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Best of LinkedIn: Defense Tech CW 04/ 05 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frenness.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: based on the most relevant posts on LinkedIn about defense tech and CWO four and O five.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Frenes is a B to B market research company that eclips product and strategy teams with market and competitive intelligence across the defense industry.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: So it's the start of February twenty twenty six.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: And looking at the landscape right now it feels like the defense tech industry is kind of holding its breath.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: We aren't just seeing new gadgets anymore.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: We're seeing the foundational doctrines of warfare well shift in real
• 0:30
  Speaker 0: time.
• 0:30
  Speaker 0: It definitely feels.
• 0:31
  Speaker 0: You know, we've moved past the look at this cool drone phase, right?
• 0:35
  Speaker 0: And we're straight into the how do we actually build a military around this stuff phase, right?
• 0:39
  Speaker 0: The novelty is wearing off and the let's say reality of deployment is setting in
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: exactly.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: and Looking at the stack of sources we have for this week, calendar weeks four and five, a mission for this deep dive is pre-specific.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: We need to parse the signal from the noise.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: There's just so much out there, flashy demos, press releases, startup hype, but you know, you and I, we represent the listener here.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: We need to figure out what is actually deployment ready.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: We
• 1:05
  Speaker 0: need to find the capabilities that survive contact with reality.
• 1:09
  Speaker 0: Looking at the research, three big themes stood out to me.
• 1:12
  Speaker 0: First, we have the evolution of drones and counter UAS towards like true robot ecosystems.
• 1:19
  Speaker 0: that's getting messy and crowded on the ground.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: And then I guess the software layer, AI and autonomy are finally penetrating high-end warfare.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: And we're talking ASW and air combat, not just chatbots.
• 1:29
  Speaker 0: And finally, the strategic layer, the massive shift towards data-driven warfare and, well, the industrial funding boom that hit in twenty twenty five.
• 1:38
  Speaker 0: It turns out writing the code is the easy part.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Building the factory and finding the talent, that's the hard part.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: So let's get right into the mud.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Theme one, drones and counter UAS, the kinetic frontline.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: I want to start with a piece of intel that sounds like science fiction, but it's just gritty tactical reality from Ukraine.
• 1:57
  Speaker 0: You're looking at the robot logistics insight.
• 1:58
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
• 1:59
  Speaker 0: From Tim DeZitter.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: That's the one.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: He highlighted this doctrinal signal from the Pokrovsk front.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Here's the scenario.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: A ground robot, a UGV malfunctions during a mission.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Now, standard procedure for the last hundred years says you send a couple of soldiers to go get the gear.
• 2:17
  Speaker 0: Which exposes them to artillery.
• 2:19
  Speaker 0: Snipers, you know those ubiquitous FPV drones.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Right, so instead the unit dispatched a second robot to go retrieve the broken one, a robot towing a robot.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: And
• 2:28
  Speaker 0: what stuck out to me in Desider's analysis wasn't just that they did it, it was how long it took.
• 2:32
  Speaker 0: Fifteen
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: hours.
• 2:33
  Speaker 0: Yeah, a fifteen hour operation.
• 2:35
  Speaker 0: Which,
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, that sounds incredibly inefficient to me.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: If I'm a commander, do I really want to tie up resources for fifteen hours just to drag a busted chassis back to base?
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Wouldn't it be faster to just send a team?
• 2:47
  Speaker 0: Faster.
• 2:47
  Speaker 0: Yes.
• 2:48
  Speaker 0: But safer.
• 2:49
  Speaker 0: Absolutely not.
• 2:50
  Speaker 0: And that's the critical takeaway here.
• 2:51
  Speaker 0: This is about force preservation.
• 2:54
  Speaker 0: Fifteen hours for a robot is cheap compared to fifteen minutes of exposure for a human squad.
• 2:59
  Speaker 0: These interpoints out that we're moving from single gadgets to a ground robotics ecosystem.
