Why We All Need to Think About Defence Now
including cyber, blood donations, the new industrial espionage, and robots fighting robots
I started the latest paid subscribers-only post with this reflection:
“What should I write about? That is the hardest part of keeping up the routine of publishing one long-form piece of writing every week.
It takes a lot of following the news and business news, reading reports about new leadership theories and management ideas, talking to people who walk the walk and not just talk, asking questions about problems and looking for threads of commonalities in what I see and hear.
Still, it can be a challenge to find meaningful things in all the noise...”
It feels appropriate to mention this as AI-written, homogenised slop increasingly drowns out properly researched and thought-through content everywhere. With so many people feeling like they are suddenly thinkers because they feed an LLM prompts, the noise has increased exponentially.
Anyways, what I was thinking about this week is defence. But before I get into that, there was another point from last week’s paid issue I wanted to bring to you, one on burnout and leadership.
“I’m not here to tell you how exactly you and your team should take a break, I’m just here to point out that indifference is often the result of overwhelm – not because of hard work, but too much upheaval and severe uncertainty and a feeling of helplessness or inability to change one’s circumstances.
A few other ways to push your team towards burnout are:
micromanaging them,
operating on a lack of trust and psychological safety,
workflow always focusing on action with no time to think,
a constant sense of urgency,
never giving enough background information or reasons for change/urgency,
lack of empowerment even on small issues,
having to deal with a toxic key customer or a toxic person on the team,
people going over each other’s heads,
no clear direction,
leader regularly flip-flopping on decisions without explanation.
I’m sure you can add yours. And maybe even identify one or two you are occasionally guilty of.”
If you’d like to read more of that issue, or the full issue below, I’d love for you to become a paying subscriber. You’ll get access immediately to other full back issues too. You’ll find the paid tier contains significantly more hands-on, practical advice and deeper analysis.
So, defence. Yes, your newsletter writer here, who has always been in favour of the EU as the most credible conduit of longterm piece on this tiny little continent I call home, and who was slightly traumatised by being right by the Ukrainian border when Russia invaded and the skies suddenly only hosted fighter jets (they are so loud), so your writer here can’t help but keep gobbling up everything about the defence industry.
This would not have been a natural territory for me a few years back. While I have always had a strong interest in geopolitics, anything army or armed conflict related was quite far from my thoughts. But now is not a few years ago.
Saying that the world has changed dramatically has become meaningless. If you pay just the slightest attention to what’s happening outside of your life, you cannot escape how brutal the world has become and how even diplomacy is conducted via open verbal attacks. While both online and real life have felt angrier, more aggressive and unpleasant since the pandemic, we have now moved beyond that.
Whenever I open LinkedIn, all I see are European defence startups. Some posts disparaging them, some hailing them, but for sure, they are now going to get incredible amounts of funding.
Take Helsing, the drone maker and AI company, that recently flew two test flights on Gripen E fighters, where their AI took over for a portion of the flight. They are promising “uncrewed” fighter jets in the not-too-distant future. They also make drones for Ukraine. This four-year-old startup just closed a EUR600m founding round at a EUR12bn valuation. They are in Europe, not Silicon Valley, so that’s significant.
There has, of course, been news about autonomous weapons of various kinds in development, which in some ways sounds better than sending human soldiers into combat, but honestly, the idea of an AI making decisions about air strikes, weapon use, killing someone, and so on makes me a bit queasy.
The other day, I heard someone from a drone startup make a flippant comment that “oh well, it’s just going to be robots fighting robots”. That sounds… naïve at best.
The most devastating violence humans inflict on each other always seems coupled with the dehumanisation of “others”. So I guess I don’t know who has the capacity to be more cruel to humans – AI or other humans.