Best of LinkedIn: Defense Tech CW 32/ 33

00:00:00: 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.

00:00:08: 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.

00:00:22: you can find more info in

00:00:25: Welcome to the deep dive.

00:00:26: really glad I have you with us today.

00:00:28: We're gonna unpack some of the top defense tech trends that are just completely dominating the professional conversation right now.

00:00:35: 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.

00:00:43: definitely We're looking at uh...the sheer speed of battlefield adaptation and then the explosive growth.

00:00:49: encounter drone tech

00:00:50: Right!

00:00:51: And also those hidden structural bottlenecks in procurement & manufacturing That nobody really wants to talk about.

00:00:56: yeah..we gonna keep this smart focused and fast paced.

00:00:59: so let's jump right into it.

00:01:01: The traditional view of defense tech is, well its that it operates like a massive slow-moving glacier.

00:01:07: Oh absolutely!

00:01:08: Like decade long requirement cycles?

00:01:11: Right billions of dollars spent before system ever even rolls off the line.

00:01:15: but uh...the intelligence we're seeing now paints totally different picture especially when you look at Ukraine.

00:01:21: Yeah, it's I mean the conflict there has taken those legacy development cycles and just compressed them into mere weeks.

00:01:28: It's basically turned combat in to a continuous R&D sprint.

00:01:32: A real-time Sprint.

00:01:33: And i think that acceleration is well its entirely driven by scale.

00:01:37: like Tatyana SFCOM highlighted this insane metric production

00:01:40: numbers.

00:01:40: yeah

00:01:41: 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.

00:01:52: It's just I mean, five million.

00:01:54: that scale is something NATO collectively struggles to match.

00:01:57: you're talking about five million autonomous or semi-autonomous systems being built and expended in a single year.

00:02:04: Exactly, and Terry VanHaren observed that this sheer mass has led to actual drone superiority.

00:02:10: Right because when you have that much persistent overhead presence it actively denies Russian troop movement.

00:02:16: You just can't move resupply lines without being seen

00:02:18: which fundamentally changes the geometry of the battlefield.

00:02:21: But how is that shifting?

00:02:22: The actual you know ground tactics.

00:02:24: well

00:02:25: professor Nick Colossimo shared a massive shift in tactics involving what he calls Marsupial deployments.

00:02:31: wait marsupial like a kangaroo carrying its young.

00:02:35: Yeah,

00:02:35: exactly that.

00:02:36: So uncrewed ground vehicles UGVs they're great But they have terrible operational range.

00:02:41: right mud heavy terrain minefield They drain the batteries so fast

00:02:46: I see so they can't actually reach the target on their own

00:02:48: Right?

00:02:49: So the adaptation is to use a heavy lift aerial drone To carry the ugv which has strapped with an anti-tank mine and

00:02:55: just

00:02:56: fly it deep behind enemy lines.

00:02:58: Oh, wow.

00:02:58: So they just completely bypass the minefields?

00:03:01: Exactly!

00:03:01: They drop the ground robot and then UGV autonomously drives the last few hundred meters to plant the mine on a supply route.

00:03:08: That is wild...and it keeps human operators completely out of the drop zone.

00:03:13: One-hundred percent.

00:03:14: 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.

00:03:24: thirty

00:03:25: percent.

00:03:26: That's a huge shift in how we think about manpower, but I mean adversaries are adapting just as fast right?

00:03:32: Oh absolutely!

00:03:33: Look at Robert Federer analysis of Russia's Molniad drone.

00:03:36: it is a master class and asymmetrical adaptation.

00:03:39: Right because they aren't building these pristine billion-dollar factories

00:03:43: Far from it.

00:03:44: They're built from cheap foam plywood and commercial electronics by these decentralized three person teams right near the front.

00:03:50: But The Real Genius Is What They Left Out.

00:03:52: Okay, what did they leave out?

00:03:53: They

00:03:54: removed the radio link entirely.

00:03:55: Wait no radio link at all how do you even control

00:03:58: it?!

00:03:58: You don't!

00:03:59: At least not remotely-they use machine vision.

00:04:02: The drone just compares its live camera feed against a preloaded map.

00:04:06: It flies completely by sight.

00:04:07: Wow

00:04:08: so traditional electronic warfare jamming...It's

00:04:10: completely useless.

00:04:11: if there is NO radio receiver There literally no signal for the EW system to jam.