• 3:05
  Speaker 0: It's unmanned sustainment.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: So the robot isn't just the spear tip.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: It's the ambulance in the tow truck too.
• 3:11
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 3:12
  Speaker 0: And once you start building an ecosystem like that, you run into engineering problems.
• 3:16
  Speaker 0: I mean, if we have robots rescuing robots, these machines are getting complex.
• 3:20
  Speaker 0: For sure.
• 3:21
  Speaker 0: And we had a really sharp critique this week from Scott Davis about how we're building them.
• 3:25
  Speaker 0: I
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: saw that.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: He's going after the industries.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: obsession with software.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: His argument is, we're over-engineering code to fix, well, bad hardware design.
• 3:36
  Speaker 0: It's a classic trap.
• 3:37
  Speaker 0: Take the drone dilemma.
• 3:38
  Speaker 0: You want to fly high to cover a large area, but you need to fly low to see details or drop a payload.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Right, and doing both just eats up battery.
• 3:46
  Speaker 0: It eats up battery and requires incredibly complex flight logic, complex autonomy.
• 3:52
  Speaker 0: David says, stop trying to code your way out of physics.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: So what's the alternative then?
• 3:56
  Speaker 0: Build better hardware.
• 3:58
  Speaker 0: He points to the hybrid hopper concept.
• 4:00
  Speaker 0: It flies to get to the location, but then it lands on a roof or a hill to observe.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Uh, so you're grounding the sensor.
• 4:06
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 4:07
  Speaker 0: By landing, you stop fighting gravity.
• 4:09
  Speaker 0: You stop draining the battery on hovering.
• 4:11
  Speaker 0: And suddenly, your mission logic gets simple.
• 4:14
  Speaker 0: You don't need an AI supercomputer to manage flight stability if the thing is just sitting on a brick wall.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: It's a good reality check.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Sometimes mechanical innovation beats algorithmic complexity.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: But let's flip the script.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: If the enemy is using these hoppers and rescue bots, how do we stop them?
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: The counter UAS, the COS market is just exploding right now.
• 4:35
  Speaker 0: And we saw two completely opposing philosophies this week on how to handle that problem.
• 4:40
  Speaker 0: Okay,
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: so on one side we have the brute force method.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: Philippe Albino shared details on Rhinemiddles new approach.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: And subtle is not the word I would use.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: No,
• 4:49
  Speaker 0: kinetic solution to a kinetic problem is the phrasing, I think.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: They put two miniguns on a ground robot.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: We are talking about firing three thousand rounds per minute.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: It sounds like something from an action movie, but Albina argues the math actually works.
• 5:02
  Speaker 0: And it comes down to the economics of the intercept.
• 5:05
  Speaker 0: That is the single biggest problem in air defense right now.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Right, because if you shoot a hundred thousand dollar missile at a twenty thousand dollar Shaheed drone, you might win the engagement, but you lose the war.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: You go bankrupt.
• 5:16
  Speaker 0: Precisely.
• 5:17
  Speaker 0: But if you spray it with, what, two hundred dollars worth of bullets, you win.
• 5:21
  Speaker 0: Abino describes it as creating a cone of projectiles.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: A wall of lead.
• 5:26
  Speaker 0: A wall of lead, yeah.
• 5:27
  Speaker 0: You aren't sniping the drone, you're creating a barrier that the drone has to fly through.
• 5:33
  Speaker 0: Highly effective for swarms.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: But you know, bullets fall down and they don't discriminate.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Is brute force the only option?
• 5:39
  Speaker 0: No, and that's where Raven Decker and Scott Fowler come in.
• 5:42
  Speaker 0: They highlighted a partnership between Drone Shield and Nutellic, who used to be Avalor AI.
• 5:47
  Speaker 0: This is the opposite of brute force.
• 5:48
  Speaker 0: This is about modularity.
• 5:49
  Speaker 0: This
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: is the software brain for the counter UAS system.
• 5:53
  Speaker 0: Think of it as an operating system for defense.
• 5:55
  Speaker 0: Their argument is that threats evolve too fast for any single hardware solution.
