The Next China Shock Will Hit Defence

24 Aug 2026 03:37 PM

If tomorrow’s wars are fought mainly by machines, victory belongs to the power that can fuse AI with robotics and build the result by the million. Today, that is China.

If most of the fighting in the next conventional war is done by unmanned systems, military power gets redefined: as the capacity to fuse artificial intelligence with robotics and build the result at scale. Your author has seen both halves of that capacity from the inside, the AI software and AI data centre world at Google and military hardware production at Airbus Defence and Space.

Anyone trying to understand what the next conventional war might look like should observe developments in the AI unicorn headquarters of San Francisco and the factories of Shenzhen, not the halls of power in Washington and Moscow. For Europe, the starting position is uncomfortable. Europe will not produce world-class AI frontier models in the foreseeable future. And in high-end industrial production, Germany is being overtaken by China, which applies equally to electric cars and to defence.

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