Europe is finally waking up from many decades of naive pacifism. While the continent is loath to give America credit, this is largely where it's due, as Trump has pulled back on blanket security guarantees. Well, that and a major war on its doorstep going on four years now.
That's the thing about delusions. Their upkeep seems free until reality intrudes. And that reality has finally gate-crashed the European continent with all the tact and timing of a drunken sailor. So now what?
"Buy, buy, buy" was what the Danish prime minister declared last year, as she committed another 50 billion kroner to buy weaponry in that year and this. But buy what and from whom? Sadly, there aren't many top European weapon and equipment makers ready, as the continent's defense industry has been starved of investment for thirty years.
As late as 2018, nearly two-thirds of European investors excluded companies involved in conventional weapons production due to ESG considerations, per Eurosif. And this has been going on since the early 1990s.
As always, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now. And this also applies to the tech industry because the next war will depend on it more than ever.
Like drones. They've become the main vector in the war in Ukraine. Fiber-optic cables have covered the battlefield like a spiderweb, and many of the recent advances on the Ukrainian side have been attributed to their superior drone operations.
We need drones in Europe. Lots of them. In all shapes and sizes. Made by European companies, built on open-source platforms, and with local supply chains. And that's exactly what the Danish startup Upteko has been working on for nearly a decade, and is now ready to scale up.
So I invested in Upteko. It's outside my normal, boring invest-in-what-you-know strategy of putting money in Danish SaaS startups, but also not that far away. The future of drones is as much in software as in propulsion. And I know something about that.
But really, it wasn't so much about knowledge as it was motivation. And nobody has brought more of a motivating example to the tech-meets-defense question than Palmer Luckey. His Anduril company is infusing modern weapon-making with the zest and innovation of a Valley startup. It's sorely needed, and deeply inspiring.
Europe needs its own Andurils. Not because it can't also continue to buy systems from the Americans, but because a good ally is self-sufficient, equally inventive, and armed to the teeth with a diverse fleet of awesome, native weapons.