🔴 Is a Privatization of the Pentagon Conceivable?

While the world had its eyes on Notre-Dame, on Trump and above all on Elon Musk visiting Paris, nobody wants to look at what is happening in other parts of the world, Syria in particular.

2025 will be a year of major changes in diplomacy and the military.

If Trump calls into question the automatic nature of Article 5, making mutual assistance conditional on European countries contributing a minimum of 2% of GDP to defense, and pursues his isolationist strategy, then the security guarantees the United States offers Europe will be considerably weakened.

But other changes are under way through Trump's appointments in the field of defense. You read my previous newsletter on the consequences of Trump's election and of the appointment of certain people to key departments. But it is not only the secretaries who matter. Just below them, we can expect many resignations and, above all, the appointment of people with a very specific agenda.

It is the subject nobody seems willing to tackle for now.

One has to believe that the appointment of Trae Stephens will shift the lines. As we wrote in our newsletter on Trump's victory, we have seen the emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs focused on global security who call themselves "techno-patriots."

These appointments reflect the influence of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and JD Vance, but that is not, in my view, the most important thing.

The Pentagon could have a new economic model imposed on it in the military domain, "weapons as a service", inspired by the cloud model, in which the American government and other allied countries would rent the technology instead of owning it.

It is the F-35 model taken to the extreme, the one many European countries bought into thinking they were buying themselves security.

Will drones, tactical clouds and the new weapons, even telecom networks like Starshield, now be sold by the minute of use, like AI compute?

Because what cannot yet be seen from Europe is the ultimate war inside the Pentagon between the old military-industrial complex and the new one led by Andreessen, Thiel, Luckey and Vance.

A battle the latter have been winning since the Ukrainian conflict, which made many heavy and expensive weapons obsolete. But which also allowed Ukraine's arms industry 2.0 to take off.

For our paying subscribers, our research notes take the thinking further on the consequences of this appointment and the risks (but also the opportunities for Europe). This subject will grow in importance in the coming years, but you will have read it here first ;)

Happy reading to our subscribers; for everyone else, hurry up and go paid, because we will soon be raising the annual prices.

Read our strategic note 👇