The Brown M&M Test for Defence Investment
David Lee Roth used to demand a bowl of M&Ms backstage with all the brown ones removed. It wasn't a rock star tantrum. Van Halen's stage show required complex rigging and pyrotechnics, and the technical requirements were buried deep in the contract. If the brown M&Ms were still in the bowl, the promoter hadn't read the details. A cheap signal that told you something specific: these people aren't paying attention to what matters.
I went to more than ten defense expos last year. After a while, I started doing something similar. I look for battery manufacturers.
A cheap signal
At expos in Denmark, the US, and the UK, I saw mostly big, expensive, precise manned systems designed for a battlefield that existed five years ago. The usual comms providers were there, the usual component suppliers. But very few battery manufacturers. At expos in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Poland, I saw BTRY — a Ukrainian company making swappable power systems for drones, ground robots, anything unmanned.
Battery manufacturers at a regular military expo are new. They're only there because unmanned platforms across every domain — land, sea, air — all need energy. When you see them, it tells you the people here are adapting to an unmanned future. When you don't, it tells you the opposite.
That's all the test tells you. A canary in the coalmine, not an investment thesis. But it points to a bigger question: how do you actually make good decisions when an entire domain is in flux?
Why this signal matters
When a domain is well understood — stable technology, proven doctrine, things evolving slowly — it makes sense to reduce deviation from plan. Buy proven systems. Follow best practices — because they exist and they're valid.
When a domain is in rapid flux, you need the opposite. Reduce the cost of change. Modular components, quick iteration, the ability to reassemble as the situation shifts.
Right now, everything in military conflict is changing at once. Technology, doctrine, tactics, training, organisational structures — all moving faster than any procurement cycle can follow. And it's not one thing changing. Generations of knowledge about massing troops, concentrating firepower, and coordinating movement are all being challenged simultaneously by battlefield transparency and lethal drones.
I'll admit I had a hard time understanding this. In 2024, two years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I kept meeting military officers who seemed stuck in the early stages of grief — denial, anger. It frustrated me. But after visiting Ukraine and seeing the scale of what's actually changing — brigade R&D units becoming major forces, 4.5 million drones in 2025 needing to be built at more than 375,000 a month in distributed locations — I gained a different understanding for their difficulty. It's not stubbornness. When everything you've mastered is shifting under your feet simultaneously, that takes time to absorb.
Battery manufacturers at a military expo are a sign that an ecosystem has started to move. Their near-absence tells you it hasn't. This was the test in 2025. By 2026, the signal will shift — the canary will be something else. That's the nature of a rapidly evolving domain.
The shift from platforms to components happens in every technology wave. If you've been through one, you'll recognise the pattern.
The skill that transfers
During a brigade exercise in northeastern Estonia around 2016, I watched Veiko-Vello Palm — then an active-duty brigade commander, now COO at Frankenburg Technologies — gather dozens of officers and NCOs around a 20 by 20 metre terrain model that his staff had spent half a day building. In the military, you learn to build these from your first days as a conscript — my squad built our first one out of sticks and moss in a pine forest near Soodla in 1999. It scales from squad level all the way up to brigade, and beyond that to nation states. You don't make decisions without seeing the landscape first. People die if you do — including you, which tends to ruin the rest of your afternoon.
Palm made an Estonian company commander physically walk across the model and shake hands with a battalion commander from another nation. The handshake represented the brigade commander's intent — why a certain manoeuvre had to happen, where two units needed to link up, and why it mattered.
Seven days later, that company commander said something I haven't forgotten. At one point his battalion had started overreacting to enemy advances and the orders coming down reflected that. But because he'd walked that model and shaken the man's hand, he understood what the brigade commander actually intended. He held to the intent instead of following the panic one level up. That turned out to be key.
Now here's the thing I find interesting. When I describe mapping a value chain — every component, where it sits in its evolution, what's stable, what's moving, what has alternatives — people with military backgrounds get it cold. Of course you'd see the whole landscape before allocating resources. That's not a methodology to them. That's common sense.
Most decision-makers don't operate this way — whether in boardrooms or national governments. Decisions about where billions go get made through many different channels and signals, but rarely by first mapping the underlying landscape. Not because the people are stupid — because the tool isn't in their vocabulary the way it's in a soldier's.
The map before the money
Mapping a value chain before allocating capital is the closest thing I've found to an unfair advantage. It shows you what a quick signal like the battery test can't: where each component actually sits, which parts have alternative pipelines at different stages of maturity, and which way the landscape is moving.
The brown M&M test is free. Five minutes on an expo floor tells you whether the people in the room are adapting to the world as it is or selling the world as it was.
The mapping takes work. But once you've seen a landscape the way that company commander saw the terrain after walking the model — clearly enough to hold your nerve when everyone around you is reacting — you don't go back to deciding without one.
The map won't tell you what to decide. It'll show you what everyone else in the room is missing.
Hanno Jarvet is a strategy consultant based in Tallinn, working at the intersection of defence, dual-use technology, and strategic adaptation. He uses Wardley Mapping and situational awareness frameworks to help organisations see their strategic environment clearly — and act on what they see.