COVER STORY
Innovation in defence
Ever faster technological change is setting the pace of our societies’ and everyone’s life. It’s no different in the defence realm: the level of protection a state or a group of countries can provide to its citizens is tantamount to its ability to embrace and use technological progress.
COVER STORY
Until recently, Europe’s armies based their long-term capability planning on achieving relatively fixed and predictable results. No longer: new civil technologies and their potential applications in the last decade have evolved at such break-need speed that militaries must now factor “innovative resilience” into their systems. This demands agile capabilities that can absorb new technologies throughout their lifecycle, becoming mainstream during their operational use, and thus avoiding obsolesce or early retirement of systems.
Some of the most trail-blazing innovations such as artificial intelligence, robotics or quantum physics are transforming military operations and battlefield strategies in every direction, from logistics to frontline automation to situational awareness undersea and in space.