Defense Tech & Transformation of Modern Conflict

May 2025 

Coming to Terms with the New Realities of the 2020s 

“There are decades,” Lenin once observed, “where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The remark, though characteristically Bolshevik in tone, bears a grim truth for our own age. Since 2020, the rhythm of world affairs has accelerated, not through a cumulative accretion of events but through sudden convulsions that reorder what had once seemed fixed.

We are, I think, witnessing not merely a transition from one international order to another—a passing of the torch from unipolarity to multipolarity, as is often suggested—but the dissolution of the conceptual frameworks which once held global politics in equilibrium. That the world is no longer unipolar is plain enough; but what it has become is less obvious. What emerges is not a new symmetry but a condition of polycentric unease: overlapping sovereignties, intersecting domains of power, and an erosion of the bright line between war and peace.

Ukraine, Gaza, Kashmir —none are singular anomalies. They are flare-points in a world system straining under its own contradictions. This new era is defined not by the balance of power but by the dispersal of influence. Corporations rival states; ideologues rival diplomats; algorithms rival armies. The conditions of stability have not yet found their footing, and it is not certain that they will.

In such a context, the notion of deterrence endures, though it is increasingly abstracted from the realities it once governed. The old equilibrium of gunboats, missiles and men is giving way to something far less tangible: economic coercion, cyber intrusion, narrative disruption. The battlefield is now everywhere—and nowhere. “Peace” becomes a state of perpetual contestation. The German language, ever suited to such subtleties, might call this unfrieden—not war, but the absence of peace.

Institutions, too, falter. The Security Council is paralysed by rivalry; trade frameworks bend under national exigency; the very idea of international law is undermined by selective invocation. We are in need not merely of reforms but of reinvention—an architecture suited not to the twentieth century’s wars of position but to the twenty-first century’s wars of perception and persistence.

And here enters a subject of particular interest to our economic sensibilities: the resurgence of defense technology. Where once investment in armaments was seen as a dismal but necessary burden, today it is reframed as a frontier of innovation. Private capital, having once regarded the sector with suspicion, now floods in—venture capitalists brushing shoulders with generals, algorithms drafted into the service of arms.

Startups, especially those born in the crucible of Silicon Valley, are entering this fray with characteristic élan: software-first, agile, and instinctively dual-use. Their path, however, is not smooth. Governments do not move quickly, and the procurement state is an engine of delay. Success in this realm depends not on speed alone but on stamina, on founders who can navigate the corridors of power as deftly as they write code.

The technologies at hand—autonomous systems, cyber tools, gene editing—are not mere instruments; they are fields of contest. The concept of dual-use, once a marginal concern, now defines the frontier. We inhabit what might be termed a state of double usage—where tools cannot be easily sorted into military or civilian, nor even into manned or unmanned. Arms control under such conditions resembles not treaty-making but a kind of perpetual interpretation.

Ideology, too, is not absent from this maelstrom. If the liberal project wavers, it is not because of a single antagonist but because of erosion from without and within: the confidence of centralized powers, and the weariness of democracies at home. The rise of post-truth politics, of institutional cynicism, and of fashionable nihilisms—be they of the left or right—have sapped the moral confidence which once underpinned Western leadership.

Into this moment of hesitation rushes a paradox: renewed enthusiasm for defense technology. One might be forgiven for detecting in it the familiar scent of recency bias—that tendency of financiers to chase the last disaster with the next bet, as though wisdom could be conjured from momentum. Climate technology, once the darling of Davos and Silicon Valley, found itself orphaned not by economics but by politics—its ambitions suffocated with the stroke of a pen and a change of administration.

Is defense tech merely the next idol, destined for the same altar?

This is not to say that the defense sector is immune to faddism or waste; it is merely to assert that the underlying transformation is real. New vectors—autonomous drones, low-orbit satellites, AI-driven decision loops—are doing to strategy what the printing press did to dogma: flattening hierarchies, redistributing power, and confounding the assumptions of the high command. The cost of action is falling, and with it, the credibility of deterrence as traditionally understood.

The defense sector may not, in the end, become the engine of global growth. But it is no longer an anachronism. Increasingly, it is the crucible where security, sovereignty, and technological innovation converge. The question is not whether this convergence will persist—it will—but whether we will shape its trajectory with foresight, or allow it to shape us by default. To assess the durability and consequences of this trend, we must return to first principles: the nature of conflict, the evolving character of dual-use technologies, and their role in redefining deterrence and power. And to begin, we must examine the nature of power itself. 

