The Willing

I have named a lot of adversaries in this manifesto — a war economy in Moscow, a cartel of five primes, a thirty-year holiday from history. None of them is the enemy.

The enemy is an idea.

The enemy is the belief that people unwilling to fight for their freedom are still entitled to that freedom.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. It's in the capitals that outsourced their security and called it a peace dividend. It's in the arsenals that stopped testing against anyone who shoots back. And it has a commercial expression too — one this industry politely refuses to name.

Demo-day defense

There is a way of doing this business that optimizes for briefings, decks, and lobbying. It sells to committees, not crews. It calls a product "battle-tested" that has never been near a battle. It avoids the one hard thing — the honest interaction with the actual customer, the warfighter — while a real war two hours from Warsaw offers every answer, to anyone willing to go.

That is the same unwillingness, wearing a suit. Refusing to show up for your own product the way a citizenry refuses to show up for its own freedom.

And I'll say the quiet part plainly: selling a weapon to your country's soldiers without knowing whether it works on a battlefield is not just bad engineering. It is dishonest. In this industry the customer's failure mode is a funeral. Every founder in defense either accepts what that implies, or has no business in defense.

The willing founder

Now let me tell you who this whole world is written for.

I know a founder — I'll leave his name out — whose priorities run in an order that would scandalize a term sheet: the mission first, the profit second, the wealth barely on the list. He came to Ukraine once to test. Then he came back. Then he kept coming. Then he moved here.

He is not fearless — he's just not afraid of the things you'd expect. Not the danger. What he fears is missing his chance to matter. Wasting years on the wrong problem with the wrong people. He believes — as a matter of ethics, not marketing — that shipping unproven gear to soldiers is immoral. He works until he nearly drops, because he can hear the clock.

I have met this person, in different bodies, at every front-line test and in every Kyiv workshop since 2022. They are a type. They are the type that opens frontiers — the chartered risk-takers of Part II, five centuries on.

They are the Willing. And freedom, it turns out, belongs to them.

Why I get to ask this of you

One January morning in Iraq, I watched soldiers I was responsible for stack against a wall and go through a door, because they would rather die than let each other down. A writer who spent a year in a valley in Afghanistan found the words I couldn't: the willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religion fails to inspire.⁷

That is what war is, under all the technology — Part I's law, seen from inside. And that is who you are really building for: people who love each other enough to die for each other. They deserve products built by people willing to stand beside them and find out the truth.

I live in Kyiv with my wife and my daughter. When the explosions are close, I ask the question every parent here asks. Then I remember the men holding the line east of us — and I remember what I believe:

If the West doesn't win, Ukraine is in mortal danger. The West has to win — and it wins by mobilizing its best founders and its best capital into Ukraine.

Not out of charity. Out of the coldest strategic logic there is: the West can only win a war it understands, and the understanding lives in exactly one place.

It is 1936

Now the part I am asked to soften, and won't.

Russia believes it is in an existential war with the West. That is what they believe — say it out loud, because everything follows from it. We don't believe it yet. That asymmetry of belief, not any weapon, is the most dangerous fact in the world right now.¹

Adam Tooze taught a generation how Germany converted itself into a weapon: one percent of GDP on arms in 1933, ten percent by 1939 — and past a certain point, a war economy must be used.² Russia is on that curve now, approaching the point of no return, while the West debates. And history's pattern for us is crueler still: free nations lose the opening battles. Professional armies die in the first act; the citizens' army wins the war — if there is time to raise one.³

Hear what I am not saying. I am not saying the war is lost. I am saying the opposite:

This war is winnable. Their mass loses to our velocity — the velocity of AI, of Western capital, and of founders — if we choose to move.

The proof already exists in the open. Ten Ukrainian drone operators erased two NATO battalions at a NATO exercise, undetected. A Ukrainian regiment eliminated an American armored brigade at another, then switched sides and taught the Americans offense. NATO's own Supreme Allied Commander said the experience "cannot be replicated in the United States."⁴ The free world already possesses the most battle-tested army on earth. It is Ukraine's — and the architecture that wins the next war will be built around the people who fought this one.

And a warning about the word "ceasefire." A ceasefire without defeat is not peace. It is a rearmament pause — a paid intermission before the next act, in Ukraine, or the Baltics, or Poland, at a higher price. The wars this one rhymes with ran for thirty years and a hundred; they ended not when the shooting stopped but when a new order was built.⁵

As a cadet I wrote my thesis on how the Spanish Civil War led to the Second World War — how the world watched a testing ground and refused to learn from it. I did not expect to live in the sequel. It is 1936. The proving ground is lit. The only question is whether the free world's builders treat it the way the willing did then — or the way the watching did.

History is not written by the victors. It is written by people who believe it before it happens — and make it so.⁶

History is calling. What will we do?

Three questions

So this manifesto ends where the talk ends — with the questions I leave in the room.

If you're a founder: are you ready to become a theorist of war, not just a builder? Are you ready to go? And in the marketplace future — where the line between a defense company and a security company dissolves — do you know which one you're building?

If you're an investor: is your fund positioned for the world Part III described? Will you send your companies to the proving ground — and should "What's your Ukraine story?" be in your diligence checklist?

If you make policy: are you studying technology and history together? And what would it take to make "Ukraine-validated" a requirement instead of a curiosity?

The invitation

Not long ago I gave a talk in the Kyiv central train station — the building through which millions fled in 2022, and through which the soldiers still leave for the east every night. This manifesto is that talk's argument; the talk itself goes further. Part I — Why War Matters — is free. Parts II and III are where the five objections die, the ten rules get taught with the companies that lived them, and the map of the two futures gets drawn.

New essays, and each new part of anything I write, reach readers of The Borderlands Dispatch first — the letter I write from Kyiv. The talk page is the door to that, too.

And a word of honesty, because this world runs on it: most people who read this will nod, close the tab, and go back to the feed. That's allowed. Ukraine doesn't need everyone.

It needs the Willing. They already know who they are.

One last thing, for the readers who wonder whether any of this can end well.

When I was eight, a bomb went off in Belfast on my birthday. My family walked through the checkpoints to the party anyway, singing over the broken glass — my parents were determined to give me a normal childhood in the middle of a war, the way ten thousand Kyiv parents are doing tonight.

When I was twenty-one, I walked down that same street. The roadblocks were gone. The soldiers were gone. The glass was gone. Hope filled the air.

I have personally walked a street where a war ended. That is why I believe this one can — and why I will spend the rest of my life on the leadership it takes. Wars end. The Willing decide how.

Watch Why War Matters — free » · Back to the manifesto hub