The journal of defence technology and strategic futures.
The World Being Built, And The People Building It
Defence technology is no longer a specialist concern. It is where geopolitics, industrial policy, artificial intelligence, and the future of open societies collide. The decisions being made now — about autonomous systems, space infrastructure, undersea networks, biotechnology, cyber capability — will shape the world for decades. They deserve more serious coverage than they currently receive.
Orbis Futura Review is a publication for that coverage. We sit at the intersection of serious journalism and serious research: literary in register, rigorous in method, independent in judgment.
Our Thesis
Most defence writing is either institutional or transactional. Academic journals are careful and slow. Trade press is fast and captured. Think-tank output is thoughtful but often cautious about saying what it actually thinks. The layer in between — technically literate, independent, willing to say what the evidence supports — barely exists. It is almost entirely absent from Europe, and almost entirely absent from the people who understand these systems best: the researchers, engineers, and scientists building them.
Orbis Futura Review exists to publish those voices.
What We Publish
Research. Peer-reviewed analyses, technical primers, and original work by researchers and practitioners. Rigorous, but written for readers, not reviewers.
Essays. Commissioned long-form pieces on strategy, doctrine, industrial policy, governance, and the geopolitics of capability. Editor-reviewed, opinionated where the evidence supports it, written with literary ambition.
Signals. Shorter dispatches — field reports, technical annotations on current events, reviews, and notes from practitioners.
Who We Publish
We are built around a simple premise: the most interesting thinking on defence technology is being done by people you have not yet heard of. PhD students and postdocs. Research engineers. Junior fellows. Officers doing graduate work. Engineers at the labs and startups where these systems are actually built. We commission from this cohort deliberately. Established voices are welcome; emerging ones are our purpose.
If you are a researcher or technologist with something to say, we want to hear from you. We read every pitch, we edit with care, and we publish work that earns our pages.