The Dynamics of Power and the Foundations of Political Equilibrium

Throughout the history of civilizations, power has been the central mechanism by which social cohesion is achieved and political structures maintained. It is not an abstraction but a lived reality, shaping and being shaped by the institutions that arise to mediate human relationships. At its core, power manifests in three interlocking forms: physical coercion (force), economic influence (wealth), and ideological alignment (persuasion). This tripartite division, recognized as early as the Arthashastra of Kautilya, is not merely a matter of classification—it reflects a profound structural reality embedded in the evolution of states.

Force, the most immediate and visible, arises from the ability to organize violence. It is epitomized by the military hierarchy, the conscription law, and the prison system—tools that translate potential into authority. Yet force alone has always been insufficient. Wealth, derived from the surplus extraction of economic activity, extends power over time. It underwrites armies, sustains bureaucracies, and incentivizes loyalty through patronage. Persuasion, perhaps the most enigmatic of the three, legitimizes both force and wealth by embedding them in shared narratives—be they religious, ideological, or cultural. The priest and the propagandist, no less than the soldier and the financier, are architects of the state.

But these categories do not operate in isolation. Rather, they intersect and reinforce one another within institutional arrangements whose legitimacy rests on their ability to deliver what men seek most: security. By security, we do not mean merely the absence of violence, but the assurance that individual action can proceed within a stable, predictable framework of expectation. This security, in turn, rests on two interdependent foundations: first, the objective distribution of power among actors; second, the subjective consensus regarding that distribution, often codified in law or ritual. When the former shifts and the latter lags behind, the result is systemic disequilibrium. From such disequilibrium emerges the phenomenon we call conflict—not as an aberration, but as a corrective.

This dynamic is neither new nor accidental. It has characterized the cyclical nature of political legitimacy across epochs. The collapse of Poland in the late eighteenth century was not a consequence of internal decay alone, but of external coordination among neighboring powers that recalibrated the geopolitical balance. The Ottoman Empire, which for centuries managed to fuse its military, economic, and ideological bases of power, disintegrated when its legal fiction no longer reflected military reality. It was only in 1923, through the Treaty of Lausanne, that Turkey re-established equilibrium—by aligning recognition with real capability.

Indeed, wars themselves must be understood not merely as destructive episodes, but as revelations of underlying realities. They are the dialectical moments through which the apparent is shattered and the real is affirmed. As Clausewitz observed, war is the continuation of politics by other means—but Quigley would insist that politics, in turn, is the visible surface of deeper social structures and civilizational trajectories.

Moreover, the spatial and temporal dimensions of power cannot be ignored. Throughout history, the ability to project power has been constrained by geography and technology. The reach of Roman legions or British frigates was bounded by logistical endurance. The English Channel did more than frustrate Napoleon and Hitler—it preserved an institutional continuity that altered the course of global history. In the modern era, similar constraints apply. China’s demographic density east of the Heihe–Tengchong Line imposes a spatial asymmetry in its border conflicts. The Himalayas do not merely separate states; they obstruct the sustained conversion of tactical gains into strategic control.

In the interstitial zones of power—those ambiguous regions between great power centers—small states find both opportunity and peril. The survival of Belgium or Switzerland has historically depended less on intrinsic capability than on the indecision or balance among larger powers. These buffer states exist because the surrounding equilibrium permits their existence. When that equilibrium falters, their fate is rarely their own.

Thus, political stability is not a natural state but a negotiated artifact—periodically tested, often violently, by the shifting alignment of force, wealth, and belief. Power, in its essence, is relational and contingent, and its legitimacy is sustained only when institutional forms evolve to reflect underlying transformations. Where that evolution is arrested, conflict becomes inevitable—not as an external disruption, but as a systemic necessity.

Conflict and the Reconfiguration of Power

Students of strategy and conflict will acknowledge that warfare has served not merely as an episodic expression of violence, but as a systemic instrument for the recalibration of political order. It arises not from aberration or failure, but from structural misalignment—between the objective distribution of power and the normative frameworks through which that power is legitimized. To view conflict solely in terms of matériel or tactical doctrine is to misunderstand its essential nature. It is not firepower that determines outcomes, but the dissonance between perception and reality, and the strategic ability to manipulate that dissonance.

This principle is not novel. It finds antecedents in both Western and Eastern traditions—from the dialectical theories of Heraclitus to the strategic formulations of Sunzi. The latter’s dichotomy between cheng (direct force) and chi (indirect method) represents not a tactical curiosity but a civilizational insight: that conflict is won not by brute contest but by disorientation, by the undermining of cohesion, and by the imposition of a new cognitive map upon the adversary. The greatest victories, in this view, are those achieved without battle—when the enemy collapses inwardly, before a single blow is struck.

