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Best of LinkedIn: Defense Tech CW 32/ 33 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 0: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about defense tech from CW- Thirty Two and Thirty Three.
• 0:08
  Speaker 0: Frennis is a B to B market research company that supports ICT providers with a structured defense market entry framework designed to move them from European Defense Opportunity landscape to qualified ministry conversations within six to eight weeks.
• 0:22
  Speaker 0: you can find more info in
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep dive.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: really glad I have you with us today.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: We're gonna unpack some of the top defense tech trends that are just completely dominating the professional conversation right now.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, exactly if you are an ICT provider or working in digital transformation The stuff we're tracking today is pretty much rewriting their roles.
• 0:43
  Speaker 0: definitely We're looking at uh...the sheer speed of battlefield adaptation and then the explosive growth.
• 0:49
  Speaker 0: encounter drone tech
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  Speaker 1: Right!
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  Speaker 1: And also those hidden structural bottlenecks in procurement & manufacturing That nobody really wants to talk about.
• 0:56
  Speaker 0: yeah..we gonna keep this smart focused and fast paced.
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  Speaker 0: so let's jump right into it.
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  Speaker 0: The traditional view of defense tech is, well its that it operates like a massive slow-moving glacier.
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  Speaker 1: Oh absolutely!
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  Speaker 1: Like decade long requirement cycles?
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  Speaker 0: Right billions of dollars spent before system ever even rolls off the line.
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  Speaker 0: but uh...the intelligence we're seeing now paints totally different picture especially when you look at Ukraine.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's I mean the conflict there has taken those legacy development cycles and just compressed them into mere weeks.
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  Speaker 1: It's basically turned combat in to a continuous R&D sprint.
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  Speaker 0: A real-time Sprint.
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  Speaker 0: And i think that acceleration is well its entirely driven by scale.
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  Speaker 0: like Tatyana SFCOM highlighted this insane metric production
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  Speaker 1: numbers.
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  Speaker 1: yeah
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  Speaker 0: In twenty twenty two Ukraine's domestic drone production was around like five thousand but today projections show they are going to produce well over five million drones annually.
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  Speaker 1: It's just I mean, five million.
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  Speaker 1: that scale is something NATO collectively struggles to match.
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  Speaker 1: you're talking about five million autonomous or semi-autonomous systems being built and expended in a single year.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly, and Terry VanHaren observed that this sheer mass has led to actual drone superiority.
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  Speaker 1: Right because when you have that much persistent overhead presence it actively denies Russian troop movement.
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  Speaker 1: You just can't move resupply lines without being seen
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  Speaker 0: which fundamentally changes the geometry of the battlefield.
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  Speaker 0: But how is that shifting?
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  Speaker 0: The actual you know ground tactics.
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  Speaker 0: well
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  Speaker 1: professor Nick Colossimo shared a massive shift in tactics involving what he calls Marsupial deployments.
• 2:31
  Speaker 0: wait marsupial like a kangaroo carrying its young.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: exactly that.
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  Speaker 1: So uncrewed ground vehicles UGVs they're great But they have terrible operational range.
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  Speaker 1: right mud heavy terrain minefield They drain the batteries so fast
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  Speaker 0: I see so they can't actually reach the target on their own
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  Speaker 1: Right?
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  Speaker 1: So the adaptation is to use a heavy lift aerial drone To carry the ugv which has strapped with an anti-tank mine and
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  Speaker 0: just
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  Speaker 1: fly it deep behind enemy lines.
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  Speaker 0: Oh, wow.
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  Speaker 0: So they just completely bypass the minefields?
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  Speaker 1: Exactly!
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  Speaker 1: They drop the ground robot and then UGV autonomously drives the last few hundred meters to plant the mine on a supply route.
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  Speaker 0: That is wild...and it keeps human operators completely out of the drop zone.
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  Speaker 1: One-hundred percent.
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  Speaker 1: And Arta Maraz projects that these autonomous ground robots are slated to replace like thirty per cent front line manpower in those high risk assault and medivac zones this decade.
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  Speaker 1: thirty
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  Speaker 0: percent.
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  Speaker 0: That's a huge shift in how we think about manpower, but I mean adversaries are adapting just as fast right?
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  Speaker 1: Oh absolutely!
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  Speaker 1: Look at Robert Federer analysis of Russia's Molniad drone.
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  Speaker 1: it is a master class and asymmetrical adaptation.
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  Speaker 0: Right because they aren't building these pristine billion-dollar factories
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  Speaker 1: Far from it.
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  Speaker 1: They're built from cheap foam plywood and commercial electronics by these decentralized three person teams right near the front.
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  Speaker 1: But The Real Genius Is What They Left Out.
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  Speaker 0: Okay, what did they leave out?
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  Speaker 0: They
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  Speaker 1: removed the radio link entirely.
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  Speaker 0: Wait no radio link at all how do you even control
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  Speaker 0: it?!
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  Speaker 1: You don't!
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  Speaker 1: At least not remotely-they use machine vision.
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  Speaker 1: The drone just compares its live camera feed against a preloaded map.
