If I weren’t working to build the world’s first cryptoasset insurance company, Evertas, there are a few things I’d be interested in working on:
Secure and trustworthy computing platforms — remote attestation VMs, which we tried to build back in the 1990s with HSMs, and in 2010 with CryptoSeal, and which you can almost get from Graviton on AWS or Confidential Computing on Azure today, or in some of the zk-enhanced VM systems in the blockchain world, but none yet to the degree needed
Sovereignty and “physical territory for network state” via physical communities (maybe Seasteading, maybe something else)
Technological leverage to reshore industry to the US (i.e. enablers for the reshoring — financial markets tools, IT, etc., rather than any specific industry)
[probably 5-10 other things…ideas are not my shortage, time is]
But since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia last year, the most interesting to me is probably something different. Unlike the above, it falls prey to the “negative sum” world of defense — i.e. it doesn’t actually make the ideal world better by existing overall, although it does make the world as it actually is better than it would be otherwise. In the famous Eisenhower Cross of Iron speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Essentially, it is weapons optimized for new kinds of warfare, the wars we’re likely to see over the next century, at every level below total global thermonuclear war between top adversaries (which we hopefully never see, because if we do, it’ll be The End.)
This warfare will be largely fought by a “high-low” combination of super-elite government forces (elements of JSOC, CIA Special Activities Division from the US, and some extremely specialized special operations forces of the local military trained by those guys in advance of the conflict) and local forces (national militaries, militias, and local volunteers), with some mix of international contractors and international volunteers added at both ends of the spectrum.
(My personal experience with war is 2003-2010 Iraq/Afghanistan/Gulf/etc., with zero military experience and basically just showing up to work as an IT/satellite guy at a local Iraqi company (and then bootstrapping my own company beyond that), getting a bunch of fairly elite customers, and learning as I went. I think my experience was pretty unique, in that I approached the war as a “startup”, rather than trying to fit it into established military frameworks. I do tech security stuff now, but aside from reading a lot about what’s going on, and knowing a bunch of people on the ground in Ukraine right now, not personally involved in this conflict at this time. As a hobby, I collect/sell a bunch of equipment (gun store, and lots of tactical/etc. gear), so I’m pretty familiar with a lot of the hardware involved.)
The “high” super elite guys are going to go in, do stuff, and generally know exactly how to do what they want to do — their limitations are needing to keep their footprint small, being very small numbers of people, and in almost all cases needing to remain deniable.
The “low” forces are much more numerous, but are far less well equipped, far less trained (and in some cases, completely untrained), and yet expected to operate in a similarly challenging environment, without years to get up to speed on everything.
The West tries to help by providing equipment, intelligence, and other assistance to the local forces, but there are a lot of problems with providing the same equipment to the “low” forces as are used by the “high” forces. The stuff is insanely expensive, but that’s usually far from the main concern — we’d often happily give out $300k individual loadouts to local forces if it would magically instantly turn a highly motivated local soldier into a Delta-tier operator, if it were just a matter of cost (as we already hand out $200k Javelin missiles and other equipment of similar expense.). The problem is a lot of the higher end equipment is actually difficult to use, requires training, has high value if captured by the enemy (both for use against us, and reverse engineering/intelligence value), and could be misused to cause serious problems for the US. The famous example of this was providing FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air man portable missiles to “the brave mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan” (when they were fighting the Soviets in the 1980s…see Charlie Wilson’s War), and then those missiles becoming a serious liability when those brave fighters became the Taliban.
My solution, and what I’d build as a startup, is basically the video gamer solution to this set of problems:
Weapons with ~50-80% of the capabilities of the stuff we’d give US forces, at 10% of the price, and available in mass quantities, but designed for use by forces with little or no training. These weapons would include “simulator/training mode” onboard; you could take the item and run through VR training missiles on-device and be reasonably confident you could use it in the field the first time for real and be effective.
Even more importantly, they would include various levels of “lethal rights management” — the donor country could place effective controls on how the weapons would be used. This might be a time restriction — the weapons expire after 90 days unless explicitly reauthorized — or maybe a geofence restriction (they could only be used within the Ukraine battlespace) — or maybe a target type restriction (they could only be used against fighter aircraft or helicopters, in the case of MANPADS, but not against civilian airliners or transport aircraft — or maybe they’d have donor-in-the-loop for individual missions (a large SAM system like Patriot could be set up, and send a request for final firing authority, with all data provided, to a US officer to authorize on each use — to prevent a shoot-down of a civilian airliner.). The system could also be robust against tampering and reverse engineering.
It would be politically/culturally unpalatable to provide these restricted weapons to US forces for their own use, but when arming proxy forces, being able to provide capacity-limited weapons at a lower cost is actually desirable.
This is all possible because weapons above small arms are basically computer systems with effectors at this point. What makes something like NLAW effective is not that it’s got some amazing rocket motor or explosive compound, but that the sensors and targeting system are smart enough to take an unguided rocket and detect when it’s over a target, identify the target accurately, look up the right part of that target to hit for maximum lethality, and then send an explosion into that part of the target. Anti-aircraft, anti-radiation/ECM/ECCM, high-end IEDs, and guided weapons are even more fundamentally computer systems, and making that computer system portion tamper-resistant/responding and logic-locked is very feasible.
Another market for this is rapid retrofit of existing stocks of “dumb” or legacy weapons into high-end networked systems. Taking Ukraine’s stocks of old T-64 tanks and giving them a package of thermal sights and battlefield management systems could make them more lethal than Russia’s later-generation tanks which lack some of those systems. It wouldn’t be impossible to convert older inventory anti-tank munitions, land mines, etc. into smarter munitions with relatively limited kits. Easy-to-use battlefield communications and battlefield management systems are basically software and IT, and could be deployed as software on commodity platforms (a bunch of Android phones/tablets and specialized but inexpensive radios).
It might be desirable to build these capabilities from “open source” components, and to have them available from multiple countries around the world. One of the concerns with the conflict in Ukraine is Germany’s pathological cuckoldry around allowing their weapons and components to be exported or used in an actual conflict (although they’re far more willing in this conflict than they have been in the past!). If the retrofit components and systems were built using open source tech and available from multiple countries (e.g. US, Taiwan, Turkey, UAE, Brazil, independently), it would be easier to provide assistance in a conflict, even a conflict where the US might want to provide assistance but wouldn’t want to be seen as providing lethal aid directly to a combatant — it could simply not oppose one of the other sources doing so. There’s a long history of this, with the US sourcing weapons from third parties for these conflicts, and with defense businesses having operations in multiple countries for export control reasons (and famously, Gerald Bull having a business on the US/Canada border with the ability to export under whichever country was more favorable for a specific transaction…).
Combining all of this with great but inexpensive/high volume sensor platforms (trail cameras, consumer-style drones, cheap thermal and digital night vision sensors, etc.) can let relatively untrained forces rapidly increase their capabilities to become much more effective at both defense and offense. Combining those forces with the very small number of elite international forces, proxy wars will be much more winnable. Unfortunately, the number and severity of proxy wars seems like it will increase over the next decades, so building specialized technology for these conflicts probably is a good market opportunity.
Ideally, there would be no need for a company or products like this, but…we clearly do not live in an ideal world, and I’d certainly prefer our friends be armed with the best equipment possible.