Capitalising on the Capabilities of the Defence Sector

At its most fundamental, investing in defence stocks enables the investor to profit from active military aggression — as an example consider the current 2024 conflict in Gaza / Middle East theatre.

However any defence investor is also critically aware of the ability for a defence prime or defence asset to profit from:

• Preparedness (e.g. the sale of ICBMs for threat deterrence)
• Spin-off R&D (e.g. ULA launch-servicing NASA)

Especially considering the R&D capability, there are many tangential benefits to investing in defence — the last example may even be classified as Humanitarian; defence security assets are certainly not entirely correlated with lethal usage.

Compound this as follows:

Defence primes create technologies — such as military vehicles or communication technologies — which have lethal capability, but also critically:

• Global reach / planet-scale access to precise areas of conflict
• Planet-scale deployment capability

Could these features of a defence prime create new technologies that are re-purposed for humanitarian or life-preserving objectives? If so, this would hedge the risk of the investor to a scenario where there is no war. This enables investors to access defence securities for ‘peacetime’ or ‘war-resolving’ products and services.

Could defence technologies and defence R&D be deployed to:

1. Profit from the diminishment of the risk of an outbreak of military aggression?
2. Could a defence investor tap into the unique capability of defence technologies to profit from an humanitarian end to any outbreak of aggression, i.e. one designed to minimise the loss of life and maximise the security and protection of what is sacred? e.g. places of worship and buildings, such as homes, schools, hospitals…

If either approaches could yield commercially feasible markets, defence primes are uniquely positioned to profit from Humanitarian defence technologies and uniquely positioned to profit from an end to conflict, should it be active or should it ever emerge.

Blue-sky examples could be:

1. Medical kits designed to alleviate human suffering i.e. via drone deployment… health-kits, safety kits for rubble removal and so on.
2. Emergency preparedness kits such as emergency blankets, civilian identification lighting or vulnerability lights / signals designed to reduce civilian casualties and safeguard vulnerable sites.
3. Emergency / humanitarian internet access…

The last one is interesting because the internet is a relatively young technology, at least in the history of warfare.

Another example:

Messaging technologies designed to harness the power of the internet citizen to foster instant-dialogue, build bridges and find peaceful resolutions that work for everyone, fast.

What if emergency resources — such as food or water, or areas of sanitation — could be digitally way-pointed to civilians at internet-scale? What if the identification of sacred sites or safe-zones could be crowd-sourced? What if democratic peace-treaties designed to create lasting ceasefires could be rapidly rolled out via instant-messaging, based on the opinion of those vulnerable to areas of conflict?

All of these examples could ultimately work for the investor by accelerating the eternal (and recurrent) dream of an end to any given live military conflict, encouraging a faster recommencement of trade relations between hostile parties, going on the principle that no countries at war can trade — and vice versa — no countries engaged in trade can be engaged in war.

Winterdelta seeks to theorise and deploy humanitarian software and hardware technologies that are negatively-correlated with military conflict.