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  Speaker 1: It flies completely by sight.
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  Speaker 1: Wow
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  Speaker 0: so traditional electronic warfare jamming...It's
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  Speaker 1: completely useless.
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  Speaker 1: if there is NO radio receiver There literally no signal for the EW system to jam.
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  Speaker 0: That i mean might be referred to this as a six-week battlefield learning cycle.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what it is
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  Speaker 0: and It reminds me of you know agile software sprints in the commercial tech sector pushing updates fixing bugs.
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  Speaker 0: But I have to push back here a bit.
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  Speaker 1: okay go for
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  Speaker 0: does this hyper fast Decentralized iteration just fundamentally break The legacy defense procurement model like one that relies on years of requirements testing?
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  Speaker 1: honestly yes It completely breaks it.
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  Speaker 1: If cheap drones are mutating their navigation every six weeks, the legacy infrastructure defending our bases is effectively blind.
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  Speaker 1: Right
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  Speaker 0: because if you're iterating out of plywood every two months a five-year certification process Is just a joke.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly Which means we have to scramble to catch up with counter drone and detection systems.
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  Speaker 1: That's the pivot we're seeing right now.
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  Speaker 0: Okay, so let's talk about that.
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  Speaker 0: because Angus being pointed out that coordinated drone incursions probing military bases require a total shift in detection
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  Speaker 1: Yeah Because legacy radar wasn't built for low slow threats.
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  Speaker 0: Right they were built for fighter jets or ballistic missiles.
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  Speaker 0: A plastic drone flying at forty miles an hour under the tree line just looks like a flock of birds to old radar.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly So.
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  Speaker 1: you need software-defined detection.
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  Speaker 1: Ben Newlove highlighted drone shields RFAI-III technology, which is fascinating.
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  Speaker 1: What's
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  Speaker 0: the paradigm shift there?
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  Speaker 1: Well older systems used a hard coded library of known radio signatures.
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  Speaker 1: if an enemy changed their frequency you were blind.
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  Speaker 1: But RKAI-III analyzes the raw RF spectrum and identifies completely unseen drone types via advanced behavioral analysis.
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  Speaker 0: Oh, so it's looking for anomalies in emissions themselves rather than checking against a list?
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  Speaker 1: You got it!
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  Speaker 1: It is software doing heavy lifting.
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  Speaker 0: That's brilliant but once you detect that you still have to shoot down.
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  Speaker 0: And on the kinetic side... Reeves Valentine posted about Lockheed Martin's Morpheus X-Rotor.
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  Speaker 1: Right, the high power microwave system?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah
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  Speaker 0: it is an airborne system that neutralized over fifty hostile drones in a single flight and It didn't even need a dedicated fire control radar.
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  Speaker 1: Because it operates like a localized EMP?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah!
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  Speaker 1: It doesn't fire of physical projectile, it just emits a cone of electromagnetic energy that physically melts the silicon pathways in the drones.
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  Speaker 0: So its just sweeping the sky and knocking everything out...
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  Speaker 1: yeah Its one to many weapon And speed for this stuff is improving drastically.
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  Speaker 1: Paul Kwan noted that Aurelia Systems built a mass-producible directed energy system in just two years.
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  Speaker 0: Two years from concept to mass production?
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  Speaker 0: In defense terms, that is light speed!
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  Speaker 1: It really is...
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  Speaker 0: And to prove this works at scale even outside the military Tom Adams broke down planning for the twenty-twenty six FIFA World
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  Speaker 1: Cup.
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  Speaker 1: Oh yeah The civilian applications
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: They used a layered approach of technology, federal coordination and personnel And they successfully resulted in over seven hundred drone seizures without any operational disruption to the event.
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  Speaker 0: In
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  Speaker 1: a dense urban environment full of RF noise from cell phones no less.
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  Speaker 1: it's impressive
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  Speaker 0: Truly!
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  Speaker 0: And real quick if you are finding this breakdown useful make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss our future.
• 7:24
  Speaker 0: deep dives into these tech & defense trends.
• 7:26
  Speaker 0: we've got lot more coming.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: definitely subscribe.
• 7:29
  Speaker 0: Getting back to the military application, Aviv Barzohar made a great point about ammunition waste.
• 7:34
  Speaker 0: He compared using unguided traditional munitions against agile drones to swatting a swarm of gnats with a sledgehammer...
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  Speaker 1: That's perfect analogy!
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: so my quote on is do these new autonomous fire control systems actually flip cost exchange ratio in favor of the defender?
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  Speaker 0: They
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  Speaker 1: have to.
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  Speaker 1: I mean if you launch two million dollar missile at Four hundred dollar plywood drone.
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  Speaker 1: You will go bankrupt long before you run out of targets.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, the economics just bleed you dry.
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  Speaker 0: It's
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  Speaker 1: exactly.
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  Speaker 1: but directed energy costs pennies per engagement because the ammunition is literally Just electricity.
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  Speaker 1: so it completely restores that economic balance okay?
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  Speaker 0: That makes sense.
