“Nothing moves in the kill zone.”
That was the key line in our pitch at European Defense Tech Hackathon Munich 2026, where we finished as one of three winning teams. It’s one I think about a lot.
We built for what happens under the surface. If the air above a unit belongs to someone else, you move what keeps them alive below ground. This is as old as warfare itself: royal Assyrian inscriptions describe undermining tactics around 700 BCE.
But the concrete solution was never really the point for me. I wanted to work on something that matters and learn as much as I could doing it. What’s stayed with me is the condition that makes it necessary: a soldier who can’t move, can’t be resupplied, can’t be pulled out when they’re hit, because there’s a threat overhead they have no good way to answer.
We’ve gotten good at protecting the things that stay put. Bases, cities, command posts, the high-value assets sitting on a map. Air defense was built to stop something big and fast, heading for a building that doesn’t move. We’re adapting that playbook to drones about as quickly as we can, but it’s still static defense.
The person actually out there (sitting in a dugout, moving forward) is the one with the least between them and the sky. Going underground is one way around that. It’s a good one.
That problem keeps getting louder. The kill zone used to be something you could mark on a map and plan against. If you knew where the enemy artillery was, you knew where they could hit. Now it’s wherever a soldier happens to be standing, and it moves with them.
That’s a gap. Still turning over what closes it.