Welcome back to the #54 edition of The New Defense Post!

In this edition, we'll cover:

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On October 22, ICEYE and Nokia signed a letter of intent with Ukraine's Ministry of Defence to explore building sovereign satellite communications for the country. (ICEYE)

The two Finnish companies announced their partnership on October 1. ICEYE, best known for its radar imaging satellites, and Nokia want to sell governments their own broadband satellite networks in low Earth orbit. The customer would own the satellites, the ground stations and the terminals.

ICEYE already sells radar constellations to governments this way and says it delivered Poland's system in under a year. The first communications satellites are expected to launch in 2028. (ICEYE)

🗣 Rafal Modrzewski, ICEYE CEO and co-founder, on October 1: “Nations must be able to fully own and control their communications, without dependency on a foreign commercial operator's terms of service.” (ICEYE)

📰 Our Take: The letter is a timed response to the recent Starshield drama. For more than a week, Ukrainian officials say, the military version of Starlink was capped at 160 km/h, which made it harder to intercept Russian drones. Both Elon Musk and the U.S. government dodged accountability for the slowdown. (Reuters)

Ukraine and Europe cannot rely on Starlink in a war. But ICEYE and Nokia won't end that dependence anytime soon. Their first satellites are planned for 2028, and their system is intended to complement existing networks. An alternative also needs enough coverage and capacity to support military operations, while dealing with launch bottlenecks and Russian jamming.

Jonatan's guest article explained these problems and made the case for using high-altitude aircraft alongside satellites.

On October 22, Denmark announced it will buy its first long-range precision strike missiles: Kongsberg's Joint Strike Missile for its F-35 fighters and the ground-launched Anthem cruise missile from U.S. startup Covenant. The size of the order hasn't been made public. (Danish Ministry of Defence, Reuters)

We covered Covenant in #49 when it came out of stealth only a few weeks ago, having raised just over $250 million. The company says it has flown Anthem more than 200 times and wants to sell it for a mid-six-figure price per missile once serial production starts. Denmark's missiles are to be built in Leipzig, where Covenant plans to begin production in early 2027. (CTech, Defense News)

🗣 Jeppe Bruus, Danish Defense Minister: “These acquisitions represent a significant step toward improving Denmark's self-defense capabilities, strengthening NATO, and enhancing our capacity to strike back.” (Defense News)

📰 Our Take: Denmark is buying an established missile and a brand-new one at the same time. Kongsberg's Joint Strike Missile is a known weapon. Anthem hasn't been used in combat. Covenant wants to make it cheap enough to buy in large numbers. The company plans to start production in Leipzig in 2027. Europe keeps talking about defense sovereignty. In this case, that means buying from an American startup that builds its missiles in Europe. (CTech, Defense News)

The past two weeks could change how the public thinks about cybersecurity and AI. Two people outside the tech industry have already asked me about it. The biggest story was about two critical flaws in PHP, the language behind WordPress and much of the web. The flaws had been in the code for more than a decade, and AI helped researchers find them and turn them into working attacks. (Wiz)

These incidents are part of a bigger trend. In April, Anthropic announced Mythos Preview, a model so good at finding security flaws that only a few dozen companies got access. In July, Epoch AI counted around 2,500 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities reported by 21 software vendors and open-source projects. That was about five times their highest monthly total before the Mythos announcement. (CNBC, Epoch AI)

But restricting access to one model only buys time. The best open-weight models, which anyone can download and run, are only 6 to 7 months behind the leading closed models in cybersecurity tests. Models close to what Anthropic held back in April will soon be available to anyone, including attackers. They are cheap to run, and successful attacks can be highly profitable: Imagine thousands of AI hackers searching for vulnerabilities around the clock, each targeting a different one.

Human teams cannot keep up with that volume of attacks on their own. That was the warning from OpenAI's Michael Dalton at Black Hat in August, where he discussed the Hugging Face incident and called for automating both finding and fixing vulnerabilities. We are heading for a world where agents attack, and other agents defend. (Black Hat talk)

That creates a huge market for cybersecurity agents, and investors are already betting on it. By September, early-stage cybersecurity startups had raised more than in all of 2025. Armadin, founded by Mandiant's Kevin Mandia, is valued at over $2.5 billion just seven months after emerging from stealth, while Horizon3 raised $250 million in July.

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