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Best of LinkedIn: Defense Tech CW 46/ 47 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 0: provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennus, based on the most relevant posts on LinkedIn about defense tech in CW-Forty-Six and Forty-Seven.
• 0:07
  Speaker 0: Frennus is a B-to-B market research company that equips product and strategy teams with market and competitive intelligence across the defense industry.
• 0:16
  Speaker 0: Welcome back to the Deep Dive.
• 0:19
  Speaker 0: Today, we're jumping straight into the strategic shifts we're seeing in defense tech, all based on the professional conversations from LinkedIn in calendar weeks, forty-six and forty-seven.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: And looking at the material, one thing is just crystal clear.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: There is a fundamental pivot happening right now.
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  Speaker 0: A huge one.
• 0:34
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: We're moving away from this old model of just buying, you know, single pieces of hardware.
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  Speaker 1: The whole conversation now is about integrated system.
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  Speaker 0: It's all about integration.
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  Speaker 0: Software, factories, networks.
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  Speaker 0: Even capital markets are being treated as core technologies now.
• 0:47
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: And the posts we've seen give really concrete examples of this.
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  Speaker 1: We're talking new drones, submarines, new comm systems.
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  Speaker 1: So it's
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  Speaker 0: not just theory.
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  Speaker 0: You can see it in the metal and in the code.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 1: So we've broken it all down into five major themes that really dominate the conversation.
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  Speaker 1: Let's start with the one that underpins everything else.
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  Speaker 1: the industrial base itself.
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  Speaker 0: The idea that the factory is the weapon.
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  Speaker 0: The
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  Speaker 1: factory is the weapon.
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  Speaker 1: That's the phrase you see everywhere.
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  Speaker 0: It's the shift in thinking where sheer mass production capacity is now seen as the decisive capability, maybe even more so than just having the single most advanced piece of tech.
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  Speaker 1: It's right, Stevens drove that point home really effectively.
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  Speaker 1: He argued that, you know, defense preparedness now relies almost entirely on that capacity for mass production.
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  Speaker 0: And we're seeing startups pivot hard towards that.
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  Speaker 0: Ali Java Harry pointed out that twenty twenty six seems to be the year for it.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, for sure.
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  Speaker 0: He named names Castilian, a pyrus and Dural, all committing serious capital to actually scale up their manufacturing.
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  Speaker 1: Which is a huge deal.
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  Speaker 1: You have this venture capital speed now crashing into old school industrial discipline.
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  Speaker 0: A tough combination to get right.
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  Speaker 1: Very tough.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: But they're becoming these critical players in the supply chain.
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  Speaker 1: You can see it really clearly in these strategic bottlenecks like.
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  Speaker 1: Solid rocket motors
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  Speaker 0: the SRM market.
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  Speaker 0: Matthew Fulco laid that out really well.
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  Speaker 0: It used to be this quiet little duopoly
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  Speaker 1: right complacent, but now with this massive demand It's becoming this hyper competitive Strategic industry.
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  Speaker 0: and that's where a company like Andrewle comes in exactly.
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  Speaker 1: they saw the bottleneck and just moved.
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  Speaker 1: they put seventy five million dollars of their own money into a new SRM facility in Mississippi.
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  Speaker 1: and
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  Speaker 0: what's the output they're targeting?
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  Speaker 1: It's huge Six thousand tactical motors a year by the end of twenty twenty six.
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  Speaker 0: Six thousand.
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  Speaker 0: That kind of private investment speed just completely changes the game for the big traditional primes.
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  Speaker 1: It does.
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  Speaker 1: And it's not just a U.S.
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  Speaker 1: thing either.
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  Speaker 1: Over in the U.K.
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  Speaker 1: James Lawson noted that they just opened their first resilience factory
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  Speaker 0: in Plymouth.
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: Yep.
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  Speaker 1: And its entire purpose is rapid iteration for autonomous systems.
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  Speaker 1: So the physical footprint is changing globally to reward speed.
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  Speaker 0: OK.
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  Speaker 0: So the factories are getting faster.