• 6:00
  Speaker 0: Today, it's a quadcopter.
• 6:01
  Speaker 0: Tomorrow, it's a jet-powered drone.
• 6:03
  Speaker 0: You need a system that is effector agnostic.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: OK, just to clarify for everyone, effector being the thing that actually stops the drone.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: so jamming lasers, nets, bullets.
• 6:13
  Speaker 0: Correct.
• 6:14
  Speaker 0: The drone shield and intelligent approach is to build an open architecture.
• 6:17
  Speaker 0: You might need jamming today, a laser tomorrow, and that Rheinmetall minigun next week.
• 6:23
  Speaker 0: The software stays the same, the effector just swaps out.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: That feels much more future-proof.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: And speaking of future-proof, we have to talk about the high-end fight.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: We aren't just fighting cheap quadcopters.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Catherine Knee from Lockheed Martin shared something about the JGM missile that caught my
• 6:38
  Speaker 0: eye.
• 6:38
  Speaker 0: Yeah, this is significant because it bridges the gap.
• 6:41
  Speaker 0: The JGM is a serious piece of hardware.
• 6:44
  Speaker 0: and Lockheed demonstrated a true vertical launch capability with it against a UAS threat.
• 6:50
  Speaker 0: Why
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: does vertical launch matter specifically here?
• 6:52
  Speaker 0: It's all about geometry.
• 6:54
  Speaker 0: If you are on a ship or a truck in an urban canyon, you can't always point a launcher at the horizon.
• 7:00
  Speaker 0: Vertical launch means you can shoot straight up.
• 7:01
  Speaker 0: turn and engage a threat coming from any angle.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: It's about flexibility in tight spaces.
• 7:06
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 7:07
  Speaker 0: And adding to that high-end mix, Jack Chung noted that Lockheed's Helios laser system was praised for neutralizing drones at sea.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: So lasers are finally moving from PowerPoint to deck of a ship.
• 7:18
  Speaker 0: They are.
• 7:19
  Speaker 0: And again, it comes back to that economic equation.
• 7:21
  Speaker 0: If a laser, which costs pennies per shot in electricity, can fry a drone, you save your multi-million dollar SM-II missiles for the anti-ship cruise missiles.
• 7:32
  Speaker 0: His
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: resource management.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: You don't use a sledgehammer to kill a fly, especially when you need that sledgehammer for the tank coming up behind it.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Precisely.
• 7:40
  Speaker 0: But before we leave the hardware world, there is one factor that no amount of software or funding can fix.
• 7:46
  Speaker 0: The weather.
• 7:46
  Speaker 0: The weather.
• 7:47
  Speaker 0: The Arctic test.
• 7:48
  Speaker 0: Mark C.L.
• 7:49
  Speaker 0: and Adam Painter raise a really cold point about testing in Latvia.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: minus fifteen degrees Celsius.
• 7:55
  Speaker 0: That is where the rubber meets the frozen road.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: It's easy to look good in a desert test range.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: But Adam Painter's takeaway was that when technology meets extreme cold, simplicity is what saves lives.
• 8:06
  Speaker 0: Totally.
• 8:07
  Speaker 0: Batteries fail faster, sensors ice over, touch screens don't work with thick gloves.
• 8:12
  Speaker 0: Painter's point is that arctic proof on a spec sheet is often, well, a lie.
• 8:17
  Speaker 0: If your system is fragile, it's useless on the Eastern flank in February.
• 8:20
  Speaker 0: It's a stark reminder that geography still dictates technology.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the hardware reality, frozen batteries, miniguns, and rescue robots.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Let's shift gears to theme two, AI and autonomy.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: This is what they're calling software-defined defense.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: And interestingly, the most advanced stuff we saw this week isn't in the sky, it's underwater.
• 8:42
  Speaker 0: Yes, the anti-submarine warfare domain.
• 8:45
  Speaker 0: or ASW.