Such insights were known, if not always articulated, by the imperial strategists of the nineteenth century, who employed diplomacy, financial systems, and cultural institutions to extend dominion in ways far more enduring than open conquest. The structure of British imperial power, for instance, was sustained not merely by naval supremacy, but by the interlocking webs of finance, education, and ideology. The Rhodes Scholarships and the Round Table movement were as much instruments of empire as were gunboats or treaties. Today, their modern equivalents are think tanks, NGOs, and digital influencers. 

The command structures of industrial warfare—hierarchical, rigid, and optimized for mass mobilization—were once adequate to the requirements of total war. But in the post-industrial, information-dense environments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such structures have proven brittle. The victories of the modern era—from the Blitzkrieg’s disruption of Maginot Line certainties to the Israeli raid on Entebbe—were secured not by force concentration, but by speed, deception, and cohesion across distributed networks of action.

These successes illustrate a larger truth: power in the contemporary period lies not in scale alone, but in the capacity to adapt—to process information faster than one’s adversary, to act before the enemy can orient. The OODA loop, often attributed to John Boyd, is not merely a tactical heuristic; it is a structural insight into the metabolism of decision-making in conflict. Those who can outpace their rivals in perception and reaction dominate, not by overwhelming force, but by rendering the opponent’s decision apparatus obsolete.

Conflict, in this light, is not destructive per se—it is diagnostic. It reveals the fractures between inherited legal-normative systems and emergent realities. The First World War did not merely destroy the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires; it exposed the anachronism of their institutions. The Treaty of Versailles, far from ensuring peace, embedded a misalignment between punitive legalism and the shifting distribution of industrial and demographic power in Germany. This misalignment led, inevitably, to renewed catastrophe.

Today, the same structural tensions are resurfacing, albeit in more diffuse and multidimensional forms. The international order established after 1945—underwritten by American industrial dominance, liberal ideology, and the Bretton Woods system—is under challenge. China’s rise, Russia’s reasseration, and the emergence of digital domains have eroded the coherence of a unipolar vision. Yet the institutions—legal, diplomatic, and economic—that structure global governance remain calibrated to a bygone equilibrium.

The result is what might be termed systemic lag: treaties, norms, and assumptions that no longer reflect the operational realities of power. In this context, the return of conflict—whether kinetic, informational, or economic—is not accidental. It is functional. It performs the role of realignment, forcing recognition of changed conditions.

Lucas Kello’s term “unpeace” captures this transitional condition—a strategic environment in which contestation is continuous, attribution ambiguous, and escalation uncertain. Here, the Cold War’s logic of deterrence, built on mutual assured destruction and symmetrical adversaries, provides little guidance. In a world of memetic warfare, economic coercion, and transnational networks, security cannot be guaranteed by dominance alone. It must be secured through resilience—through adaptive systems that can absorb shocks, reconfigure themselves, and maintain continuity amidst disruption.

Such a system does not yet exist. The architecture of global strategy remains anchored to twentieth-century categories, even as the twenty-first century advances with technological acceleration and ideological diffusion. Liberal internationalism, once presumed to be the telos of modernity, now competes with civilizational pluralism. The Western narrative of universal democracy and markets faces credible alternatives that assert sovereignty, hierarchy, and culturally specific values.

Nor should this be viewed simply as decline. It may be, rather, the passage from one civilizational phase to another. As Quigley observed in Tragedy and Hope, civilizations are not static—they evolve through phases of expansion, crisis, and transformation. The key to survival lies not in preserving institutions in amber, but in adapting them to the realities they were meant to manage.

Weapon Systems and the Shifting Architecture of Power

The evolution of weapon systems, far from being a merely technological phenomenon, must be understood as an integral function of the broader civilizational process. Across the trajectory of Western history, military transformations have unfolded not linearly, but cyclically—oscillating between systems predicated on shock and those predicated on missile projection. These cycles, in turn, have reshaped the fundamental structures of political authority, the coherence of social institutions, and the legitimacy of power itself.

In the earliest epochs of human combat—what we may call the paleotechnic era—shock weapons such as the club, spear, and axe predominated. These were tools of immediacy, used in proximity and intimacy, suited not for destruction at a distance but for the direct imposition of control. Yet, around the second millennium B.C., with the diffusion of the bow and the increasing sophistication of projectile systems, missile weapons gained ascendancy. This was not a minor alteration in tactics—it marked a shift in the very character of violence, from coercion to annihilation, from enforcement to disengaged lethality.