00:04:16: That i mean might be referred to this as a six-week battlefield learning cycle.

00:04:21: Yeah, that's exactly what it is

00:04:22: and It reminds me of you know agile software sprints in the commercial tech sector pushing updates fixing bugs.

00:04:28: But I have to push back here a bit.

00:04:30: okay go for

00:04:31: does this hyper fast Decentralized iteration just fundamentally break The legacy defense procurement model like one that relies on years of requirements testing?

00:04:42: honestly yes It completely breaks it.

00:04:45: If cheap drones are mutating their navigation every six weeks, the legacy infrastructure defending our bases is effectively blind.

00:04:52: Right

00:04:52: because if you're iterating out of plywood every two months a five-year certification process Is just a joke.

00:04:58: Exactly Which means we have to scramble to catch up with counter drone and detection systems.

00:05:03: That's the pivot we're seeing right now.

00:05:05: Okay, so let's talk about that.

00:05:06: because Angus being pointed out that coordinated drone incursions probing military bases require a total shift in detection

00:05:13: Yeah Because legacy radar wasn't built for low slow threats.

00:05:17: Right they were built for fighter jets or ballistic missiles.

00:05:20: A plastic drone flying at forty miles an hour under the tree line just looks like a flock of birds to old radar.

00:05:27: Exactly So.

00:05:28: you need software-defined detection.

00:05:30: Ben Newlove highlighted drone shields RFAI-III technology, which is fascinating.

00:05:35: What's

00:05:35: the paradigm shift there?

00:05:37: Well older systems used a hard coded library of known radio signatures.

00:05:41: if an enemy changed their frequency you were blind.

00:05:44: But RKAI-III analyzes the raw RF spectrum and identifies completely unseen drone types via advanced behavioral analysis.

00:05:52: Oh, so it's looking for anomalies in emissions themselves rather than checking against a list?

00:05:57: You got it!

00:05:58: It is software doing heavy lifting.

00:06:00: That's brilliant but once you detect that you still have to shoot down.

00:06:04: And on the kinetic side... Reeves Valentine posted about Lockheed Martin's Morpheus X-Rotor.

00:06:10: Right, the high power microwave system?

00:06:11: Yeah

00:06:12: 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.

00:06:22: Because it operates like a localized EMP?

00:06:24: Yeah!

00:06:24: It doesn't fire of physical projectile, it just emits a cone of electromagnetic energy that physically melts the silicon pathways in the drones.

00:06:33: So its just sweeping the sky and knocking everything out...

00:06:35: yeah Its one to many weapon And speed for this stuff is improving drastically.

00:06:41: Paul Kwan noted that Aurelia Systems built a mass-producible directed energy system in just two years.

00:06:46: Two years from concept to mass production?

00:06:49: In defense terms, that is light speed!

00:06:50: It really is...

00:06:51: And to prove this works at scale even outside the military Tom Adams broke down planning for the twenty-twenty six FIFA World

00:06:58: Cup.

00:06:58: Oh yeah The civilian applications

00:07:00: Right.

00:07:01: 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.

00:07:12: In

00:07:12: a dense urban environment full of RF noise from cell phones no less.

00:07:16: it's impressive

00:07:17: Truly!

00:07:18: And real quick if you are finding this breakdown useful make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss our future.

00:07:24: deep dives into these tech & defense trends.

00:07:26: we've got lot more coming.

00:07:27: definitely subscribe.

00:07:29: Getting back to the military application, Aviv Barzohar made a great point about ammunition waste.

00:07:34: He compared using unguided traditional munitions against agile drones to swatting a swarm of gnats with a sledgehammer...

00:07:42: That's perfect analogy!

00:07:43: Right.

00:07:43: so my quote on is do these new autonomous fire control systems actually flip cost exchange ratio in favor of the defender?

00:07:51: They

00:07:51: have to.

00:07:52: I mean if you launch two million dollar missile at Four hundred dollar plywood drone.

00:07:57: You will go bankrupt long before you run out of targets.

00:08:00: Yeah, the economics just bleed you dry.

00:08:02: It's

00:08:02: exactly.

00:08:03: but directed energy costs pennies per engagement because the ammunition is literally Just electricity.

00:08:09: so it completely restores that economic balance okay?

00:08:11: That makes sense.

00:08:12: So we have software defined radars and microwave weapons But none of it matters if you can't actually build them at scale.