• 8:46
  Speaker 0: Jennifer McArdle shared some insights on Helsing's Lura AI.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Now for the listener who isn't a naval expert, ASW is notoriously difficult.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: You're basically listening to a noisy ocean and trying to hear a specific metal tube moving miles away.
• 9:00
  Speaker 0: It is the ultimate signal to noise problem.
• 9:02
  Speaker 0: Whales, waves, shipping traffic, it's all just noise.
• 9:05
  Speaker 0: What Helsing is doing is deploying this AI On gliders, these are low-power, long-endurance underwater drones.
• 9:11
  Speaker 0: But
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: here's the key part.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: The AI processes the data at the edge, right, on the glider itself.
• 9:16
  Speaker 0: That is the game changer.
• 9:18
  Speaker 0: Usually you record sound and send it back for analysis, but sending data underwater requires loud sonar pings or surfacing to use radio, which immediately reveals your position.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: So edge processing means the glider listens, the AI identifies the SUG locally, and it stays silent.
• 9:32
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 9:33
  Speaker 0: It only transmits when it has a hit.
• 9:35
  Speaker 0: It allows for a passive, silent dragnet.
• 9:38
  Speaker 0: It turns the ocean transparent for you while you stay invisible to the enemy.
• 9:42
  Speaker 0: That's a huge tactical leap.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: That is incredibly stealthy.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Now taking it from the sea to the sky, Harold Copey shared a collaboration between GROB aircraft and Helsing, and I love the tagline here.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: The aircraft is the platform, the software is the weapon.
• 9:56
  Speaker 0: This is the K-One Europa concept.
• 9:59
  Speaker 0: They took a standard trainer aircraft, the G-One-Twenty-TP, prop plane and turned it into a test bed for autonomous combat.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: This isn't just a drone pilot on the ground with a joystick, though.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Oh,
• 10:09
  Speaker 0: far from it.
• 10:10
  Speaker 0: This is about an aircraft that understands intent.
• 10:12
  Speaker 0: It collaborates with manned aircraft.
• 10:14
  Speaker 0: It makes decisions when communication is cut.
• 10:16
  Speaker 0: It's a shift towards the aircraft being a computing node that just happens to fly.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: But the speed of decision making, it's getting a little scary, isn't it?
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Ricardo Grande brought up the UK's baby raptor interceptor.
• 10:28
  Speaker 0: He did.
• 10:29
  Speaker 0: And he raised the philosophical and tactical question.
• 10:32
  Speaker 0: If AI interceptors react in milliseconds faster than humanly possible, what is the human's role?
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: If the machine observes, Oriens decides and acts before I can even blink, am I really in the loop?
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Or am I just liability?
• 10:47
  Speaker 0: That is the tension we are going to face for the next decade.
• 10:50
  Speaker 0: And Torsten Stov's report on Endoral and D-Wave adds another layer of speed to this.
• 10:55
  Speaker 0: They are bringing quantum computing into the mix.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Quantum computing and air defense.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: I thought quantum was still years away from practical use.
• 11:03
  Speaker 0: For encryption breaking, maybe.
• 11:05
  Speaker 0: But for optimization, it's here.
• 11:06
  Speaker 0: They use quantum annealing to figure out the best placement for air defense systems.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: Explain that.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: Why do you need a quantum computer to tell you where to put a missile launcher?
• 11:15
  Speaker 0: Because it's a math problem with infinite variables.
• 11:18
  Speaker 0: Terrain, incoming threat vectors, coverage overlap, battery ranges.
• 11:22
  Speaker 0: A classical computer takes hours to crunch that.
• 11:25
  Speaker 0: Stab reports that the quantum approach achieved a ten-x speedup.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: But did it actually improve the defense, or did it just do the math faster?
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: Both.
• 11:33
  Speaker 0: In simulations with five hundred incoming threats, a massive saturation attack, the quantum optimized placement improved intercept rates by nine to twelve percent.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Twelve percent.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: In a saturation attack that could involve nuclear or biological warheads, stopping twelve percent more missiles isn't a statistic.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: That's saving a city.