This dialectic—between the instruments of control and the instruments of destruction—has recurred across successive civilizations. The reassertion of shock dominance through the rise of heavy cavalry in the late Bronze and Iron Ages reintroduced the imperative of close-quarters combat. The medieval knight, armored and oath-bound, was less a soldier than an institutional expression of a feudal order. Yet that equilibrium was not permanent. The development of gunpowder, followed by rifled artillery and later aerial bombardment, once again shifted the balance toward missile-based systems. By the 20th century, and especially by the time of the Vietnam War, warfare had become almost entirely an exercise in stand-off lethality—a transformation as significant in its sociopolitical consequences as in its battlefield implications.

These transformations were not limited to the battlefield. Each epoch’s dominant weapon system reshaped the architecture of the state. Shock-based systems required hierarchical discipline and social cohesion; they were best suited for empires or feudal orders where control was exercised face-to-face. Missile-based systems, by contrast, extended the frontier of violence, rendering direct rule unnecessary and enabling looser, more networked empires—Roman legions, Mongol archers, and later, imperial navies operating across oceans.

The interaction between military form and political structure is reciprocal and generative. One cannot meaningfully examine the absolutist monarchies of early modern Europe, or the industrial nation-states of the 19th century, without understanding the weapon systems that gave rise to their bureaucracies, their tax structures, and their cultural ideologies of legitimacy. As with the rise of the Blitzkrieg doctrine—which fused mechanization with communications infrastructure—the military revolutions of the past century have always presupposed corresponding innovations in logistics, finance, and political will.

We now stand at the threshold of another such transformation—one not centered on a single revolutionary technology, but on a systemic shift in scale, cost, and dispersion. The advent of unmanned aerial systems—popularly known as drones—represents not merely a new class of weapon, but a new mode of warfare. These systems, when diffused through asymmetrical and decentralized actors, as in the case of the Houthis in Yemen or nonstate formations like Hamas and Hezbollah, impose disproportionate costs on traditional militaries structured for large-scale conflict.

The significance of this shift lies not in its novelty, but in its recurrence. As with the Mongol use of mounted archery or the early use of Greek fire, what matters is not the weapon per se, but the strategy of disruption it enables. These new systems rely less on precision than on persistence; they do not need to defeat a navy—they only need to saturate its sensors, drain its ammunition reserves, and complicate its strategic calculus. A $20,000 drone may provoke a $2 million missile response. Over time, this inversion of cost and effect corrodes the logic of deterrence itself.

The Red Sea theater offers a compelling case study. Iran, acting through its regional proxies, has fused low-cost innovation with strategic ambiguity. It does not seek victory in conventional terms, but exhaustion—an erosion of credibility and readiness among more technologically advanced adversaries. The logic is not Clausewitzian but attritional in the long sense: to make conflict unmanageable, to induce paralysis not through confrontation but through uncertainty.

The consequences for Western power projection are profound. Modern militaries, optimized for short, decisive engagements, find themselves outpaced by adversaries who operate on longer temporal horizons and with radically different political incentives. Where Western states value stability, procedural clarity, and institutional coherence, their adversaries trade in improvisation, ideological fervor, and ambiguity. This is not merely an asymmetry of arms, but of worldview.

What is emerging is a new paradigm of warfare, one that aligns not with the classical model of concentrated state violence, but with a postmodern dispersal of means, ends, and legitimacy. Deterrence, long rooted in rational choice theory and the predictability of mutual cost, now falters against actors who do not fear escalation, who welcome ambiguity, and who seek not victory but influence.

Under such conditions, the nations will reconceptualise not only its arsenals but its assumptions. Power is no longer a function of superior technology alone. It is a function of resilience, adaptability, and the capacity to impose coherence upon complexity. The lesson is not to build the next-generation superweapon, but to construct institutional frameworks capable of operating across multiple temporalities and domains—kinetic, cognitive, economic, and informational.

In every age, the dominant weapon system has shaped the dominant form of civilization. The trireme, the phalanx, the longbow, the dreadnought, the tank, the aircraft carrier—each dictated not just how battles were fought, but how societies organized their economies, legitimized their rulers, and conceived their enemies. Drones and autonomous systems will be no different. The question, as always, is whether the institutions of governance will adapt as quickly as the instruments of destruction.

Dual-Use Technology and the Institutional Dialectic of Power

One of the defining features of advanced civilizations—especially in periods of technological transition—is the increasing ambiguity of their instruments of power. In earlier epochs, tools of war and implements of peace bore distinct and legible markers: the sword belonged to the soldier, the plough to the peasant. But as societies developed more sophisticated institutions and technologies, the boundary between destruction and development, between coercion and cooperation, began to erode. Nowhere is this erosion more visible—or more consequential—than in the domain of dual-use technology.

By dual-use, we refer not merely to artifacts that possess both military and civilian applications, but to a deeper institutional reality: technologies whose utility, significance, and legitimacy cannot be disentangled from the systems—political, ethical, and epistemological—that produce and deploy them. These technologies are defined not only by what they are, but by how and why they are used. In short, they are not simply physical tools, but nodes of power embedded in complex moral and institutional networks.

