The technology behind today’s defence products — from AI-powered drones to autonomous ground vehicles — is what some might have considered futuristic mere years ago. But according to some industry insiders, the next decade could bring more autonomy, and even fully-robotised warfare.
“Many of the most impactful changes will emerge from a combination of trends already under way: battery technology, alternative navigation, sensors and edge compute will all continue to improve,” says Will Blyth, cofounder and CEO of London-based defence startup Arondite, which is building AI tools and software to better connect humans with robotics, unmanned systems and sensors. “These developments will mean robotic and autonomous systems will be more reliable, cheaper to build and more performant.”
There’s now a host of investors looking to back that future. The defence industry has skyrocketed in popularity among VCs and founders in the last couple of years, driven largely by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Total investment in European ‘defence, security and resilience’ tech notched a record high of $5.2bn in 2024, according to data from data provider Dealroom and the NATO Innovation Fund.
More recently, Europe’s scramble to rearm and increase defence budgets amid the US’s more protectionist stance has sparked a hype cycle in 2025.
VCs are backing everything from AI-powered drones (like German unicorns Helsing and Quantum Systems) and battlefield software (like Project Q and Arondite) to autonomous ground vehicles (ARX Robotics and Shark Robotics).
From business models that might emerge to tech that will become obsolete, here’s what defence insiders think the industry will look like a decade from now.
A fully robotised battlefield
The modern battlefield is already starting to look far more autonomous. But once autonomy becomes standard in 10 years, “it’s not crazy to think of a fully robotised battlefield,” says Eveline Buchatskiy, the managing partner of Kyiv-based D3, a VC fund backing early-stage defence startups in Ukraine.
“Removing the human from the field is the goal, and it’s going to be achieved. We do have some of it in Ukraine already — a fully robotised ‘zero line’ is also one of those obvious things,” she says, referring to the line of contact in battle.
Buchatskiy reports that the line of contact is already much wider than it used to be; in the future, “think of it as if you had a continuous army, kind of like the Roman style, marching — but in this case, it’s the robots. You have so many of them that you cannot just have one line, but you have a whole stretch.”
She doesn’t expect these fully robotised battlefields to include humanoids anytime soon. “It’s just such an incredibly hard task that I do not see that coming in 10 years.”
“We’ve been talking about humanoids for decades,” she adds. “They’re still extremely limited. You would throw them in the battlefield to be taken out in five minutes, and they’re extremely expensive.”
Nicholas Nelson, who runs Estonian defence VC Archangel, believes the “most impactful” change will be integrating technologies like AI or hypersonics to the “team level, such as enhanced situational awareness via novel command and control solutions and unit scale intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets.”
Human-free autonomy will be possible — but moral qualms may still prohibit use
Some startups like Helsing have said that full autonomy — without a human in the loop making decisions for things like strike drones to attack — is already possible, although employing that in the future is more of an ethical question.
“The West is unlikely to allow unfettered full autonomy, which is why understandable, auditable AI is of such criticality,” says Nelson. “Whoever can integrate this with the least friction and latency will win. However, if we choose not to do this, that will leave us a significant disadvantage relative to China and Russia.”
‘Ubiquitous’ use of ground robots
Today, ground drones — the kind ARX Robotics or Shark Robotics make, which can do everything from rescue troops on the frontline to serve as imitation enemy fire in training — are starting to gain traction.
But they’re “in their infancy,” says Buchatskiy. “Right now, they are not smart at all, but companies realise that there’s big potential.”
Unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, “have a long roadmap ahead of them,” Buchatskiy says. While currently they are largely used in logistics, she believes in the future they can be used for things such as fully replacing infantry, like a miniaturised tank without people. “They have grenade launchers that they can use and countering systems,” she says.
Buchatskiy thinks “you will see ubiquitous use of UGVs 10 years from now”, with AI as a key component for things like computer vision to help them manoeuvre, communicate with each other and not destroy each other.
No more tanks; staying stealthy will be a challenge
Founders and VCs agree that in the coming years, being able to operate unseen will become incredibly challenging.
“At a tactical level, the increase in the number of sensors — including the massive growth in space-based sensing — will make it even more difficult to move without being detected and targeted,” Blyth says. “This will put a premium on the ability to stay concealed from enemy sensors before rapidly moving to enable strike, so the race to out-range opponents will accelerate.”
For those reasons, Buchatskiy notes “the relevance of tanks has gone really down. They are now used for just a handful of very specific missions; any large object that is very visible, you may question the relevance of it 10 years from now.”
That might facilitate a boom in subsea and subsurface vehicles in the next 10 years. “In the maritime and land domains, the saturation of sensors above the surface will send defence forces below the waves and below ground,” suggests Blyth. “We can expect a lot of investment in both crewed and uncrewed submarine technologies, and tunnel warfare will become more important on land where battlefields are relatively static.
“In both of these areas we will see the development of new types of robotic and autonomous systems, which must be able to deal with the limited communications these environments entail. The laws of physics aren’t going away.”
Defence as a service (DaaS)
Buchatskiy predicts that owing to the host of new defence VC funds being raised, there will be a lot more defence startups popping up in the next decade. “The primes are old integrators. There’s probably going to be a surge of new integrators that are savvy on all these new solutions,” she says — something a bunch of startups from Helsing to Delian are all vying to become.
In 10 years, Buchatskiy expects we’ll see startups increasingly adopting a business model akin to SaaS — software as a service — but for defence.
MoDs will realise that owing to the disposable and constantly-updating nature of some of these technologies, like drones, they will need to have “the next version every month,” says Buchatskiy. “They shouldn’t buy the box of software, but rather subscribe to something that is constantly bringing you the new innovation,” she says. Enter: defence as a service, or DaaS.
These “new integrators” are “always up to speed on everything: the best sensors, the best air defence system, the best everything.” She believes these companies will approach MoDs and ask them to subscribe to their DaaS service, which will give them a continuous “supply every X amount of time with the best sensors for this, the best unmanned systems for that, and the best counter systems.” Per mission you’ll get a DaaS package at a set subscription cost. “That’s where it should evolve,” says Buchatskiy.
Which countries will dominate defence tech?
The US defence ecosystem is far more expansive than Europe’s. But on the continent, “those countries who are willing to move the fastest and work with new suppliers, and not just their own national companies,” will win, argues Nelson.
“Given this has largely been determined by threat proximity, the Nordics, Baltics and Poland, as well as those countries such as the UK which integrate and test technologies on this frontier, and [are] capable and willing to work with regional partners, will win out,” he suggests.
Buchatskiy thinks that Germany’s talent, budget and robotics expertise puts it in the pole position to be a key winner, although in a “utopia”, she believes a “one Europe” approach — where countries are “able to actually co-develop and not be so parochial in their defence development and procurement” — would be ideal.
VCs like Nelson also believe there will continue to be ample need for defence tech even if the current war raging in Ukraine resolves soon.
“Unfortunately, as the data shows us, the world is getting less stable, not more,” he says. “There will be an increased proliferation of regional conflicts (for instance recent ones between Cambodia-Thailand, Israel into Gaza), particularly as the West no longer has the willingness, nor the desire, to police the world or involve itself in these conflicts.”
Europe will increasingly have to develop its own strategic culture, which has not existed in decades.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/defence-europe-10-years-predictions/
