The trouble with talking about militarisation at TU Delft

TU Delft is militarising. At the executive level, declarations of intent (in Dutch) were signed by the previous Rector with the Ministry of Defence. For almost a year now, YES!Delft has been hosting a Dutch Defence innovation centre called MINDBase. More is likely to come, with scrapped cuts in education being replaced by promises of up to 10% of the defence budget going towards ‘joint research projects with knowledge institutions’.

The breadth of commonsense opinions available seems to be that this militarisation is desirable. The space for debate is focused on the practical matters of how (much) TU Delft militarises, not whether it should at all. In a Delta interview, former Rector Tim van der Hagen stated that ‘we want to do this very carefully and not rush’. Even in a nice critical opinion piece by Sander Otte it was conceded that defence research is important, but should proceed with caution and not come at the cost of further blocking or stalling of climate-related priorities.

In the midst of it all, I admit I feel like a madman. As far as I am concerned, the conversation has been on the wrong foot since the moment we accepted the word ‘defence’ instead of ‘military’. Frankly, it strikes me as Orwellian. Naming something as defensive does not make it so. I would even argue that there are no strictly ‘defensive’ military technologies. As parts of a whole, military technologies help facilitate the use of force. Even an ‘air defence’ system frees up other assets for other ends. In other cases, they can be repurposed.

At best the dichotomy of defensive versus offensive military technologies is troubled, running on a hazy mix of assumptions about technologies. At worst, it is a conceptual mistake which needs serious correction. These concerns extend to how we describe research directions and industries themselves. Even if the concept of ‘defence’ could be salvaged, I would argue we aren’t using it right.

We helped one of the largest air operations of the 21st century: the illegal war on Iran

For instance, TU Delft describes its collaboration with Lockheed Martin and their internship programme on the F-35 as a ‘defence industry collaboration’. In The Netherlands, F-35s play a role in the forward deployment of NATO’s nuclear arms. In the past weeks, the F-35 has been extensively used in one of the largest air operations of the 21st century – the illegal war on Iran initiated by the United States and Israel. We are now, as an institution, a part of that story. We helped. Yet the conversation retains the vocabulary of ‘defence’.

Perhaps it’s because my research focus concerns military technology and ethics that the phrasing troubles me. But I don’t think it’s just pedantry. Recently, a colleague was tasked with organising a conference on ethics and military technologies. He was asked to change the wording from ‘military AI’ to ‘defence AI’ after worries about the offensive connotations of the term ‘military’. To be clear, the request hardly constitutes an intentional attempt to deceive. Nevertheless, well intentioned attempts at ‘positive framing’ can mislead us. They reinforce the notion that we can simply stipulate our way into talking only about military technologies which won’t be used unjustly.

Though I would prefer to go on at length about these concepts, the discussion of militarisation sits in the shadow of obstacles far larger than issues of framing and conceptual confusion. We have learned in the past weeks that TU Delft passed names of staff members to the police due in part to critical columns in Delta. Meanwhile, as TU Delft militarises, the demand for greater measures of knowledge security and cooperation with military and intelligence institutions also increases.

At the Knowledge Security in Defence Research at TU Delft symposium which I attended in winter 2025, I learned that TU Delft intends to expand its infrastructure in the handling of classified and secret information. At the same time, we are expanding our ‘ethical infrastructure’ to handle questions about our research and our ‘defence partnerships’. In the past weeks they’ve begun inviting students and staff to train for moral deliberation chambers, the proceedings of which are of course private. Militarisation brings with it these pressures, surveillance, secrecy. It’s not exactly a recipe for academic openness.

Can we be optimistic about militarisation at TU Delft when it seems we are incapable of calling things as they are? Are we able to reckon with the costs of militarisation if there is pressure to use certain words and consequences for writing columns? How much conversational maturity are we capable of? To me the answer is clear: not much.