This is not a modern phenomenon, though its implications have intensified with industrial and post-industrial science. In every phase of civilizational development, there have been technologies that straddled domains—navigation instruments that served both commerce and conquest, printing presses that disseminated scripture and subversion, and railways that undergirded both industrial integration and imperial logistics. But what distinguishes the contemporary moment is not the existence of dual-use technology, but its pervasiveness, its speed of diffusion, and its capacity for concealment.

Take, for instance, the centrifuge. As an object of engineering, it is elegant in simplicity and profound in implication. It can enrich uranium to fuel a hospital or to level a city. The distinction lies not in the object, but in intent—an epistemic variable hidden from immediate view and only partially inferable through behavior. This problem of intent opacity creates what we may call a structural asymmetry: a divergence between the observable characteristics of a system and its underlying strategic significance.

The Manhattan Project marks the modern origin of this dilemma in its most acute form. What began as theoretical physics, pursued in the name of energy and science, quickly became the foundation of global military hegemony. In Oppenheimer’s equation, E=mc² became both salvation and sentence. The institutions of science and the apparatus of war had fused—forever altering the architecture of state power.

In the decades that followed, this fusion deepened. Synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, blockchain protocols, and satellite constellations—each originated within civilian aspirations for medical care, efficiency, trust, or knowledge—but each now stands at the center of the evolving strategic competition among great powers. These systems blur the division between civilian and military, between private enterprise and public command, between national interest and global norms.

And this ambiguity is not incidental. It is structural.

For every breakthrough that enhances medical diagnosis, there exists a corollary that enables population surveillance. For every algorithm that maps logistics, there is another that optimizes missile targeting. DNA sequencing can reunite families—or engineer pathogens. 5G networks may connect rural communities—or map adversarial troop formations through distributed sensor swarms.

The challenge is not merely one of classification but of institutional visibility. Regulatory bodies—whether national export regimes or international arms control frameworks—are built upon binary distinctions: peaceful versus hostile, civilian versus military, legal versus illicit. Dual-use technologies collapse these binaries. They do not reside at the edge of categories; they dissolve them.

This poses not only a practical problem but a philosophical one. Can law constrain what ontology cannot distinguish? Can institutions built for the era of steel and treaties govern a world of code and cryptographic anonymity?

The result is a breakdown of the verification regimes that underpinned the strategic stability of the mid-20th century. During the Cold War, the adversarial symmetry between the United States and the Soviet Union was stabilized by the legibility of weapons systems. An ICBM silo was visible from space. A submarine’s presence was locatable by sonar. Even in deception, there were detectable patterns.

But today, strategic intent may be concealed within a container ship, an agricultural drone, or a software update. Missile systems can be disguised as cargo modules; surveillance networks can masquerade as fitness trackers. Even satellites, once the purview of state monopoly, are now constructed by private actors, launched by commercial vendors, and serve overlapping military and commercial purposes.

This creates what might be termed a triple ambiguity: of form, of function, and of affiliation. A given technology may not only possess ambiguous purpose, but its developers and users may also span jurisdictions and loyalties. A chip designed in Taiwan, manufactured in South Korea, funded by an American venture firm, and deployed in a Chinese product defies the nation-state logic on which traditional arms control rests.

Worse still, states themselves may exploit this ambiguity. By embedding weapons within civilian contexts—port facilities, telecom infrastructure, or health services—they create strategic deception without overt violation. This tactic—what may be called dual-use camouflage—undermines trust and accelerates arms races, for it renders transparency itself a vulnerability.

In such a world, deterrence—once premised on clarity, symmetry, and mutual vulnerability—begins to unravel. The threshold for escalation becomes murky, attribution becomes contested, and the very notion of "war" is diluted into a continuum of contestation: cyber interference, economic sanctions, information manipulation, and deniable sabotage.

Thus, the institutional challenge of dual-use technology is not merely regulatory. It is civilizational. It demands a reconfiguration of how societies govern knowledge, how they define intent, and how they construct systems of trust amidst strategic opacity. To regulate dual-use effectively, one must first reimagine the architecture of governance itself—not around hardware, but around function; not around ownership, but around integration.

While the concept of dual use is not new, its scale, opacity, and systemic entanglement are without historical precedent. For in previous epochs, the instruments of war and peace, of command and commerce, were largely distinct in form and function. The sword and the scythe, the galley and the merchantman, the fortress and the monastery—these represented different institutional orders. But in the 21st century, it is not the difference but the indistinguishability of function that defines the problem. Nowhere is this clearer than in the emergent strategic domains of space, nuclear energy, biochemistry, and artificial cognition.

