Capital’s Blind Spot: Defense, Offence, or Resilience Pt. 1?
The defense investment boom may be systematically undervaluing the technologies that make societies resilient beyond warfare because our definition of defense has yet to fully account for resilience.
Over the past six months, I've been in a number of investment spaces—conferences, venture discussions, and countless conversations with investors and entrepreneurs.
During that time, I've felt a shift. Not a subtle one, but something so material that I feel it merits interrogation.
In truth, I have waited for someone else to articulate what I was witnessing, assuming I had simply missed the conversation.
Increasingly, I just don't think that conversation is happening, or at least not out loud.
Fundamentally, the present investment zeitgeist requires us to interrogate the lens through which we view defense and its implications for technological and societal development at large.
Because much of what presently sits beneath this banner is focused on our capacity to confront, deter, or respond to a threat.
My contention is that our current definition of defense is incomplete.
Defense is not just about responsiveness; it is also about resilience: an amalgam of memory, preparedness, fortification, and integration.
And the reality is that an incomplete framing matters for capital allocation. At precisely the moment when defense has become one of the dominant investment narratives, technologies addressing some of our most fundamental long-term vulnerabilities are facing hyper-scale growth expectations that, in my experience, are unreasonable for deep-tech companies, making already difficult commercialization pathways harder still amidst a very disrupted innovation landscape [1].
…by funneling technologies through an increasingly response-oriented investment lens, we may be systematically undervaluing other applications of those technologies that address equally fundamental needs beyond warfare.
Recent data shows that European green-startup funding fell 23% in 2025 to its lowest level since 2020 [2], and experientially, the difficulty of navigating this funding environment has been abundantly clear to me among the blue-tech and clean-tech founders I have spoken to.
I don't know what the optimal amount of capital going into response-oriented defense technology is, and,for the sake of this piece, I'm not interested in litigating the ethics of defense tech itself.
My concern lies adjacent: by funneling technologies through an increasingly response-oriented investment lens, we may be systematically undervaluing other applications of those technologies that address equally fundamental needs beyond warfare.
And trust me, I've heard the present capital environment described as a trend or a cycle. Perhaps it is. But in the meantime, I would posit that we are allocating capital less efficiently and, paradoxically, potentially becoming more vulnerable in a period of extraordinary technological opportunity.
To borrow from immunology, when the body encounters an acute infection or trauma, aggressive intervention is often necessary. High-dose medication can save a life. But no physician would argue that the path to long-term health is remaining indefinitely on emergency treatment. In other words, a healthcare system concerned only with response would represent an incomplete conception of health.
The body, like our societies, is a system, and health is a dynamic process of both strengthening and responding: general practices that build underlying resilience—nutrition, sleep, exercise—alongside case-specific interventions that meet acute needs, such as medication or surgery.
Our innovation economy faces a similar challenge.
Much of what we currently understand as defense technology is, in many ways, emergency medicine.
The technologies building resilient supply chains, more sustainable access to critical resources, clean energy systems, healthier infrastructure, and stronger community health systems are preventative medicine.
Adding to this, the opportunity cost of capital is rarely discussed. Every dollar invested reflects a strategic decision that moves not only financial resources but other scarce resources within an investment ecosystem. Attention, talent, institutional capacity, political focus, and appetite for risk move with it.
When capital overwhelmingly concentrates around responding to immediate crises, we risk underinvesting in the systems that reduce the likelihood or severity of future crises altogether. It’s the ER of it all: treating disease in an acute state is far more expensive, risky, and taxing on the patient, doctor, and healthcare system.
And I worry that, over time, the trend I am seeing will lead us toward two outcomes.
We leave ourselves vulnerable to the threats that don't arrive from across borders but emerge from within our own brittle systems––ailing energy infrastructure, strained critical-resource supply chains, and environmental degradation. Call these silent chronic killers.
Second, we inadvertently slow the broader social evolution we claim to be after. If our investment decisions consistently reward technologies that respond to breakdown, we shape a future optimized for managing crises instead of reducing their frequency and impact.
The answer, in my view, is not for ventures building outside of the defense space to suddenly rebrand themselves as defense or dual-use [3] companies.
When capital overwhelmingly concentrates around responding to immediate crises, we risk underinvesting in the systems that reduce the likelihood or severity of future crises altogether.
It is for our approach to defense investment to become logically cohesive and vision-led rather than mandate-led. The strategic value of deep-tech companies solving core technological problems should stand on its own, without requiring them to contort themselves to fit whichever investment category currently commands capital and attention.
The current defense investment boom, with Five Eyes defense-tech VC deal value reaching $49.1 billion across 861 deals in 2025 [4], reflects a market consensus that geopolitical instability and strategic competition will persist. Invite me for coffee, and we can have a longer conversation about the broader implications of this statistic.
However, if that consensus is correct, then the value of technologies that increase societal and industrial resilience should rise alongside technologies that increase response capability.
The concentration of capital around the latter while many of the former remain difficult to finance may therefore represent not merely a societal imbalance, but an investment mispricing. In other words, the extraordinary flow of capital toward response-oriented capabilities is implicitly treating one dimension of defense as though it represents the whole problem,
With the framing above, there arises a core driving question to which I alluded a few paragraphs ago: is our present, narrow definition of defense allowing investment mandates to drive the vision, rather than the vision to determine our investment priorities? I will explore this tension in Part 2. Stay tuned.
[1] https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/khaki-is-the-new-green-climate-tech-startups-pivot-to-defense
[2] https://aclima.eus/noticia/climate-tech-proves-strategic-value-in-europes-push-for-autonomy/
[3] https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/khaki-is-the-new-green-climate-tech-startups-pivot-to-defense
[4] https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/q4-2025-defense-tech-vc-first-look