All 10 Defense & Aerospace posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
America's defense-tech renaissance has created a bottleneck: scaling production requires modernizing an aging, fragmented supplier base. A16z argues this manufacturing gap is a national security liability and a generational venture opportunity to build technology-first suppliers using co-engineering, software, and capital.
Exploring how companies ride tailwinds—temporary subsidies in customer education, capital, or political will—and why the truly durable ones are those built to survive when the wind dies. Anduril's ChatGPT boost and the defense-tech bubble illustrate both the opportunity and the risk.
AI infrastructure exhibits classic bullwhip dynamics: demand shocks in GPUs cascade through memory, CPUs, and storage with multi-year lags, locking in higher costs at each stage and risking severe overcapacity when software revenues fail to justify $20B/GW data center buildouts.
AI has collapsed the economics of discovery in hard sciences, transforming venture's investment landscape from software-first to deep tech-first, accelerated by founder proof points and geopolitical demand for sovereignty.
Germany faces structural economic headwinds—Chinese competition, high labor costs, pension crises, and political instability—even as venture funding rebounds. European tech lags globally, but German startups, unicorns, and AI/defense investment show resilience amid geopolitical shifts.
U.S. military stockpiles of advanced munitions are dangerously shallow relative to potential conflicts; the Pentagon's 97%-to-3% budget split favoring expensive legacy systems over lower-cost alternatives leaves insufficient depth. Shifting procurement toward commercially-designed munitions—now available at 5–15× lower unit cost—would stretch defense dollars further and support sustained production capacity.
A16Z's Charts column surveys AI-generated books flooding self-publishing (40% of sales but diluting per-book revenue), defense manufacturing backlogs surging 60% since 2020, IT services repricing downward as AI shifts budgets away, and Moonshot's Kimi K3 gaining traction while pivoting marketing toward LinkedIn and enterprise.
Pentagon fast-tracks military painkillers via emergency powers; ICHRA rebrands as CHOICE amid accelerating enterprise adoption; Juul 2.0 gains FDA approval. Three healthcare stories highlighting regulatory dynamics, employer benefits shifts, and first-mover regulatory burden.
A16Z (7) · Not Boring (2) · Abe Murray (2) · Tomasz Tunguz (1) · Kyle Harrison (1) · Vickram Pradhan (1) · Greycroft.com (1) · Michael Greeley (1) · Northside Ventures (1) · Insight Partners (1)
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