I. Space: The Sanctuary Becomes a Theater

The domain of outer space—once conceived as a sanctuary of scientific exploration and symbolic aspiration—has increasingly become a contested environment of profound strategic ambiguity. The very systems that enable orbital maintenance and planetary observation—satellites with rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) capability—are also capable of interference, surveillance, and destruction. It is no accident that the same satellite can be deployed to remove debris or to blind an adversary's command-and-control infrastructure. That such duality exists in physical form is not troubling in itself; what is troubling is the absence of institutional clarity in distinguishing intent.

International law, grounded in a Westphalian architecture and constrained by Cold War precedent, lacks the linguistic or procedural tools to categorize dual-use space systems. In times of conflict, the legal fiction collapses: every asset becomes a potential target, every civilian operator an instrument of war. The growing commercialization of space, led by consortia of private actors with global footprints, only exacerbates this fragility. As these entities provide communication backbones and geospatial intelligence, they blur the once-clear line between military and non-military infrastructure. The ambiguity surrounding anti-satellite (ASAT) and anti-ballistic missile (ABM) technologies—what might be termed the strategic shell game—demonstrates the degree to which weapon classification itself has become a matter of narrative control, not objective function.

II. The Nuclear Dialectic: Power and Proliferation

Among all dual-use domains, none exemplifies the paradox more starkly than the nuclear. Since the dawn of the atomic age, the capacity to split the atom has represented both the zenith of scientific ambition and the nadir of civilizational dread. The enrichment centrifuge, as a material artifact, contains no inherent malice. Yet its indistinguishability in use—whether for power or for weapons—has rendered it a permanent regulatory dilemma. What has emerged in response is an elaborate latticework of institutional oversight: the IAEA, safeguard protocols, transparency regimes.

Yet even these structures operate under a presumption of good faith, a fragile consensus vulnerable to erosion by geopolitical distrust and technological diffusion. The very success of nuclear energy programs creates the substrate for latent weaponization. This is not simply a technical issue, but an institutional one: a failure to resolve the contradiction between the global demand for energy and the sovereign desire for security.

III. Biology and Chemistry: Life as Instrument

The biological and chemical domains, long associated with medicine and agriculture, are now sites of latent conflict. The rise of synthetic biology—heralded as a revolution in health, materials, and ecological restoration—also carries the capacity to engineer pathogens, customize bioagents, and destabilize populations through invisible vectors. Here the dual-use problem enters its most intimate form: the very substrates of life become tools of power.

Unlike traditional weapons systems, biotechnological tools are often produced by private entities with minimal oversight, driven by market incentives rather than national strategy. Their integration into global supply chains makes regulation exceptionally difficult. Moreover, the institutions tasked with monitoring such developments—public health ministries, bioethics councils, research universities—often operate without a unified security doctrine. In this sense, the biotechnological sphere mirrors the conditions of early gunpowder empires: powerful technologies emerge faster than the systems needed to govern them.

The same is true in the chemical domain, where innovations in manufacturing and data analytics enable the rapid synthesis of previously rare or complex compounds. AI models, designed to discover beneficial molecules, can be redirected—intentionally or not—to identify toxic substances. The line between pharmacology and poison is one of intent, not composition.

IV. Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: The Synthetic Mind in a Human Arena

Artificial Intelligence (AI) introduces a qualitatively different challenge: not simply a tool of execution, but a mechanism of cognition. Here, the dual-use ambiguity is not merely physical, but epistemic. An algorithm designed to optimize supply chains can also coordinate drone swarms. A machine learning model that identifies tumors may, in parallel form, detect concealed military assets. The divide between civilian and military, in such cases, is an abstraction of context.

The most consequential debates revolve around autonomy in lethal systems—manned versus unmanned targeting, human-in-the-loop versus machine-decision frameworks. But the deeper issue lies in the systemic integration of AI across domains, where applications cannot be segregated into neat silos. The very nature of learning systems is to generalize; thus, suppression in one sphere leads to innovation in another. The diffusion of AI expertise across academia, startups, and global cloud infrastructure makes comprehensive control not merely difficult but structurally implausible.

The strategic imperative for the modern era is not to eliminate dual-use ambiguity—an impossibility—but to navigate it with moral clarity and institutional sophistication. This will require a recalibration of arms control, export regulation, and research governance. It will demand new forms of public-private coordination, new ethical paradigms for innovation, and—above all—a willingness to confront uncertainty without exploiting it.

