Necessity breaks laws, but it also breaks existing patterns, paradigms, and drives innovation. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. Not abundance or curiosity, but circumstances in which delay is not an option.
Wars are, in that sense, the most ruthless form of necessity humanity knows. Those who lose, disappear. That existential pressure produces something no innovation program has ever managed to replicate. Namely, the absolute willingness to go all in, without a time horizon, without a return requirement.
Every war begins with the weapons of the previous one. The cavalry that entered Europe in 1914 was equipped with the mindset of Waterloo. Within four years, the trench had given rise to the tank, the airplane had found its military purpose, and the blockade had turned the submarine into a strategic instrument. Not because engineers had suddenly become smarter, but because the consequence of standing still was death. Necessity compressed decades of technological development into months.
The Second World War accelerated this pattern. Radar, jet propulsion, the first programmable computer, penicillin on an industrial scale, the first structured operational research. They did not arise from curiosity, but from panic. The Allies cracked the Enigma code because the Atlantic convoys would otherwise be lost. The Americans built the atomic bomb because they feared the Germans would get there first. The urgency was not artificial; it was deadly and real.
The Cold War that followed proved that the dynamic does not stop when the shooting ends. The Korean War, the first hot conflict of that era, showed how incorrect assumptions about the opponent determine the outcome. General MacArthur assumed China was too weakened to intervene after an exhausting civil war. Mao nevertheless chose to intervene, because a US ally on his border constituted an existential threat. Wars are not only won through technological superiority, but also through the opponent’s willingness to absorb costs the attacker did not anticipate. That willingness generates its own improvisations, its own innovations, its own surprises.
The counterargument is that peacetime has also produced its own innovations. But even then, military necessity is often present. The internet grew out of Arpanet, a military communication project designed to survive a nuclear war. GPS was developed for nuclear missile guidance. The semiconductor found its first mass market in military systems. The first satellites were military. Even the smartphone builds on a stack of technologies that originated in defense research.
Peacetime does innovate, but more slowly and selectively. The difference lies in speed and radicalism. Wars do not bring improvement, but replacement. It is creative destruction in practice.
The current war with Iran illustrates this mechanism. Iran does not possess the technological superiority of the United States, but has deliberately chosen a strategy that targets the opponent’s weakest point: the global energy supply. By attacking oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf States and blocking the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran is forcing an innovation race that extends beyond the battlefield.
The necessity of securing energy chains, accelerating alternatives to fossil dependence, and modernizing maritime defense systems is channeling billions of dollars in investment into technologies that would otherwise have remained on the margins for years. As every war generates its own innovation cycle, this energy war is forcing acceleration in areas such as renewable energy, autonomous shipping, and the cyber defense of critical infrastructure.
Technologies developed in wartime spill over into the civilian economy and structurally increase growth potential for the generations that follow. The postwar decades of the twentieth century were so exceptionally productive in part because they could build on a generation of inventions forced by necessity. Scarcity of time, of resources, and of alternatives repeatedly proves to be the most reliable catalyst for the impossible.
Artificial intelligence is, in this light, the latest child of that tradition. The technology was funded for decades by defense budgets before achieving its civilian breakthrough, and it is now being accelerated by geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. Where the Cold War between the United States and Russia drove the space race, the competition between China and the US is driving an AI race.
The productivity gains that AI promises are inherently disinflationary and can increase the structural growth potential of economies for generations, just as radar, the computer, and the internet did for earlier generations. The same conflicts that disrupt financial markets in the short term—such as rising oil prices, higher interest rates, and geopolitical uncertainty—will, in the long term, finance technological leaps that enable the next period of prosperity.
War destroys, but the necessity it creates also builds. Those who look only at the destruction miss half the story.
Han Dieperink is chief investment officer at Auréus Vermogensbeheer. Earlier in his career, he was chief investment officer at Rabobank and Schretlen & Co.