Sixty-five

That's how many active state-based conflicts the world is currently running, the highest since records began in 1946. Not a spike. A structural shift. The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) put it plainly: "Despite a sharp decrease in battle-related deaths from 2022 to 2023, the past four years have been the most violent period since the end of the Cold War."

The post-Cold War calm is over.

Here's the part founders should sit with.

Smaller countries can now defend themselves against bigger ones in ways that were impossible five years ago. Drones. AI targeting. Cheap precision weapons. Commercial location data weaponized against deployed troops.

The Economist writes that smart tech makes war a dumber choice but a cheaper one to start. Ross Douthat of the NYT points out that America's mighty military is built for the wrong century. Every defense ministry on the planet is now writing the same memo, asking whether half its force structure will be obsolete in a decade.

That memo is a market.

When a $4 billion legacy platform becomes a question mark, the budget doesn't disappear. It moves. It moves toward whatever is cheap, mobile, software-defined, and buildable in 18 months rather than 18 years.

Then there's the AI line. JD Vance told Air Force Academy graduates this week that the military should never allow AI to make life-or-death decisions. The Pentagon is moving forward with AI in war anyway.

The gap between the stated policy and the deployed reality is exactly where the next decade of defense procurement gets written, and exactly where the governance fight gets ugly.

The incumbents are optimized for the war that isn't coming. The buyers know it. The capital is starting to move.

If half the existing force structure is obsolete inside a decade, who is building the half that replaces it, and are you early or late?

Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.

-Marc

Founder @ Brigadoon

Brigadoon | Know What's Next.

*****

Marc Ross specializes in Geopolitics + Communications for global business, at the intersection of commerce and governments. Founder of Caracal Global, a communications consultancy serving Fortune 1,000 companies, private equity, and founder-led businesses; and Brigadoon, an intelligence network connecting founders and civic leaders since 2013. DET, WAS, EDI, LON. marc@caracal.global | marc@brigadoon.live | +1 202 596 5270

The best idea rarely wins

We like to believe markets reward the strongest idea. The better mousetrap. The cooler EV. The better restaurant service.

It is a comforting story. It is also false.

Ideas do not spread because they are good.

They spread because someone built the machinery to spread them. The idea that wins is usually the idea that traveled, not the right idea.

Founders feel this and resent it. You have the insight. You have lived inside the problem for years. You can see the thing the market cannot. And yet the loudest voice in your category belongs to someone with a worse product and a better cadence.

That gap is not unfair. It is mechanical.

Spreading an idea is a discipline, not a personality trait.

Event, strategy, tactics, organization, consistency, know-how.

E-STOCK.

Most people start with tactics, "let's do a podcast," and skip the five things that make the podcast matter. Then they decided their idea was not strong enough. It was. The distribution was.

Here is the part that founders miss. The know-how you cannot outsource, the thing only you can say, is the only thing that compounds. Anyone can buy reach. No one else has your view from inside the room. That is the asset. Most of you are sitting on it.

The companies that define the next decade are not the ones with the best technology, best ideas, or best processes. They are the ones whose ideas arrived first, traveled furthest, and shaped the conversation before anyone else showed up.

So ask yourself the uncomfortable one.

What do you know that the market hasn't heard yet, and what is your excuse for keeping it quiet?

-Marc

Brigadoon | Know What's Next.

MI5 and US Soccer made the same mistake

Think the expensive travel team is the path to the US Men's National Team. Think again.

Only about a third of Coach Pochettino's World Cup 26 came from that affluent club-soccer world. The rest came from El Paso, Pico Rivera, and Fresno, or from free European academies. Nineteen of the twenty-six reached the national team through a system that charged their family nothing. The expensive path was never the path.

The pattern is old. In the 1930s, MI5 hunted Soviet spies by watching working-class communist émigrés in Hampstead, and it missed the actual recruits entirely, because it could not imagine that idealistic young men from Cambridge would betray their country. It assumed the threat looked a certain way, so it stared at the wrong people while the real ones walked past in good suits.

Founders do this every day. You assume the talent comes from the logos you respect, the threat comes from the competitor you can see, and the next big customer looks like your current ones. You build your whole pipeline around what you expect, and then you are stunned by what you missed.

The uncomfortable part is that the thing you are looking for, the hire, the rival, the idea, is developing right now in the exact place your assumptions told you to ignore.

What are you so sure about that you've stopped looking, and what is growing in the spot you refuse to watch?

Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.

-Marc A. Ross

Founder @ Brigadoon

Brigadoon | Know what's next.

Google makes an agentic turn

Three years ago, the smartest critique of Google was that it had too many peacetime generals.

Capable people. Big budgets. No urgency. A culture where the audience that mattered was your manager and your peers, not the messy, warring market outside. The company optimized for not losing rather than for winning.

At I/O 2026, Google looked like a different company. Not because the models got better, though they did. Because the posture changed. Agent-first development platform. Agents in Search. An agentic shopping cart. A general-purpose agent meant to act across your apps. The pitch was not "we built a tool." It was "now anyone can be a builder."

Here is what I keep turning over.

Google did not win this by out-engineering the upstarts on raw capability. It is winning, where it is winning, on distribution. Three billion Android devices. Search. YouTube. Workspace. The agent does not have to be the best in the world if it is already sitting on the surface where the work happens.

For founders, that is the uncomfortable lesson of the moment. The incumbent that looked asleep was actually holding the one asset you cannot raise a Series B to buy: a place to stand. When the giant decides to fight, it does not need a better mousetrap. It needs to wake up.

The defense and dual-use world is full of the same setup. Slow, well-funded, internally focused organizations that own the distribution, the contracts, the relationships, and the trust. They have been peaceful for a long time.

What happens to your edge the day the sleeping incumbent in your category decides it is at war?

Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.

-Marc A. Ross

Founder @ Brigadoon

Brigadoon | Know what's next.

You can always reach me @ marc@brigadoon.live.