China’s Rise and Proliferation of Low Cost Dual Use Technology

The balance of power between civilizations has historically hinged not solely on military strength or ideological clarity, but on the capacity to harness and apply the instrumentalities of power—particularly technology, organized knowledge, and the institutions that govern their deployment. In this context, the contemporary rise of China represents not merely a regional shift but a significant reconfiguration of the global technostructure: the interlinked systems of innovation, production, and civil-military integration that shape a civilization’s ability to influence global outcomes.

The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s signaled a deeper transformation. More than a monetary event, it marked the end of the post-war consensus that subordinated private capital to national economic planning for the sake of stability. What followed—market deregulation, global capital flows, and increasing technological diffusion—enabled the relocation of industrial capacity from the Atlantic core to emerging economies. Among the beneficiaries of this shift, China seized a historic opportunity.

Under Deng Xiaoping, China transitioned from a closed, centrally planned economy to a more open and market-oriented system—while preserving centralized political authority. This hybrid model has allowed China to adopt the productive mechanisms of global capitalism, even as it maintains distinctive governance and regulatory norms.

A key aspect of this development has been China’s civil-military integration strategy, wherein technological development serves both economic and defense purposes. Initiatives such as Made in China 2025 exemplify this approach, directing substantial national investment—estimated to exceed $250 billion—into critical dual-use sectors: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cyber capabilities, space, and autonomous systems.

This fusion of civil and defense domains stands in contrast to traditional Western models, which tend to maintain clearer institutional separation. It also revives elements of earlier centralized technocracies, in which long-term planning and unified command were seen as essential for national development.

To Chinese leadership, technological self-reliance is more than an economic goal—it is viewed as a strategic necessity and a means of ensuring national dignity and security. Historical narratives of technological backwardness during the 19th and early 20th centuries continue to inform policy, framing innovation as both a corrective and a symbol of national rejuvenation.

In pursuit of this goal, China has deployed a multi-faceted technology acquisition strategy, combining legitimate means—such as foreign direct investment, education, and R&D partnerships—with more contested methods, including industrial espionage and opaque technology transfers. This blend of statecraft and innovation policy reflects a pragmatic approach to global competition.

In the post-Cold War world—once characterized by U.S.-led unipolarity and liberal institutionalism—a more complex, multipolar order is now emerging. Here, China’s model of state-directed capitalism and technological nationalism stands as an alternative, though not necessarily a challenger, to liberal democratic governance. Unlike the Soviet Union, China does not currently seek ideological export, but rather aims to achieve global relevance through economic influence, technological leadership, and institutional presence.

One characteristic feature of this ascent is the blurring of lines between public and private actors. In China’s ecosystem, corporations, academic institutions, and defense entities operate within a shared strategic framework. This interwoven structure can create challenges for international regulatory frameworks, particularly in areas such as export control enforcement and technology transfer. Fragmentation among domestic oversight agencies further complicates matters, inadvertently enabling sensitive technologies to flow through complex intermediary networks.

China’s rise as the world’s leading manufacturing hub has also yielded significant benefits for global consumers—democratizing access to technology, including smartphones, which now reach over 85% of the global population. At the same time, it has accelerated the diffusion of low-cost, dual-use technologies that may empower actors engaged in asymmetric warfare or cyber operations, increasing the urgency for responsible innovation and international coordination.

From a governance perspective, China’s model of technocratic long-term planning has drawn attention, especially in contrast to the political volatility in some Western democracies. The return of populist leadership, such as that of former President Trump in the U.S., and growing political fragmentation in Europe, has prompted debates about the efficacy and resilience of democratic institutions in a time of global uncertainty.

In response, Western nations appear to be reassessing the role of the state in technological leadership, with renewed emphasis on strategic innovation, defense technologies, and industrial policy. The rise of Defense Tech and the increasing support for sovereign technology ecosystems reflect this evolving consensus. The objective is not merely to compete, but to preserve the normative foundations of the liberal international order—by adapting institutions to meet 21st-century challenges.

China’s trajectory offers both lessons and imperatives. Its approach to innovation, civil-military integration, and global economic positioning reflects a coherent and determined strategy. The challenge for the West is not to mimic this model, but to revitalize its own institutional core—balancing openness with strategic autonomy, and reaffirming the values that have historically underpinned its strength.

Defense Technology and the Institutional Transformation of Modern Conflict

Throughout the history of civilizations, transformations in the instruments of warfare have not merely altered the conduct of battle; they have precipitated systemic reorganizations of political and economic life. In every epoch—from the phalanx to the longbow, from the trireme to the dreadnought—the emergence of new military technologies has required the adaptation, and often the reinvention, of the institutions that mediate power. We are today witnessing the early stages of such a transformation—a reconstitution of strategic authority catalyzed by the rise of defense technology as both a domain of capital investment and a locus of national survival.

