The European Defence Tech Festival was held last month at a disused Nazi airfield in Neuhardenberg, some 40 miles northeast of Berlin. Billed as taking place at a ‘secret location’, the event’s organizers touted it in eye-catching terms: there would be live demonstrations of quadcopters, fixed wing drones and maybe even planes; NATO generals and Ukrainian soldiers would be in attendance; an afterparty would round out the weekend; camping was encouraged. I registered as a visitor, expecting to encounter something between an arms fair and a music festival. But pulling up to the airfield on the last day, I found a lacklustre scene. Rain meant that most of the attendees remained inside the hangar, many typing code on MacBooks. Drones bought on Amazon hummed in the air. The biggest aircraft taking off from the tarmac was no larger than a housecat.

With European states pledged to sustain the war in Ukraine until ‘total victory’, and the Trump administration joined with Netanyahu in bombing Iran, defence technology has become one of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy. European Union defence spending almost doubled over the last six years, rising to a projected 454 billion euros in 2026. Venture capital funding for companies developing software and hardware for surveilling and killing has risen 63-fold in the last decade. The festival is just one of many hackathons, founder summits and pitch days recently held on the continent. Among the companies present was a drone manufacturer selling surveillance UAVs (‘unmanned aerial vehicles’) with fifty-five-minute battery-life, a software firm trying to engineer drones that use algorithms rather than human operators to target and kill, and a start-up building machine gun turrets that could be rigged to the roof of a truck and used to automatically shoot down small UAVs. Together, they constitute a small sample of the largest reorganization of capital towards militarization in Europe since the early Cold War.

With the war in Ukraine unfolding amid the speculative frenzy of the AI ‘boom’, Europe’s rearmament has taken on the manic energy more typical of American tech boosters and the venture capitalists that bankroll them. ‘What is happening with artificial intelligence in defence is like magic’, Andrius Kubilius, EU commissioner for Defence and Space, announced at a gathering of investors and arms manufacturers in Brussels this past February. ‘We need to learn from the Ukrainians, how to put AI in a drone, how to target with AI’. Such exuberance chafes against the reality unfolding in Donetsk. Nor does it seem likely that emulating Silicon Valley’s ceaseless push to ‘innovate’ will make the continent any less reliant on American companies.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion in 2022, Pentagon officials pumped billions into renovating Ukraine’s defence industry. This spawned a start-up frenzy that succeeded in slowing the Kremlin’s advances – and shifted a land war based on tanks and artillery into one that hinged primarily on cheap and expendable airpower. Kiev co-working spaces became fairgrounds for Ukrainian engineers, European mercenaries and Silicon Valley tycoons to buy and sell arms. It’s worth nothing that, along with lining the pockets of western weapons manufacturers, the cash flow has yielded a number of corruption scandals – the most damning entangling Zelensky and a group of Ukrainian-Israeli arms dealers, who fled Kiev for Tel Aviv’s most affluent zip-code.

Yet more than four and a half years in, these ventures have also helped entrench an attritional game of one-upmanship. Small first-person-view (FPV) drones deployed by Ukraine’s army in the millions during the first years of the war were stymied by Russian advances in GPS jamming; engineers then outfitted them with fibre optic cables, which Russian UAVs can now slice through with rotor blades. Today, investors say the real Wunderwaffen are drones rigged with ‘autonomous terminal guidance’ relying on algorithms rather than connectivity with an operator to track and kill. Weapons manufacturers though are already finding ways to spoof the targeting software or better means to intercept them. Most new drone systems only last three months on the battlefield before they are rendered obsolete by the other side’s technological advances, if they work at all.