00:08:18: right then

00:08:19: there it Is The structural bottleneck.

00:08:22: Right, let's pivot to manufacturing and supply chains.

00:08:25: Because Nathan Weeks dropped a real reality check.

00:08:28: he said everyone wants to build the drone

00:08:30: right?

00:08:30: The glamorous AI targeting systems exactly

00:08:34: but nobody wants to Build the unglamorous businesses that actually manufacture ten thousand of them.

00:08:39: two exact specifications Scaling that capacity is the real barrier.

00:08:43: it's the hardest part of defense tech.

00:08:45: And Jackson Moses laid out some terrifying math regarding Patriot missiles to prove this point.

00:08:50: So the US awarded a fifty eight point six billion dollar contract To scale Patrick production two thousand units A year by twenty thirty.

00:08:58: Okay, two thousand a Year sounds like a

00:09:00: lot it does but America and his allies fired over fifteen hundred patriots in just three months recently.

00:09:06: wait

00:09:07: They burn through nearly a year's worth of future production capacity in ninety days.

00:09:11: Yeah,

00:09:12: the numbers simply don't add up.

00:09:14: for sustained high-volume conflict.

00:09:16: You cannot expend munitions three times faster than you can forge the rocket motors.

00:09:21: That is just... wow So how do we solve that?

00:09:24: Because we cant build bigger centralized factories Can We?

00:09:27: No because modern warfare punishes geographic concentration.

00:09:32: Large factories are massive targets.

00:09:35: Chad McCoy has this concept of moving the factory to the edge.

00:09:38: To the Edge, like distributed nodes?

00:09:40: Exactly!

00:09:41: Imagine shipping containers deployed near front lines with five-axis CNC machines and industrial three D printers.

00:09:48: They receive CAD files via satellite And print exact replacement parts.

00:09:52: you need that day.

00:09:53: Oh

00:09:53: thats incredibly smart.

00:09:54: So if one node gets hit You just reroute data into another container.

00:09:58: Precisely It reconstitutes capability immediately.

00:10:01: But I mean, that brings up a whole different issue doesn't it?

00:10:03: If you're distributed and relying on global components what about security?

00:10:07: Ah the supply chain forensics.

00:10:09: Yeah Richard William shed this alarming story of British built Royal Navy drone.

00:10:15: They discovered they had third party camera secretly communicating with an IP address in China.

00:10:20: That is a nightmare scenario for procurement

00:10:23: officers.

00:10:23: It really it's a multi-tier dependency.

00:10:26: You can't just trust the prime contractor anymore.

00:10:29: you have to audit The offshore developer who wrote the firmware?

00:10:32: For the lens actuator.

00:10:33: and that vulnerability Is exactly why European procurement is shifting.

00:10:37: Tim desider pointed out that Europe is increasingly demanding ITAR free systems.

00:10:43: Right.

00:10:43: To avoid being dependent on US export approval.

00:10:45: Exactly!

00:10:46: If your sovereign weapon system relies on American microprocessors, you might need Washington's permission just to upgrade your own hardware down the line.

00:10:54: Europe wants their data ecosystems

00:10:56: Which is a huge opening for ICT providers listening to this.

00:11:00: But let me challenge you because modern defense supply chains feel like a massive game of Jenga.

00:11:06: Well... You pull out one obscure microchip from Taiwan or an optics module in Japan and the whole capability collapses.

00:11:15: With thousands of global dependencies, is defense sovereignty just a political illusion?

00:11:21: That is

00:11:22: uh...the

00:11:23: defining question of next decade.

00:11:24: honestly Yeah Look.

00:11:26: if Sovereignty means physically forging every single component inside your own borders then yes it's complete illusion.

00:11:32: The Global Supply Chain Is Just Too Intertwined Exactly.

00:11:36: 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.

00:11:47: Oh I see so its about software control not just physical manufacturing?

00:11:51: Right!

00:11:51: And i want leave you with this final thought we are entering an era where hardware is just temporary vessel for the software

00:11:57: A temporary vessel?

00:11:58: Yeah

00:11:59: As build systems that learn in weeks.

00:12:01: supply chains hide at tactical edge.

00:12:04: The future of warfare won't be determined by weapons stockpiled today.

00:12:07: It's going to be determined by how fast your entire industrial base can unlearn its

00:12:15: old habits tomorrow.