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  Speaker 0: That brings us to our next theme.
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  Speaker 0: What are they actually building?
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  Speaker 0: Drones and autonomy.
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  Speaker 1: And here, the conversation has moved on.
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  Speaker 1: The airframe itself.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, it's almost a commodity now.
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  Speaker 0: That's what Tom G, a senior UAV pilot, was saying, the real race is in the electronics, the stuff you don't see.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 1: The resilient, scalable electronics.
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  Speaker 1: The questions everyone's asking now are, what happens when your GPS is jammed?
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  Speaker 1: when your data links are degraded or spooced.
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  Speaker 0: How does the system handle messy partial data instead of needing a perfect
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  Speaker 1: picture?
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  Speaker 1: Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: And that onboard intelligence is enabling completely new tactics.
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  Speaker 1: Matt Bev detail AFSO's A to E strategy.
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  Speaker 0: Where they use the MQ-Nine drone as a kind of mothership.
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  Speaker 1: A mothership in a network node, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: They can send a smaller, cheaper, LTE-ist drone into the high threat areas.
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  Speaker 0: So you risk the a tradable asset, not the multi-million dollar platform.
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  Speaker 1: It's just a smarter way to distribute risk and extend your reach.
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  Speaker 1: It's about mass and intelligence.
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  Speaker 0: Which, of course, means the counter drone race is heating up just as fast.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely.
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  Speaker 1: Bochan Stochkovsky basically called, twenty twenty five, the year of the interceptor drone.
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  Speaker 1: And we're
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  Speaker 0: seeing them emerge.
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  Speaker 0: You have the European MBDA Skywarden system that Florence Dooley was talking about.
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  Speaker 1: And that AI-powered Merobs Interceptor that Mark CL highlighted.
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  Speaker 1: It did really well at a NATO live fire exercise in Poland.
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  Speaker 0: It all comes down to a race for time.
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  Speaker 1: It does.
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  Speaker 1: Wow.
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  Speaker 1: Which explains the money.
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  Speaker 1: Evan Loomis mentioned that Seas Industries just closed a five hundred and ten million dollar series D round.
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  Speaker 1: Wow.
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  Speaker 1: And their whole focus is on advanced radars that give you more time.
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  Speaker 1: They track targets minutes sooner and for much farther away than the legacy systems can.
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  Speaker 0: And in a swarm attack a few minutes is everything.
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  Speaker 0: It's
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  Speaker 1: the difference between success and failure.
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  Speaker 1: And this push for autonomy isn't just in the air either, it's going deep.
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  Speaker 1: Right,
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  Speaker 0: down into the subsurface.
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  Speaker 0: Keith King reported on Australia's massive investment, what was it, one point seven billion?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, one point seven billion dollars to mass produce the ghost shark.
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  Speaker 1: These
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  Speaker 0: are the extra large autonomous underwater vehicles.
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  Speaker 1: AUVs, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Developed with Endoral Australia.
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  Speaker 1: And these things can operate beyond five thousand meters deep.
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  Speaker 1: We're talking deep ocean ISR and strike capability.
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  Speaker 0: Which is not just about military targets, it's about protecting all that critical subsea infrastructure like internet cables.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: The defense mission is expanding into new economic territory.
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  Speaker 0: Speaking of expansion, that's a perfect lead-in to our third theme.
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  Speaker 0: The collapse of traditional domains.
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  Speaker 0: Space, firepower, and networked integration.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: It's all connected now.
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  Speaker 1: Space isn't some separate domain anymore.
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  Speaker 1: It's absolutely central to maritime, air, and ground operations.
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  Speaker 0: Joseph Aschbacher pointed out that growing link between space and marine economies.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: with ESA's Sentinel satellites enabling everything from border security to law enforcement at sea.
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  Speaker 0: And having your own way to get there remains critical.
• 5:50
  Speaker 0: Tony Toker Nielsen framed the Ariane Six rocket as this big symbol of European cooperation for sovereign access to space.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: And once you're up there, or anywhere really, you need firepower that actually works.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: It sounds basic, but reliability is everything.
