# Defense Supply Chain Fragmentation Postwar West traded discipline for diffusion. Defense and aerospace supply chains that once won wars splintered into a democratized archipelago of mom-and-pop machine shops. Fertilizer plants replaced munitions factories. By-product of Chinese cotton shirts now feeds Europe's explosives industry. What was once resilient interdependence has become strategic vulnerability. ## The Breakdown Reshoring isn't a slogan—it's survival. Current state: - U.S. builds fewer than six commercial ships a year - China built majority of new deadweight tonnage last year - European industrial capacity degraded over decades - Critical components sourced from geopolitically unreliable suppliers - "Just-in-time" supply chains optimized for cost, not resilience ## Warfare Evolution Warfare itself is mutating: - Tanks now die to cheap quadcopters - Anti-tank missiles have given way to anti-drone jammers - Unmanned systems fight below a thousand feet - AI fuses the battlespace above it - Decision time compressed from minutes to milliseconds From Mosul to Mariupol, the lesson repeats: you learn fast or you learn late. The new race is not for territory or ideology but for **adaptation itself**—the ability to evolve at the speed of threat. ## The Response Europe, jolted awake by Ukraine, is rearming on a scale unseen in half a century: - New primes rising from dust - New multi-layered air defenses designed for drone-saturated skies - New supply chains built to last beyond the current crisis Making defense cool again attracts top-grade talent from big tech and old primes alike. ## Moral Dimension The ethic is deterrence through precision. Higher technical resolution yields higher moral resolution: a big, credible arsenal one ideally never has to use. Best weapons are those never fired—but only because adversaries know they work. Related: [[AI Defense]], [[Autonomous AI Agents - The rise, potential and challenges]], [[Physical Assets Revival]], [[Alpha in Atoms - Reflection on the Physical Inversion]] --- Tags: #deeptech #systems