Defense, energy, robotics and government have historically been classic no-go areas for VC investment. These 'hard' industries have slow procurement cycles, tight regulatory oversight and high-friction customer migration in common. Legacy software vendors serving them have benefited from a barrier of complexity to innovate slowly without facing the risk of customer churn. This made the victims of this year's AI anxiety-driven sell-off all the more dramatic. Software juggernauts serving heavy industries ' IBM, SAP, ServiceNow, Schneider Electric ' have gone from safe bets to being the subject of investor scrutiny. While headlines have attributed that sell-off to quick-fire Anthropic launches of tools for vertical industries, there's more at play. The macro trend is a newfound founder enthusiasm to build AI-native entrants in legacy industries, and the backing they're enjoying from VCs that can see the once-in-a-generation opportunity to disrupt entire industries. Be it the U.S. or across Europe, policymakers are prioritizing investment in grid upgrades, transportation networks and public sector infrastructure, while also re-examining procurement and compliance systems that have slowed the adoption of emerging technologies that could bring said industrial resilience about quicker....

American Jews have achieved unprecedented safety, integration, and success in the United States, yet we carry a long historical memory in which periods of apparent security elsewhere, again and again, ended abruptly in exclusion, violence, murder, or expulsion. I grew up with a deeply personal connection to the Holocaust and with sensitivity to how the erosion of democratic institutions and the descent into fascism enabled the rise of Nazism. My father, Richard Sonnenfeldt, was a German Jewish refugee who fled to England in 1938 and then, at 23, became the chief interpreter for the American prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, and ultimately Hermann Goring's personal interpreter. Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the United States is not Weimar Germany or Eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement, where deadly pogroms against Jews were a regular feature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America's constitutional order'independent courts, federalism, a free press, and a robust civil society'provides formidable safeguards against the translation of social hostility into state persecution. Jews are not a tolerated caste here but full participants across every sector of civic life: business, academia, media, the professions, government, the arts. Jewish confidence in America's resilience is not foolish. The challenge is to hold that warranted confidence alongside a warranted fear....

Studies of the airline industry show that resilience does not have to come at the cost of efficiency. Managers in a variety of industries can meet both objectives by ensuring that operational performance metrics reflect true customer priorities; using predictive analytics and data-driven insights to allocate system buffers where they generate the most meaningful resilience benefits; and shaping the options offered to customers to improve their company's resilience to disruptions. Operational efficiency is critical for both financial success and customer satisfaction. Efficient systems, characterized by minimal buffers and idle time, tight schedules, and maximum asset utilization, allow organizations to do more with less, thereby boosting revenue and appealing to time-sensitive customers. However, such systems often lack resilience, increasing an organization's vulnerability to operational disruptions. The tension between efficiency and resilience is especially visible in the airline industry. A resilient airline network can absorb disruptions, protect passengers from severe service failures, and recover quickly without incurring excessive costs. But airlines also face constant pressure to offer faster itineraries and maximize the use of costly resources, such as their fleet of aircraft and flight crews. Meanwhile, passengers strongly favor efficiency as well, in the form of shorter travel times with minimal layovers. Those preferences can lead to itineraries with little to no time buffer to absorb the delays or cancellations common to air travel, leaving passengers frustrated and stuck waiting in terminals. Moreover, such disruptions propagate throughout interconnected networks, affecting passengers, flight connections, crew schedules, and aircraft positioning. These ripple effects result in significant financial and reputational damage for airlines.1...

By the United States military's estimation, about 1,550 marine vessels'oil tankers, bulk carriers, container ships, and more'are idling in the Persian Gulf right now. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively blockaded, their crews, many of them uninvolved in the ongoing war with Iran, are slowly using up supplies as they await safe passage through the mine-filled waterway. Donald Trump announced on Sunday that the U.S. would rescue these 'victims of circumstance' by guiding them out of the war zone in an as-yet-unspecified way. On Monday, though, Iran's military rejected the plan, warning that American military forces would be attacked if they approached the strait. Both sides fired shots yesterday, although the U.S. claims that the cease-fire remains in place. The fact that Iran's leaders are apparently willing to risk violating the delicate monthlong truce emphasizes just how fiercely they want to protect their hold over the strait. The past 65 days of war have badly punished Iran: Its leaders are dead, its navy and air force have been depleted, and its economy and infrastructure have been decimated. 'If we leave right now,' Trump said last week, 'it would take them 20 years to rebuild.' But amid the destruction, the country has also found new forms of leverage. Iran had not previously exercised this degree of control over the Strait of Hormuz, and before the war, the country could not have been confident that it would be able to do so. Even in its diminished state, the Iranian military has managed to deter enemy ships and outmaneuver anti-air systems, maintaining that grip on the strait while costing the U.S. billions....