• 6:03
  Speaker 0: Brian Kubic announced a record setting day for PAC-III missile intercepts at White Sands.
• 6:08
  Speaker 0: That continuous testing and proving is non-negotiable.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: But the real game changer, like we said at the top, is integration.
• 6:15
  Speaker 0: For sure.
• 6:16
  Speaker 0: Chandra Marshall and Ray Pacelli were discussing plans to integrate the European IRIST missile into the US Aegis system.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Which sounds technical, but that is a massive deal.
• 6:26
  Speaker 0: It's the first European missile ever to be integrated like that.
• 6:29
  Speaker 0: They pull
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  Speaker 1: it off, yeah.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: It would be a huge leap forward for Allied interoperability.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: A policy win and a tech win all at once.
• 6:37
  Speaker 0: You see that same logic in procurement.
• 6:39
  Speaker 0: Glenn Copeland highlighted Germany picking Lockheed Martin Canada's CMS-III-III Combat Management System.
• 6:45
  Speaker 0: It's another move toward Allied fleets that can operate as one.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: But again, none of this works.
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  Speaker 1: The missiles, the ships, the sensors, without the network tying it all together.
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  Speaker 0: The secure communication layer.
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 1: That's why you saw so much attention on things like the Airbus DCIS showcase at Steadfast Cobalt-II.
• 7:02
  Speaker 0: And that European five-g compad demonstration, that one involved Rheinmetall, SAB, and Thales showing off resilient tactical comms.
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  Speaker 0: It's not just a concept anymore.
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  Speaker 0: It's
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  Speaker 1: a deployable reality, which brings us to a tricky subject.
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  Speaker 1: We have the tech, we have the factory spinning up, but is the policy keeping pace?
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  Speaker 1: Ah,
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  Speaker 0: theme four.
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  Speaker 0: policy, strategy, and the gaps.
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  Speaker 0: And there's some real friction here.
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  Speaker 0: Sure.
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  Speaker 0: Andrew Park described the new U.S.
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  Speaker 0: acquisition reform plans from Secretary Haggsyth as a complete restructuring.
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  Speaker 1: Not just a tweak.
• 7:37
  Speaker 0: No, making speed and usable capability the absolute center of gravity for how they buy
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: things.
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  Speaker 1: But that focus on speed isn't everywhere.
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  Speaker 1: Thomas Lucas was blunt about the UK's defense posture being misaligned with current threats.
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  Speaker 0: Specifically calling out the lack of a fully funded air and missile defense strategy.
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  Speaker 1: A huge gap.
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  Speaker 1: And then you get to examples that are, well,
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  Speaker 0: almost absurd.
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  Speaker 0: The tank bubble in Germany.
• 7:59
  Speaker 0: Jonas Singer laid this out.
• 8:00
  Speaker 0: The cost for a new leopard to a tank is nearly five times the historical price.
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  Speaker 1: And at the same time, they have a massive manpower shortage.
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: They lack the four-person crews, not to mention the ten to fifteen support staff you need for every single tank.
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  Speaker 1: So you're buying thousands of vehicles you can't even operate?
• 8:17
  Speaker 0: He called it the world's most expensive parking lot.
• 8:20
  Speaker 0: It's capacity without capability.
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  Speaker 1: And you contrast that inertia with what's happening in Ukraine.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Denise Fiatokum reported on real capital flowing in now.
• 8:29
  Speaker 0: The two hundred and fifty million dollar rebuild Ukraine fund and over a hundred and forty million euros from the EU for dual use
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: tech.
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  Speaker 1: They're actively trying to integrate Ukraine into Europe's resilience strategy.
• 8:42
  Speaker 0: Which is great.
• 8:43
  Speaker 0: But Maria Chirpec and Ilya Chikinyeva pointed out that despite all the talent there, the Ukrainian defense tech sector is still massively undercapitalized to really scale up.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Ingenuity can only get you so far without.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: serious industrial investment.
