There is only technology. How it is employed is a question of intent, context and political will, not of the technology itself. A precision optical payload captures imagery whether the target is a forest fire or a forward operating base. Autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations software closes distance on a piece of debris or an adversary asset according to instruction, not category. The knife cuts bread or threatens a neighbour; the capability is the same. The term “dual-use” has always obscured this, but in the present strategic environment it has become worse than imprecise. It has become a distraction.
The problem isn’t semantic. Dual-use implies a meaningful boundary between civilian and military technology, and by extension between civilian and military life. That boundary has never been as clean as the term suggests, and Russia’s sustained campaign against European society has made it close to meaningless. Jamming, sabotage, election interference, drone incursions, poisonings, cyber operations against critical national infrastructure; none of these target the military first. They target the population, the politics, the communications and the morale. The British Defence Secretary has spoken publicly of a 30% rise in Russian vessels threatening United Kingdom waters. Major Tedman of UK Space Command has described satellite jamming as a weekly occurrence. This is not grey-zone activity of the kind that can be parcelled off to uniformed professionals and left there. It is a form of pressure applied across the whole of society, and it requires a response that runs through the whole of society.
Europe has been slow to understand this, for reasons that are partly structural and partly psychological. The American security umbrella made strategic leisure possible. For decades, governments could divert spending away from defense and towards the visible apparatus of a developed welfare state; schools, hospitals, infrastructure. The public came to experience peace not as a condition that required maintenance but as a permanent feature of the European landscape. War became, in the public imagination, something abstract, something that happened to others, something that certainly did not warrant higher taxes or energy bills or meaningful inconvenience. The term dual-use is one of the products of that imagination. It allowed a clean store of commerce over here, security over there, and the two occasionally overlapping when a satellite company wanted a government contract.
That story is fiction. Sweden has formally ended over two centuries of military non-alignment and is undertaking its most significant national mobilization since the Cold War, integrating large-scale military restructuring with civil preparedness measures that reach into everyday life. Finland’s comprehensive security doctrine has long treated military and civilian defence as a single system rather than parallel tracks. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are actively preparing civilian populations for the possibility of conflict. These are not postures of alarm for its own sake. They reflect a strategic assessment that the distinction between combatants and civilians, between military infrastructure and civil society, is precisely what an adversary will seek to exploit. A doctrine that enshrines that distinction in its language hands the adversary an advantage before the first engagement.
The phrase dual-use retains value as a legal and regulatory category. Export controls, licensing frameworks and procurement rules require working definitions, and the term has a precise enough meaning within those contexts to be useful. The problem is that it has escaped those contexts and entered the culture as a way of thinking about the relationship between commerce and security. In that broader register it does harm. It keeps defense conceptually separate from the society it exists to protect, and it encourages the assumption that capability development is the preserve of one community while the costs and responsibilities of deterrence are absorbed by another. That assumption is precisely what adversaries are banking on.
Europe does not need more rhetoric around dual-use. It needs total-defense realism — a recognition that deterrence is a whole-of-society commitment, that the space between civilian and military capability is narrower than our language has allowed, and that the countries making serious preparations for this strategic moment are the ones that have already stopped pretending otherwise.
Graeme Ritchie is the CEO of Shield Space.
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