The Convergence of Civil Technology and Defence Industry

Artificial intelligence is dissolving the long-standing boundary between civilian and military technologies, giving rise to a unified dual-use economy that operates simultaneously across markets and strategic domains. In the twentieth century, technological flows typically moved from defence research to civilian adaptation; in the twenty-first, the direction has reversed. Commercial innovation now drives military transformation. Software, cloud infrastructures, and autonomous systems developed for consumer or industrial use are repurposed for command, control, and surveillance. This convergence is not accidental but structural: AI requires data, computation, and distributed experimentation—resources that thrive in open markets but can be redirected toward defence once validated. The resulting ecosystem is fluid, fast, and decentralised, governed by overlapping incentives rather than by rigid institutional hierarchies. It is this interdependence between civilian entrepreneurship and military application that defines the new geography of power within the global defence economy.