Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

The impact of war on the hardware industry

20 May 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:56

In this video, the speaker argues that the pace of change in warfare, driven by AI and rapid manufacturing technologies, will outstrip developments in consumer electronics over the next two years. Using Ukraine as a case study, he highlights how drones are being continuously upgraded through AI-driven design and 3D‑printing, illustrating a new model of fast‑iteration military hardware. He contends that to ensure national security, countries must reindustrialize, building large‑scale, independent supply chains for military equipment and raw‑material processing. The speaker warns that geopolitical alliances are fluid and that future crises—such as another pandemic—could disrupt existing supply networks, making domestic manufacturing resilience essential.

Chapters

there's probably more change in war than there is in consumer electronics in the next 2 years. AI is changing everything. Military technology is changing incredibly fast. The place to look at that is Ukraine, where drones are being changed and updated every day rapidly with 3D printing. And this is, I think, the future of where war is headed. Unfortunately, I do feel that we need to reindustrialize the country significantly in order to be safe. We need to, at least on the military side, have an independent supply chain as much as possible. I think every other country should do that as well. You really never know what's gonna happen in the future, and people that are your allies now may not be in the future. The allied West, I think, is going through a lot of geopolitical changes. There's a lot of shifting. And so I would really like to reteach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to make things at quantity, how to process raw materials, how to be more independent so that when COVID happens again or something else happens again, we're not in trouble and we're not unable to protect ourselves.