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  Speaker 0: So we have software defined radars and microwave weapons But none of it matters if you can't actually build them at scale.
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  Speaker 0: right then
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  Speaker 1: there it Is The structural bottleneck.
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  Speaker 0: Right, let's pivot to manufacturing and supply chains.
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  Speaker 0: Because Nathan Weeks dropped a real reality check.
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  Speaker 0: he said everyone wants to build the drone
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  Speaker 1: right?
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  Speaker 1: The glamorous AI targeting systems exactly
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  Speaker 0: but nobody wants to Build the unglamorous businesses that actually manufacture ten thousand of them.
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  Speaker 0: two exact specifications Scaling that capacity is the real barrier.
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  Speaker 1: it's the hardest part of defense tech.
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  Speaker 1: And Jackson Moses laid out some terrifying math regarding Patriot missiles to prove this point.
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  Speaker 1: So the US awarded a fifty eight point six billion dollar contract To scale Patrick production two thousand units A year by twenty thirty.
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  Speaker 0: Okay, two thousand a Year sounds like a
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  Speaker 1: lot it does but America and his allies fired over fifteen hundred patriots in just three months recently.
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  Speaker 1: wait
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  Speaker 0: They burn through nearly a year's worth of future production capacity in ninety days.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: the numbers simply don't add up.
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  Speaker 1: for sustained high-volume conflict.
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  Speaker 1: You cannot expend munitions three times faster than you can forge the rocket motors.
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  Speaker 0: That is just... wow So how do we solve that?
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  Speaker 0: Because we cant build bigger centralized factories Can We?
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  Speaker 1: No because modern warfare punishes geographic concentration.
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  Speaker 1: Large factories are massive targets.
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  Speaker 1: Chad McCoy has this concept of moving the factory to the edge.
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  Speaker 0: To the Edge, like distributed nodes?
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  Speaker 1: Exactly!
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  Speaker 1: Imagine shipping containers deployed near front lines with five-axis CNC machines and industrial three D printers.
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  Speaker 1: They receive CAD files via satellite And print exact replacement parts.
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  Speaker 1: you need that day.
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  Speaker 1: Oh
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  Speaker 0: thats incredibly smart.
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  Speaker 0: So if one node gets hit You just reroute data into another container.
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  Speaker 1: Precisely It reconstitutes capability immediately.
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  Speaker 0: But I mean, that brings up a whole different issue doesn't it?
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  Speaker 0: If you're distributed and relying on global components what about security?
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Ah the supply chain forensics.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah Richard William shed this alarming story of British built Royal Navy drone.
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  Speaker 0: They discovered they had third party camera secretly communicating with an IP address in China.
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  Speaker 1: That is a nightmare scenario for procurement
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  Speaker 0: officers.
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  Speaker 0: It really it's a multi-tier dependency.
• 10:26
  Speaker 0: You can't just trust the prime contractor anymore.
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  Speaker 0: you have to audit The offshore developer who wrote the firmware?
• 10:32
  Speaker 0: For the lens actuator.
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  Speaker 1: and that vulnerability Is exactly why European procurement is shifting.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Tim desider pointed out that Europe is increasingly demanding ITAR free systems.
• 10:43
  Speaker 0: Right.
• 10:43
  Speaker 0: To avoid being dependent on US export approval.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Exactly!
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: If your sovereign weapon system relies on American microprocessors, you might need Washington's permission just to upgrade your own hardware down the line.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Europe wants their data ecosystems
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  Speaker 0: Which is a huge opening for ICT providers listening to this.
• 11:00
  Speaker 0: But let me challenge you because modern defense supply chains feel like a massive game of Jenga.
• 11:06
  Speaker 0: Well... You pull out one obscure microchip from Taiwan or an optics module in Japan and the whole capability collapses.
• 11:15
  Speaker 0: With thousands of global dependencies, is defense sovereignty just a political illusion?
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  Speaker 1: That is
• 11:22
  Speaker 0: uh...the
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  Speaker 1: defining question of next decade.
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  Speaker 1: honestly Yeah Look.
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  Speaker 1: if Sovereignty means physically forging every single component inside your own borders then yes it's complete illusion.
• 11:32
  Speaker 0: The Global Supply Chain Is Just Too Intertwined Exactly.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: But If Sovereignity Means Owning The Proprietary Data Architecture and having the distributed capacity to rapidly swamp out a compromised part with a localized alternative, then it's entirely achievable.
• 11:47
  Speaker 0: Oh I see so its about software control not just physical manufacturing?
• 11:51
  Speaker 0: Right!
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  Speaker 1: And i want leave you with this final thought we are entering an era where hardware is just temporary vessel for the software
• 11:57
  Speaker 0: A temporary vessel?
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  Speaker 0: Yeah
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  Speaker 1: As build systems that learn in weeks.
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  Speaker 1: supply chains hide at tactical edge.
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  Speaker 1: The future of warfare won't be determined by weapons stockpiled today.
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  Speaker 1: It's going to be determined by how fast your entire industrial base can unlearn its
• 12:15
  Speaker 0: old habits tomorrow.