Electronic warfare has existed since World War II. Radar jamming was a thing your grandfather did before he died disappointed in you. But some analyst at a defense-focused fund just read a Wikipedia article and decided this counts as a tech phenomenon now.
The market is rethinking defense valuations. That's the phrase they use when nobody wanted to touch Lockheed for eight years and now suddenly every dipsh*t with a Robinhood account thinks he's going to get rich buying RTX because drones are scary. You weren't rethinking anything. You were ignoring an entire sector because it wasn't called Magnificent Seven and didn't have a chatbot.
Deep strike capabilities. Anti-drone systems. Unmanned platforms. These are the new investment themes that will separate smart money from your money. The smart money bought this stuff in 2022 when you were still holding ARKK and telling yourself Cathie Wood sees the future. You see it now because CNBC told you to see it. You're not early. You're never early.
Different countries have different priorities, the summary helpfully explains. Groundbreaking stuff. France wants one thing. Poland wants another. Taiwan probably wants a lot of anti-ship missiles and doesn't care what your ESG score says about it. But you'll buy the same three defense ETFs as everyone else because doing actual research would require you to learn what a kill chain is and you can't even figure out how options work.
The phenomenon here isn't electronic warfare. It's watching retail traders discover that militaries buy things and sometimes those things go up in value when the world gets worse. You're not investing in the future of conflict. You're panic-buying after the move already happened because someone on Twitter said Anduril is the next SpaceX.
The real tech phenomenon is how defense contractors convinced you that jamming signals and launching missiles from robots is somehow different from jamming signals and launching missiles from planes, and that this difference justifies you buying at the top.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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