Despite regular accounts in the pages of the New York Times and elsewhere of Ukrainian strides in AI-powered warfare, so far, no line of code has changed the fact that today’s wars are still fought by humans. The 1,200-kilometre-long frontline is filled with ‘kill zones’, where Ukrainian or Russian infantrymen deployed to hold territory can endure weeks or months in cramped underground fortifications, hiding from the UAVs hunting anything that moves. The two to four soldiers needed to launch a single FPV drone into the air risk being dismembered by bombs while servicing their army’s ‘unmanned’ arsenal. Even those manufacturing or testing these weapons far from the front line may be killed by Russian strikes aimed at Ukraine’s largely unregulated arms industry. In early July, a ballistic missile killed ten and injured 100 at a drone exposition outside Kiev; another blew up a US company’s drone factory in a southeastern neighbourhood of the city a few weeks later. As each side races to produce cheaper weapons at a faster pace, the human cost of the conflict continues to rise. Today, Ukraine faces a critical shortage of manpower amid plummeting popular support for the war.

Washington has pledged to adopt the move-fast-and-blow-things-up strategy unfolding on the front lines in Ukraine. Cutting through the bureaucracy ‘with a chainsaw’ – ‘Elon style’ – is how Secretary of War Hegseth puts it. Today, Musk and other technology-cum-weapons moguls who originally offered their products to Ukrainian forces have scored hefty contracts with the Pentagon and EU states. As with Ukrainian ministers, Washington officials tend to use words like ‘speed’ and ‘agility’ to justify the billions spent on targeting systems and airpower. Thus far, the results have been underwhelming. The Defense Innovation Unit’s demonstrations in Alaska last summer were marked by spectacular failures: drones manufactured by new start-ups succumbed to electronic jamming, missed their targets or nose-dived into the hillside nearby. A recent Air Force test with drones manufactured by the American defence tech firm Anduril proved equally unsuccessful; one of its new UAVs spiraled 8,000 feet and another immediately crashed upon launch.

Europe is set on adopting this model all the same. Though the bulk of EU defence spending has gone to US weapons primes and technology giants monopolizing the computing infrastructure needed to churn out autonomous weapons systems, a portion of the vast sums Brussels plans to mobilize is earmarked for initiatives to militarize its own technology industry. The idea is to convince video-game engineers and other civilian tech buffs to get to work developing drone swarms and targeting platforms. Because European mythologies of post-war pacifism still saddle arms manufacturing with some degree of stigma, this effort has been accompanied by a formidable public relations campaign. Billboards advertising neo-futurist drone imagery accompanied by slogans invoking the political imperative to rearm (‘Protect our Democracies’) are cropping up in major cities, from Berlin’s Mitte to London’s Picadilly Circus. State-sponsored festivals and pitch-days help spin the refinement of algorithms to kill as a lucrative white-collar job like any other.

Indeed, most of those I met at the airfield – built by Wehrmacht engineers to prototype rocket propelled engines for V-2 missiles – were recent graduates from engineering or computer science programmes. They were looking to network with employers, talking up how they had figured out how to use AI to pilot or intercept drones. A few expressed some cynicism regarding Europe’s rearmament efforts. During one pitch session, I stood next to a Berlin-based aeromechanical engineer who had left a job at EasyJet. ‘I want to do something that matters’, he told me, but was unconvinced he could do so on the Old Continent. ‘I want to find an American co-founder and move to the United States, that’s where the future of this industry is. I don’t think it’s going to happen here.’ There was also scepticism that EU states could overcome their recruitment challenges. ‘Europe has this culture issue’, a financial adviser reflected as we stood in line at a food truck selling borsht and Club Maté. ‘It’s hard to convince blue haired Berliners to get on board with selling weapons to a neo-Nazi battalion’.

As the afternoon drew to a close, some gathered on the tarmac as one start-up took advantage of a brief pause in the rainfall. A 10 kg drone hovered over a large white pickup truck as it rolled up and down the tarmac. A man in a baseball cap smoking a cigarette held a laptop displaying a feed of aerial footage: a small white square – what he called a ‘kill box’ – bounded the vehicle, automatically tracking its movement. It started raining again, which seemed to pose an issue for the object-detection software. The UAV began to lag. The ‘kill box’ closed in on an empty patch of grass. The software was still in its pilot phase, the man with the cigarette explained. By now, the crowd had thinned out and the festival was coming to an end.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management’, NLR 140/141.