There’s something deeply unsettling about seeing defence contractors advertise on London buses like they’re selling meal delivery kits or productivity apps. Last week I was visiting London, England where I noticed an advertisement on one of London’s iconic red buses. Anduril—named after Aragorn’s sword in Lord of the Rings, because apparently nothing says “serious defence capability” like fantasy literature references—has decided that commuters need to know about their autonomous military systems during their morning journey to work.
This is what happens when Silicon Valley’s growth-hacking mindset collides with the business of building weapons: you get defence contractors with chief growth officers, brand strategies, and apparently, bus wrap campaigns. The same venture capitalists who spent the last couple of decades as the glorified spreadsheet jockeys they are, shamelessly flogging their SaaS du jour like sleazy used-car salesmen, have now reinvented themselves as armchair Clausewitzes, pontificating about great power competition from their glitzy offices.
Watch them on LinkedIn, these newly-minted patriots who couldn’t find Ukraine on a map three years ago, now writing breathless posts about “defending Western values” and “securing the Homeland.” The same people who used to bore you senseless about customer acquisition costs and burn rates have discovered geopolitics, and they’re wielding their superficial understanding like a cudgel. They quote Sun Tzu in pitch decks. They reference the Thucydides Trap between term sheets. They’ve traded their Patagonia vests for the metaphorical uniform of the concerned defence intellectual, all while calculating their carry interest.
Now, let’s be clear: there is no doubt that Europe needs to reassess its role in the world, regain its sovereignty, and to do that it needs to start investing more in its defence. But defence is nothing to be celebrated, nothing to be advertised, nothing glamorous. It’s a grim necessity, a burden that serious nations bear quietly. The very nature of defence—preparing for and potentially conducting violence in service of the state—is the antithesis of Silicon Valley’s mantras and playbooks. You don’t “growth hack” deterrence. You don’t A/B test artillery strikes. You don’t iterate your way to nuclear capability. For all its bloat and corruption, the traditional defence establishment, didn’t need NY Subway ads, patriotic youtube clips or social media presence. Lockheed Martin and Rolls Royce understood that building weapons systems is a grave responsibility, not a growth opportunity to be celebrated with slick marketing campaigns.
The marketing itself reveals the grotesque contradiction at the heart of this “movement”. These companies need public support and legitimacy in democratic societies, so they advertise. But what exactly are they advertising? The efficiency with which their products can project violence? The elegance of their targeting algorithms? They wrap it all in euphemisms about “defending democracy” and “keeping the peace,” but strip away the PR speak and you’re left with businesses whose success is measured in their capacity for destruction.
What’s particularly galling is how these venture capitalists and their portfolio companies leverage nationalist anxieties about China and Russia to justify their existence whilst operating on purely capitalist logic. They invoke existential threats to European or Western sovereignty and civilisation whilst their investors calculate exit strategies and ROI. They claim to be patriots whilst structuring their companies for maximum acquisition value, ready to sell to the highest bidder who passes foreign investment review.
Their patriotism extends exactly as far as their investment horizon. We’re watching the gamification of defence, where war becomes another problem to be “solved” by the right algorithm, the right platform, the right user experience.
This isn’t innovation; it’s the commodification of violence dressed up in Silicon Valley’s self-important rhetoric. And every commuter who sees these ads is being asked to accept this as normal—just another company, just another product, just another day on the bus ride to work whilst someone, somewhere, optimises the kill chain. Meanwhile, the VCs who orchestrate this theatre cash their cheques, update their Twitter bios to include “DefenceTech,” and prepare their next LinkedIn post about why Europe needs to be more like Sparta—a comparison they probably picked up from a podcast, naturally.