep to shoulder deep. The current may get stronger. But they can still touch bottom.

That foundation matters enormously during periods of uncertainty.

A new entrant standing a few feet away may be in ten feet of water. It can have extraordinary technology, enthusiastic customers, and a compelling requirement, yet still be living from financing round to financing round or award to award. A contracting delay that is irritating to the established supplier can be existential to the newcomer.

Same market. Same government. Very different depth.

We sometimes mistake this for swimming ability. Established companies may indeed be better at navigating government. Experience matters. Relationships matter. Understanding how money moves matters. But it’s also easier to look like a strong swimmer when you’re standing on $500 million of backlog.

Conversely, a young company furiously trying to remain afloat doesn’t necessarily have a business-development problem. It may have a runway problem caused by the enormous distance between government interest and government obligation.

Someone Is Moving the Lane Lines

As if the current weren’t complicated enough, the rules defining who competes where are changing too.

The Small Business Administration recently proposed a substantial overhaul of federal small-business size standards. SBA estimates the changes would add roughly 114,000 employer firms to the universe considered small businesses. In shipbuilding, one of the more dramatic examples, the proposed employee threshold would rise from 1,300 to 2,300.

There is a reasonable policy argument behind this. Growing companies shouldn’t necessarily lose access to opportunities intended to help them scale simply because they’ve become successful.

But consider what the change looks like from the other end of the pool.

A 40-person, 100-person, or 300-person company trying to break into the federal market may increasingly find itself competing for “small business” opportunities against companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees. Those larger firms may bring mature capture teams, established contract vehicles, deeper balance sheets, more past performance, and far greater ability to absorb delays.

Expanding the definition of small business may create more companies eligible to compete. It doesn’t necessarily create more opportunity for the smallest among them.

If you make the shallow end bigger, you haven’t necessarily made it shallower. You’ve put more swimmers in it—and some of them are much stronger.

For the traditional small business and particularly the new entrant, the playing field may have shifted again.

Waiting for the Wave

Then there is the enormous wave the defense industry has been told is coming.

The rhetoric has been extraordinary: a $1.5 trillion defense budget, a larger fleet, Golden Dome, autonomous systems, low-cost interceptors, expanded munitions production, critical minerals, reshoring, supply-chain resilience, and a renewed maritime industrial base.

Companies listened.

• They hired
• They invested
• They retained engineers
• They expanded facilities
• They carried inventory
• They pursued opportunities longer than they otherwise might have

Some borrowed money or raised additional capital because the demand signal coming from Washington seemed impossible to miss.

But a $1.5 trillion defense topline isn’t $1.5 trillion arriving at industry.

A budget request isn’t an appropriation. An appropriation isn’t an obligation. And an obligation doesn’t become revenue until it eventually reaches somebody’s contract.

You can’t make payroll with a topline.

Federal money has to move through authorization, appropriation, allocation, sometimes reprogramming, acquisition strategy, contracting, award, and obligation before the impressive number appearing in a speech or budget document becomes a purchase order.

Many companies took the bait on the rhetoric. They positioned themselves for a wave that hasn’t materialized on the timetable they expected.

Yet here’s what makes the current environment so unusual: for some companies, the wave really is arriving.

Shipbuilding may be the clearest example. Future workload charts show extraordinary demand ahead, and major yards are already signaling suppliers that they need material earlier. A supplier can therefore face the peculiar circumstance of being cash-starved today while its largest customer tells it to prepare for substantially more production tomorrow.

Both things can be true.

That’s the K-shaped capacity base.

Activity Isn’t The Forward Motion

There’s another lesson in understanding what drowning actually looks like.

A drowning person is working incredibly hard.

The problem isn’t effort. The problem is that nearly all that effort is being consumed by survival rather than forward movement.

Federal companies can look remarkably similar.

When business gets difficult, activity often increases.

• More conferences
• More meetings
• More proposals
• More demonstrations
• More congressional outreach
• More follow-ups
• More pipeline reviews
• More conversations about opportunities that remain perpetually six months away

Everyone is busy—but busy isn’t the same as moving.