• 11:51
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 11:52
  Speaker 0: When you are dealing with mass, optimization isn't just math.
• 11:56
  Speaker 0: It's survival.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: And wrapping up the AI theme, we have Agentec AI.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: Mario Delab gave us an update on DARPA's programs.
• 12:04
  Speaker 0: The AIR program.
• 12:05
  Speaker 0: They are training AI pilots for beyond visual range combat.
• 12:09
  Speaker 0: But I think the more critical one is AIECC autonomous cyber defense.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Why is that one more critical?
• 12:15
  Speaker 0: Because cyber moves at light speed.
• 12:17
  Speaker 0: If the enemy uses AI to hack your command and control, a human cyber defender is just going to be too slow to patch the whole.
• 12:24
  Speaker 0: You need AI to fight AI.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: It's a machine-on-machine fight in the digital spectrum.
• 12:28
  Speaker 0: It is.
• 12:29
  Speaker 0: Which leads us perfectly into our third theme, strategy, industry, and command and control.
• 12:34
  Speaker 0: Because if the warfare is changing this fast machines fighting machines at light speed, the industry and the decision making structures have to change too.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: And we're seeing a massive split in how different regions are handling this.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: For sure.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about data driven warfare.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Artem Rose shared some stats from the Army of Drones, twenty twenty five in Ukraine that are just staggering.
• 12:55
  Speaker 0: The numbers are intense.
• 12:57
  Speaker 0: Roughly eight hundred twenty thousand enemy targets hit.
• 13:00
  Speaker 0: Huge vehicle losses.
• 13:01
  Speaker 0: But the real story isn't the destruction.
• 13:04
  Speaker 0: It's the accountability.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: What do you mean by accountability?
• 13:07
  Speaker 0: Morose points out that decisions in Ukraine are now based on verified video data, not intuition or field reports.
• 13:14
  Speaker 0: You can track performance, you know exactly which unit is effective, which pilot is missing, and which drone model is failing.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: That sounds corporate, like KPIs for combat.
• 13:23
  Speaker 0: It's efficiency applied to lethality.
• 13:26
  Speaker 0: And Jonas Singer contrasts this sharply with Europe.
• 13:29
  Speaker 0: He says Ukraine has undergone a live-fire organizational revolution.
• 13:32
  Speaker 0: They have decentralized procurement.
• 13:34
  Speaker 0: They have the brave one platform to speed up innovation.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: And Europe.
• 13:37
  Speaker 0: Singer argues Europe is still stuck in slow processes.
• 13:40
  Speaker 0: He calls for a live-fire organizational revolution in the West.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: A drone PowerPoint versus a revolution.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Ouch.
• 13:47
  Speaker 0: It's a harsh critique, but his point is valid.
• 13:49
  Speaker 0: Innovation can't be a committee meeting when the adversary is iterating their software on a weekly basis.
• 13:54
  Speaker 0: Well,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: the private sector is certainly trying to catch up.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Matt Atkins dropped a market report that shows, twenty twenty five was a breakout year for defense
• 14:02
  Speaker 0: tech funding.
• 14:02
  Speaker 0: It was a massive year.
• 14:04
  Speaker 0: Fifty billion dollars in VC funding for defense tech.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: Fifty billion.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah,
• 14:08
  Speaker 0: that is double the total from twenty twenty four.
• 14:10
  Speaker 0: And we saw ten new unicorns born.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: So the cash is there, but I have to play devil's advocate here.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Is this a bubble?
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: Are we just throwing money at cool keywords?
• 14:21
  Speaker 0: That's the risk.
• 14:22
  Speaker 0: But Atkins makes a crucial distinction.
• 14:24
  Speaker 0: Twenty twenty five was the year of fundraising.
• 14:27
  Speaker 0: Twenty twenty six is the year of execution.
• 14:29
  Speaker 0: The check is cleared.
• 14:30
  Speaker 0: Now you have to build the factory.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: And that brings us to the talent war.