This transformation has been accelerated not by technological determinism, but by the resurgence of geopolitical volatility. Ukraine conflict, China’s assertive reconfiguration of its periphery, and the emergence of multi-front asymmetrical conflict in the Middle East have each underscored a structural truth: that state defense, far from being an auxiliary concern of states, is the very architecture upon which sovereignty rests. In such a world, defense is no longer merely a bureaucratic function of governments but a domain of innovation, capital, and narrative. It has become, once again, a primary arena in the contest for civilizational endurance.

At the center of this reconfiguration lies a paradox. While the logic of globalization encouraged the diffusion of industrial capability and the erosion of strategic borders, the logic of deterrence requires localization, self-reliance, and bounded trust. Hence, we observe a fragmentation of defense markets: nations are prioritizing domestic champions, constraining cross-border scalability, and fostering autarky in strategic sectors such as cyber, drones, and AI. The result is a return to a pre-liberal structure of economic sovereignty—where control over industrial capacity is no longer the residue of national power but its predicate.

This phenomenon is not without historical parallel. The post-Jutland decline of the British Navy—once the keystone of global order—illustrates how a failure to align military capability with strategic reality can mark the inflection point of civilizational decline. So too today: the lesson of Ukraine’s verticalized drone production is not about scale but about institutional flexibility—the ability to innovate, integrate, and deploy under duress. This is the essential character of strategic vitality.

And yet, despite its strategic salience, the defense innovation pipeline remains encumbered by institutional lag. The procurement apparatus—designed for the era of bureaucratic permanence and predictable budgeting—is ill-suited to the tempos and uncertainties of contemporary innovation. The typical defense startup, unlike its commercial counterpart, confronts a 3-to-5-year interregnum between prototype and program of record. During this interval—the so-called “valley of death”—the burden of financial endurance falls not on the state, but on the venture capitalists who, in a peculiar inversion of roles, now subsidize public readiness through private risk.

This structural mismatch is compounded by an epistemological divide: in defense procurement, the buyer is seldom the user. This bifurcation—between those who define requirements and those who experience conflict—creates an informational lag that distorts demand signals, prolongs feedback loops, and insulates incumbents. In contrast to commercial markets, where price and adoption reflect need, defense markets reflect inertia. The consequence is institutional sclerosis masked as procedural due diligence.

Nevertheless, capital is beginning to awaken. From $16 billion in 2019 to $40 billion in 2024, venture investment in defense technology has surged—not merely in pursuit of financial returns, but as an act of strategic engagement. What draws investors is not short-term revenue, but long-duration relevance. The logic of deterrence—long dismissed as a relic of Cold War theology—is returning as an investment thesis. For in a world where the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of innovation, defense becomes not just a necessity, but an opportunity.

Yet challenges remain. The financial architecture of venture capital—optimized for low-CAPEX, high-multiple software plays—is poorly matched to the capital intensity and regulatory drag of defense hardware. A startup building a next-generation propulsion system or a hybrid drone platform may require $200 million before achieving scale. And while software companies like Palantir have demonstrated the scalability of data-driven systems, hardware firms such as Anduril reveal the limits of outsourcing and modularity in the face of geopolitical supply chain fragility.

In response, the most resilient firms are embracing hybridity: combining sensors, algorithms, and deployable platforms to deliver asymmetric advantages. These firms do not sell products; they deliver capabilities. Their unit of analysis is not the device, but the operational effect. And increasingly, their success depends not on technological superiority alone, but on their ability to integrate into the institutional bloodstream of the defense ecosystem—to earn trust, establish credibility, and navigate the bureaucratic arcana that defines access to scalable revenue.

Beneath these institutional dynamics lies a deeper transformation: the very nature of warfare is shifting. The rise of autonomous systems and AI-driven platforms has introduced a cost asymmetry unprecedented in the history of conflict. Where once power resided in mass, it now resides in multiplicity. A $100 drone can provoke a multi-million dollar intercept. A decentralized swarm can overwhelm centralized defenses. In such a world, victory lies not in domination but in disruption.

The implications are not merely tactical. For as the instruments of war become more autonomous, more dispersed, and more ambiguous in purpose, the institutions tasked with governing their use must evolve—or risk irrelevance. The erosion of the U.S. defense industrial base, the collapse of public R&D investment, and the over-reliance on venture subsidies point to a structural misalignment between strategic necessity and institutional capacity.

For in the final analysis, the question is not whether we will develop the next generation of defense technologies. The question is whether we will develop the institutional foresight to deploy them with wisdom. The winners of the coming era will not be those who build the most advanced weapons, but those who integrate innovation into a coherent system of purpose—who align capital, command, and code to preserve peace not through illusion, but through preparedness.