Dear all,

In the muddy autumn of 1915, the Western Front in World War I had become a killing field frozen in place. British and German soldiers faced each other from trenches less than one hundred meters apart, separated by ground that devoured lives by the hundreds each day. Machine-gun fire shredded infantry within seconds, artillery turned fields into swamps, and grenades and screams filled the air.

Amid this carnage, Major Ernest Dunlop Swinton, a relatively junior British Army officer, noticed something others overlooked: tracked agricultural tractors hauling heavy artillery across mud and shell-torn ground that men could not cross alive. What if such machines were armoured, armed, and sent forward with the infantry?

The British General Staff dismissed Swinton’s idea outright. Mechanical solutions in war were considered unreliable, impractical—“unsoldierly.” Blocked by the Army, Swinton found an ally in Winston Churchill, later Prime Minister of the UK, then First Lord of the Admiralty, who grasped the potential immediately. Churchill bypassed the Army entirely, launching a secret development effort within the Navy to build what were disguised as “water tanks.” When the first crude tanks finally crossed no man’s land in 1916, they proved the stalemate was not inevitable. An innovation, pushed by a junior officer and enabled by political leadership, had changed warfare forever.

One of the UK's highest-ranking generals told me this story last week at the Munich Security Conference, during a roundtable at our SPARTA side event. Together with the former British Minister of Defence, Ben Wallace, and several generals from different NATO nations, we identified one key issue for European defence: demand signals for defence and dual-use innovation are fragmented and noisy.

In the United States, defence innovators face one dominant demand signal: the Pentagon. In Europe, between nations, ministries of defence, armed forces, and procurement agencies, signals are often unclear, contradictory, or arrive far too late. Innovators are left guessing what is actually needed—until procurement begins, when it is already too late to shape outcomes.

One idea to change this emerged in our roundtable: bring Europe’s “Ernest Dunlop Swintons”—colonel-level officers who actually do operational planning—into the same room with Europe’s leading defence innovators. Let them shape demand together, long before formal procurement processes begin. We will do this at DTM.Defence in May as part of our annual Deep Tech Momentum Summit.

Five priority fields for European defence innovation stood out for us:

Sensor-to-shooter loops. Kill chains. Lethality. Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for me to put these words into writing in a newsletter column—let alone actively support defence primes, innovators, and armed forces building more effective drones or technologies for battlefield awareness.

Yet almost exactly four years ago, at dawn, the first Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine. During the time it took to write this column, roughly 50 people on both sides will likely have died in that war. I do not want my two young sons to be among them in a few years because we in Europe lacked the courage to stand up to Vladimir Putin and his system. We must be able to fight a war against them, so that we do not have to.

With deep respect and gratitude to our Ukrainian friends, who sacrifice every day for Europe’s freedom and security,

Martin

➔ Mercanis’s autonomous agents can reduce sourcing cycle times from weeks to days in real enterprise scenarios.

➔ Industrial projects fail more often from a breakdown in coordination than from a shortage of good ideas. Magentic treats AI agents not as simple copilots, but as execution layers for hardware-intensive industries.

➔ Its AI agents, called “Digital Workers,” execute complex workflows with full traceability and auditability, making them resistant to the hallucination problems common in generative AI.

➔ Founded in 2023 by three former Monzo bank employees and reached €1M in annual recurring revenue within its first four months of launching.

Germany excels in academic research but often falters when bringing those ideas to market. So they say. Let’s change that.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), together with UnternehmerTUM, wrote a strategic report to put Germany’s High-Tech Agenda into practice. “Wachstumspfade für Deutschland” maps out priority tech bets, market sizes, and the policy mechanisms needed to get from our labs to scale.

Here are the five most important takeaways:

➔ Implication: Germany intends to compete where sovereignty, industrial capability, and global platform markets intersect.

➔ To do: Programs should operate like venture portfolios, with Stop/Scale/Pivot decisions and hard 3–5 year sunset clauses. Capital follows predictable demand.

➔ Implication: Industrial AI with proprietary data access and compute strategy will outperform generic model plays. Infrastructure is becoming an industrial policy asset.

➔ Meaning: Europe is unlikely to win commoditised logic nodes — but it can dominate differentiated, industrial-grade architectures. “Lab-to-Fab” integration will separate scalable champions from research projects.

➔ Implication: Decarbonisation is now an industrial value-chain play. The winners will be those who control core components, not just system integration.

In one afternoon, SPARTA turned 2,000 meetings into deeds. These discussions set in motion over 200 pilots, commercial deals, and investments. The event proved that assembling the right leaders converts strategy into contracts and handshakes into working models.

Two definitive themes emerged from the summit’s roundtable discussions, featuring leaders like General Christopher Cavoli (Former SACEUR, NATO), Bill LaPlante (Former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense), General Michael Claesson (Chief of Defence, Swedish Armed Forces), Vice Admiral Bob Harward (Executive Vice President, Shield AI), and Mikhail Kokorich (CEO, Destinus).

👉 Next Stop: DTM26. Berlin, May 20–21

On May 20–21, DTM26 returns with 3,000+ participants and Europe’s leading defence and space tech marketplace: DTM.Defence. The next opportunity to engage — in person — with Europe’s leading primes, neo-primes, armed forces, high-growth startups, SMEs, and specialist funds in a highly curated setting.

DTM26 is where Europe’s defence and space value chains align.

➔ Secure your ticket: deeptech.build/defence

What happens when the “fog of war” is processed by a neural network rather than human intuition?

If your time at SPARTA and the Munich Security Conference—and perhaps Martin’s column—has left you seeking a deeper dive into how early tech bets translate to the battlefield, we have your next read.

In AI, Automation, and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex, Anthony King dismantles the sci-fi myths of “Terminator” robots to reveal a much more complex reality. King explores how militaries have spent the last decade integrating AI—not as a replacement for humans, but as a massive engine for data processing and intelligence. It is the birth of a new, formidable military-tech complex that is redefining modern defence.

The book is a featured recommendation in the Munich Security Conference’s 2026 report, Under Destruction. It is a necessary guide for those tracking the intersection of sovereignty and industry.

➔ To enter the draw, reply “DEFENCE”.