The future of defence tech
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It started with a weekend, a borrowed workspace, and 150 people who thought building defence technology might be fun. Two years later, it might just be saving Europe.
Benjamin Wolba was not supposed to be in defence. A theoretical physicist by training, a German who graduated into a world where military service felt like a relic, he belonged to a generation raised on the comfortable assumption that history had, more or less, ended. Then Russia invaded Ukraine — and everything he thought he knew became obsolete.
Ukraine, starved of conventional Western weapons, turned necessity into doctrine. Drone kitchens sprang up across the country — informal R&D labs run by army units and scrappy startups, iterating at speed, rewarded through a points-based system that ruthlessly filtered out anything that didn't work in the field. It is, as Wolba puts it, video gaming at battlefield pace. Those who adapt survive.
Wolba's response, with co-founder Jonathan, was the European Defence Stack Hub — a series of hackathons designed to drag defence innovation out of the procurement labyrinth and into the hands of a new generation. The format is deliberately accessible: turn up for a weekend, form a team, build something. No security clearance required, no decade-long contracting cycle. Just people, problems, and the clock ticking. From three events in 2024, the Hub ran twenty in 2025. This year, they are on track to multiply that number again — from the UK and France to Poland, and deep into Ukraine itself, including Kyiv and Lviv.
What gives Wolba genuine hope is not a procurement deal or a policy paper. It is the sight of a ground drone retrieving a wounded soldier from the front line without a single human having to enter the kill zone. Technology, built over a weekend by people who cared enough to try, doing something that saves a life. That, he argues, is what European defence looks like now — and who it belongs to.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why Ukraine has become the world's most important defence innovation lab — and how its drone-first, bottom-up approach has fundamentally rewritten the cost and logic of modern warfare.
How a generation of gamers and hackers is building Europe's new defence capability — one weekend hackathon at a time, producing startups, prototypes and a pipeline of talent that traditional defence procurement never could.
Why mindset is Europe's most critical defence gap — and how the continent is finally, if belatedly, waking up to the reality that protecting democracy requires a willingness to engage with the tools that defend it.
Watch the episode on YouTube below, or listen via your preferred podcast app.
