When Greg Barbaccia walks into a White House meeting, he carries a résumé that civilian recruiters would not know how to evaluate. An Army veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Barbaccia is now the United States Federal Chief Information Officer, overseeing all technology policy and budget for the entire federal government.
His career arc is, in the language of a conventional hiring process, nearly unrepeatable.
The gap between what veterans have done and what employers understand them to have done was the central subject of a panel discussion at the eMerge Americas 2026 conference in Miami.
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Barbaccia joined Brett Boyd, co-founder and CEO of defense manufacturing software firm Sustainment, and Mark Chase, head of product and engineering at ClearanceJobs, for a conversation moderated by Joe Marino, executive director of Veterans Florida. The panel’s argument was neither sentimental nor ceremonial. It was purely economic.
“Everyone talks about the talent shortages in tech,” Marino said, opening the discussion. “What we don’t talk about enough is that some of the highest performing operators are already trained, already tested, and already leading. They just didn’t come through Silicon Valley.”
The numbers support the premise. A National Institutes of Health study on the psychosocial characteristics of veterans found that vets are nearly twice as likely to be self-employed as their non-veteran counterparts, and are majority owners of roughly 9% of all businesses in the United States.
Congressional testimony from the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University in December 2025 goes further: veteran-owned businesses have an 8.2% lower failure risk than non-veteran peers, 55 to 57% survive at least five years—a rate exceeding the national average—and 98% of veteran entrepreneurs report that skills developed in the military helped them overcome business obstacles.
But the hiring infrastructure that filters candidates before they reach a decision maker was not built to surface any of that.
Lost in (Résumé) Translation
Boyd, a West Point graduate and former Army captain who deployed to Iraq four times, framed the veteran talent question in terms of what the last 20 years of American warfare actually produced.
“We are fighting a very small unit decentralized military operation around the world,” he said, “which means you have a lot of people who are given a lot of responsibility very, very young.”
Boyd argued that the core competency of the modern military, building teams and solving problems in highly difficult and ambiguous environments, is precisely what high-growth startups require. The problem is convincing investors and employers of that before they glance at an MOS number and move on.
Chase, who spent 10 years in the Air Force before joining ClearanceJobs, the largest U.S. network of security-cleared talent, identified the structural mechanism behind the disconnect: applicant tracking software.
These systems, now standard across corporate recruiting, are built to match résumé keywords to job description keywords. A military occupational specialty does not map cleanly onto either. The result, Chase said, is that veteran applications are “arbitrarily screened out” before a human reviewer ever sees them.
Research commissioned by Edelman and the George W. Bush Institute found that 70% of American adults say they do not understand many of the problems faced by veterans, a figure that rises to near-certainty among hiring managers who have never served.
Chase’s proposed remedy was blunt: put veterans inside recruiting teams.
“If we add more veterans in recruiting staff, not just at the startup level, but also at the corporate level,” he said, “I think we’re going to see a lot less friction for that veteran résumé to get to the right person.”
Opportunities in Cybersecurity
Barbaccia identified cybersecurity as the most immediately exploitable opportunity for veteran talent. The latest ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study found a global shortage of 4.8 million cybersecurity workers, a figure that has grown 19% year over year.
The Department of Defense itself is short more than 20,000 cyber professionals, and the commercial sector’s shortfall is estimated to be far larger. The median annual salary for an information security analyst exceeds $120,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Barbaccia argued the fit is structural, not coincidental.
“Cybersecurity is so analogous to a military mission,” he said. “You’ve got to deal with data coming in at all angles. You’re dealing with a very tangible, often human adversary that’s also adaptive. Military operational teams are very good at understanding the enemy and understanding how to adapt their tactics to an advancing adversary.”
Veterans currently make up approximately 13% of the cybersecurity workforce, a share that panelists suggested should be considerably higher given the alignment between military training and the demands of security operations.
Opportunities in Defense Tech
Boyd described a venture capital environment that has shifted in veterans’ favor, though not uniformly. He founded Sustainment in 2020 to aggregate manufacturing suppliers across the United States, making it easier for both defense and commercial procurement teams to find and contract with domestic producers.
Raising money for that category in 2020 was, in his words, “really, really difficult.” The years since have changed the calculus. COVID-19 accelerated a rotation among investors away from consumer app companies and toward infrastructure, physical industry, and national security technology. That shift has made veteran founders—who often understand defense problems from the inside—more legible to capital.
The trend is real. Veteran founders accounted for 8% of new businesses in 2023, up from 5% in 2022, a 60% increase in a single year. Veterans represent 6% of the U.S. adult population, meaning they are starting businesses at a rate disproportionate to their share of the population.
Boyd cautioned, however, that veteran founders who come directly from the military without an intermediate civilian stop often face a steep adjustment.
“It’s actually like your first job out of the military where you’ve got to learn how to speak and how to be and what all the words mean,” he said. He described the more common pathway: veterans who leave service, spend several years at an established company, develop civilian fluency, and then launch their own ventures.
SkillBridge Really is a Bridge
The panel converged on the Department of Defense SkillBridge program as one of the most scalable mechanisms for connecting military talent to civilian employers, with more than 50,000 service members having completed it since 2023.
SkillBridge allows active-duty service members to participate in internships, apprenticeships, and job training with civilian employers during the final 180 days of their military service, while continuing to receive full military pay and benefits.
Panelists were asked to name the single most underrated skill veterans bring to civilian organizations. Chase, Chief of ClearanceJobs, answered: “decision velocity.”
He described the operating conditions in which military personnel routinely make consequential choices: low on time, low on data, high stakes. That capacity, he argued, is not a skill in the conventional sense but a business capability, one that no applicant tracking system will ever detect in an MOS description, and one that high-growth companies, navigating their own ambiguous and high-pressure environments, need badly.
Boyd, returning to the theme of mission, offered the most personal conclusion.
“I need a mission to be motivated and to be excellent,” he said. “I think a lot of veterans are wired like that.”
For veterans and the companies considering hiring them, matching veterans to the right environment is not an act of patriotism. It’s an act of good business judgment.
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