A swimmer converts effort into distance. A federal business ultimately has to convert activity into funded requirements, executable contracting pathways, obligated dollars, and revenue.

There are certainly times when treading water is the right decision. A reprogramming can be approved. An appropriation can finally arrive. A delayed award can suddenly move. Today’s cash-starved supplier may find itself scrambling to meet accelerated demand six months from now.

The executive challenge is knowing the difference between patiently holding position and quietly exhausting the company.

What Are You Spending Your Oxygen On?

• Cash is oxygen
• Executive attention is oxygen
• Engineering talent is oxygen
• Investor patience is oxygen
• Customer credibility and political capital are oxygen
• Capital expansion is oxygen

All are finite.

Every month spent waiting for an undefined contracting action consumes some of them. So does every pursuit that remains alive primarily because nobody wants to acknowledge how much has already been invested in it.

The goal isn’t simply to remain above water.
It’s to spend that oxygen getting somewhere.

That requires executives to periodically ask three questions:

1. How deep is the water?
2. How strong is the current?
3. And are we actually moving?

If your feet are planted on years of bedrock work, you may have the luxury of waiting for the wave. If you’re swimming, you need evidence that your effort is producing distance. And if every ounce of energy is going into keeping your mouth above water, another conference, another meeting, or another encouraging customer conversation isn’t necessarily progress.

• Sometimes the answer is to swim harder
• Sometimes it’s to change direction
• Sometimes it’s to get into shallower water

Grab The LifeRing

For those feeling the strain right now, recognizing that you’re treading water doesn’t mean the opportunity is lost. Sometimes you need something to hold onto long enough to recover your energy and decide where to swim next. Three things can help.

Protect your oxygen. Decide what you will no longer fund on hope alone. Put dates and evidence against the opportunities consuming cash and talent. What government action must occur next? Who owns it? When should it happen? If those things repeatedly fail to materialize, conserve the oxygen. You don’t have to abandon the market to stop financing every promise made inside it.

Swim across the current. A swimmer caught in a rip current is taught not to exhaust himself fighting directly against it, but to swim across the current until he can escape its pull. Federal businesses sometimes need to do the same thing. If the direct path to the big award is stalled, move laterally. Find the smaller funded contract, subcontract position, adjacent customer, existing vehicle, commercial revenue stream, or partnership with a company already in production. You may still be headed toward the same destination. You’re simply refusing to exhaust yourself fighting a current you don’t control.

Swim toward money, not rhetoric. Follow the dollars backward. Find the appropriation, program element, reprogramming action, contract vehicle, acquisition authority, prime contract, or other executable path that connects government enthusiasm to your revenue. A senior leader saying your capability is urgently needed is valuable. A funded requirement with a contracting path is something different. When oxygen is limited, prioritize the opportunities where you can see the shore.

And sometimes the wave everyone has been promising finally arrives.

But treading water isn’t a strategy.

The dangerous thing is to keep doing it while convincing yourself you’re swimming.

🚨 The Reviews Are Live! 🚨

I’m grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read The Fourth Ring: Navigating the New Circus of Federal Power and share their thoughts. Seeing the first reviews come in has been incredibly rewarding.

After decades of working at the intersection of industry, agencies, and Congress, I wrote “The Fourth Ring” around something I’ve watched evolve firsthand: the way federal power gets influenced is changing.

The traditional three rings — Industry, Agencies, and Congress — still matter.

But there is now a fourth ring influencing the environment in which decisions are made: technology, media, investors, think tanks, advocacy groups, AI, and public opinion.

They may not make the decision. But they can shape the environment, the conversation, and ultimately the conditions surrounding it.

If you’ve already read the book, I’d be grateful if you would take a moment to leave your review on Amazon. Your feedback helps other readers discover the book and means a great deal to me.

Thank you to everyone who has supported this project — and especially to those who have taken the time to read it and share their perspective.