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  Speaker 0: Which brings us to our final theme, the startup ecosystem and a fascinating paradox around AI.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, these startups, the so-called war unicorns, a term from Pete Modigliani, they're really driving the pace.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: You've got over a hundred and eighty billion in VC pumped into defense tech in just the last five years.
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  Speaker 0: But as you said, they're hitting some major roadblocks, especially with AI.
• 9:17
  Speaker 0: Burek Otto was on a panel about AI certification, and he flagged a core legal paradox.
• 9:23
  Speaker 0: It's a tricky one.
• 9:24
  Speaker 0: Ferry, if a human pilot makes a mistake, the human is responsible.
• 9:29
  Speaker 0: Simple enough.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 0: But an AI agent isn't a legal entity.
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  Speaker 0: So if it makes a catastrophic error, who is liable?
• 9:37
  Speaker 0: The developer, the operator.
• 9:39
  Speaker 0: the person who supplied the data.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Nobody knows.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: And that lack of clarity is a huge break on deployment.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: And
• 9:45
  Speaker 0: there's a societal hurdle too.
• 9:46
  Speaker 0: that's even stranger.
• 9:47
  Speaker 0: Burick Atta shared this thought experiment.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: The one about driving in Germany.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: That's
• 9:51
  Speaker 0: the one.
• 9:51
  Speaker 0: He said, hypothetically, AI could cut car accident rates in half.
• 9:55
  Speaker 0: A huge net gain for safety.
• 9:57
  Speaker 0: But society would likely reject the few remaining deaths if they were caused by a machine.
• 10:03
  Speaker 0: We have this paradoxical tolerance for human error that we don't extend to AI.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: It's a huge challenge.
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  Speaker 1: And it's why so much of the strategic talk comes back to software.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Brita Jacob made the case that software-defined defense is essential for deterrence and growth.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: It's about agility.
• 10:18
  Speaker 0: You see that agility with companies like ARX Robotics.
• 10:22
  Speaker 0: Stefan R. was showcasing how their software, the Mithra OS, lets them innovate in cycles measured in months.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Not years or decades, like the traditional prize.
• 10:31
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: And that speed gets you results.
• 10:33
  Speaker 0: Fast.
• 10:34
  Speaker 0: Oleksander Serban shared this incredible example from a defense tech hackathon.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: What was that like?
• 10:40
  Speaker 0: They built a prototype AI system that analyzes geotagged photos and videos.
• 10:45
  Speaker 0: So, say, for a drone sighting near an airport, it cut the emergency response time from hours.
• 10:51
  Speaker 0: down to seconds.
• 10:52
  Speaker 0: How many
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: hours to seconds?
• 10:53
  Speaker 0: Just with smarter software.
• 10:54
  Speaker 0: It's a tangible, life-saving impact.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: So if we pull all of this together, I mean, the one big takeaway from these two weeks is that we are watching the very definition of military capability change in real time.
• 11:06
  Speaker 0: It's not just about heavy metal anymore.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Not at all.
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  Speaker 1: It's about speed, it's about software, and it's about the industrial base's ability to deliver at scale.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: That's what's decisive now.
• 11:15
  Speaker 0: Which leaves us with a final, provocative thought for you to consider.
• 11:18
  Speaker 0: We're seeing governments buy incredibly expensive human intensive equipment like those German tanks that need huge vulnerable crews.
• 11:25
  Speaker 0: At the same time, frontline reports all stress that the human operator is the single most valuable and vulnerable target.
• 11:32
  Speaker 0: So given that societal paradox that Barakatata mentioned, our strange tolerance for human error, how quickly will procurement systems adapt?
• 11:40
  Speaker 0: How fast will they pivot to prioritizing force-multiplying autonomy over systems that demand the one asset we can least afford to lose?
• 11:48
  Speaker 0: If you enjoyed this deep dive, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 11:51
  Speaker 0: Also check out our other editions on ICT and Tech Insights, HealthTech, Cloud, Digital Products and Services, Artificial Intelligence, and Sustainability in Green ICT.
• 12:00
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