• 14:34
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 14:35
  Speaker 0: You have fifty billion dollars.
• 14:36
  Speaker 0: But can you find the engineers who can get top level security clearances and know how to build autonomous guidance systems?
• 14:43
  Speaker 0: That talent pool is shallow.
• 14:44
  Speaker 0: That is going to be the bottleneck.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Speaking of bottlenecks and supply chains, Britta Jacobs shared some insights from a delegation trip to Taiwan.
• 14:52
  Speaker 0: This connects back to that idea of resilience.
• 14:54
  Speaker 0: She noted a focus on whole of society resilience.
• 14:59
  Speaker 0: It's not just about the military, it's about the civil infrastructure being ready for asymmetric warfare.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: And Christoph Reithke connected this to the European startup scene.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: He mentioned that dual use is becoming essential.
• 15:11
  Speaker 0: That's a commercial reality.
• 15:12
  Speaker 0: If you are a defense startup, relying solely on government contracts is risky and slow.
• 15:18
  Speaker 0: If your tech has a commercial application, dual use.
• 15:21
  Speaker 0: You can sell it to civilian markets to keep the lights on while you wait for the Ministry of Defense to sign the contract.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: So if you make a drone battery, sell it to delivery companies and the army.
• 15:31
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 15:31
  Speaker 0: It's becoming a requirement for viability.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: And finally, on the software side of things, we have a point about user experience.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Mikhael and Rogandino from the U.S.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Space Force and Dr.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: Sinan Alaw Baidi from Barzan Holdings both touched on this.
• 15:45
  Speaker 0: This is the user-centered design argument.
• 15:47
  Speaker 0: For a long time, military software was terrible.
• 15:50
  Speaker 0: Clunky, hard to use, looked like Windows' ninety-five on a bad day.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: I've seen some of those interfaces.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: They look like you need a Ph.D.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: just to open a menu.
• 15:57
  Speaker 0: Right.
• 15:58
  Speaker 0: But the inside here... is that bad design isn't just annoying, it's dangerous.
• 16:03
  Speaker 0: If the software isn't intuitive, if it doesn't work.
• 16:05
  Speaker 0: like the apps these twenty year old soldiers use on their phones, it fails the warfighter.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Cognitive load.
• 16:11
  Speaker 0: Yes.
• 16:12
  Speaker 0: In a high-stress situation, if you have to fight the user interface to send a command, you make errors.
• 16:17
  Speaker 0: Friendly fire, missed targets.
• 16:19
  Speaker 0: So making C to command and control systems intuitive is about operational effectiveness, not just aesthetics.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: We've covered robot ecosystems that tow each other to safety, AI speags that are beating human reaction times, and a massive industrial pivot toward data and usability.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: It's a lot to digest.
• 16:39
  Speaker 0: It is.
• 16:40
  Speaker 0: But if there's one thought to leave you with, I think Eva Zula summed it up perfectly.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: I have that quote right here.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: She warned that autonomy isn't a drone race, it's a capability race.
• 16:49
  Speaker 0: Precisely.
• 16:50
  Speaker 0: The winners in twenty-twenty-six won't be the ones with the flashiest demo video on LinkedIn.
• 16:54
  Speaker 0: The winners will be the ones whose architectures are resilient enough to survive electronic warfare.
• 16:59
  Speaker 0: It's about data pipelines, C-II integration, and systems that don't crash when the jamming starts.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: Resilience over hype.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: That is the boring, unsexy work that actually wins wars.
• 17:10
  Speaker 0: It is.
• 17:10
  Speaker 0: And that's where the industry needs to focus.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: Also, check out our other editions on ICT and tech insights, health tech, cloud, digital products and services, artificial intelligence and sustainability in green ICT.
• 17:25
  Speaker 0: Thanks for listening.
• 17:26
  Speaker 0: Stay curious and keep looking for the signal and the noise.
• 17:29
  Speaker 0: Don't forget to subscribe.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: See you in the next deep dive.