The GPS in your phone was developed by the military. The AI writing your emails is training drone targeting.
Literal meaning: Dual-use technology describes technology that has both legitimate civilian applications and potential military or weapons-related applications — where the same capability serves different purposes depending on who deploys it and to what end. The concept is central to export control law, arms control policy, and technology governance.
Origin: The concept is established in international law — the EU Dual-Use Regulation (2021) and US Export Administration Regulations govern the export of technologies with military applications. It applies historically to nuclear materials, precision manufacturing, and chemical precursors. In the digital age, the concept extends to AI systems, geospatial data, facial recognition, encryption, and communications infrastructure — where the civilian and military applications are often indistinguishable at the product level.
Technologies developed for civilian purposes that have direct military applications — where the boundary between them is structurally porous, not incidentally crossed.
The Appeal: Most powerful technologies are dual-use by nature. Restricting dual-use technology restricts both applications simultaneously — including beneficial ones. Export controls and governance frameworks attempt to manage the military dimension without prohibiting the civilian one; the difficulty of that distinction is part of what makes the governance so contested.
The Friction: Digital-Military-Industrial Complex is the structural context: the entanglement of tech and defence makes dual-use not an edge case but the normal condition of advanced technology. Niantic’s LGM is a current example: trained on Pokémon Go player data, it has civilian mapping applications and military spatial intelligence applications — and the boundary between them is the subject of McClendon’s “I could definitely see it” non-answer. Strava is the inverse case: not a product built for dual application, but a civilian fitness app whose aggregated data accidentally became military intelligence. Its 2017 global heatmap, built from a billion tracked activities, let analyst Nathan Ruser identify the outlines of secret US bases in Afghanistan and Syria in January 2018 — soldiers jogging with the app on had mapped their own forward operating bases more precisely than public satellite imagery ever had. The vulnerability was never solved, only relocated: in August 2026, the director of the Dutch military intelligence service MIVD was found to have kept a public Strava account for years, revealing his home address and travel patterns — the same year Dutch broadcaster Omroep Gelderland used the app to identify nine hundred soldiers by name and address.
Why This Matters: Dual-use technology names the structural porosity of the civilian/military distinction in advanced technology. Once you see it, “this is a civilian product” is not a sufficient answer to the question of what it enables. The follow-up question is always: by whom, and to what end?
Related terms: Digital-Military-Industrial Complex · Military-Industrial Complex · Revolving Door · “I could definitely see it.” · Brussels Effect · Reconstruction Economy · Red Teamer
Read more:
- EU Dual-Use Regulation 2021/821 — European Union (2021)
- The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem — Dafoe, A. (2019). Journal of Global Security Studies
- The European Union Updates Its Control List of Dual-Use Items: Focus on Emerging Technologies — Pitet, J. (2025). Entropy Law — on emerging technologies treated as simultaneously civilian and security-sensitive under EU export controls
- 2025 Update of the EU Control List of Dual-Use Items — European Commission (2025). Directorate-General for Trade and Economic Security — on updated EU export controls for dual-use technologies including quantum systems, semiconductors, advanced computing, biotechnology, and AI-related infrastructure
- All the Ways Big Tech Fuels ICE and CBP — Wired (2026). — on cloud infrastructure, Palantir, data integration, and AI systems supporting immigration enforcement
- Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases — Hern, A. (2018, 28 januari). The Guardian
- MIVD-directeur Peter Reesink was jarenlang te volgen via een openbaar Strava-account — Verhulsdonk, I. (2026, 7 augustus). NRC