Leonardo, Hensoldt, Thales. All the challenges of military electronics
The speech by Guglielmo Gambardella (Uilm national coordinator for aerospace)
From the workshop organized by IndustriALL Eu last 10 September entitled "Trends in the military electronics sector in Europe", an interesting picture of the sector emerged: in the coming years an important growth is expected in terms of volumes and development of the technologies involved but not without possible risks on the control of the same.
The meeting, held in "remote" mode, saw the participation of the major European trade unions, with Uilm representing Italy, experts and managers of companies in the sector.
Electronics is a vast and transversal sector and it is therefore difficult to determine its application perimeters: it certainly includes communications, sensors, radar just to name a few.
Unlike in the past, defense companies have been chasing (for some time now) those civilian holders of digital technologies (Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Automation) increasingly present in all military systems: the future of the battlefield is the electronic one.
It is now a reality that the digital applications of the great IT giants and web services (Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others) are more advanced than the military ones, allowing multinationals to achieve significant bargaining power or influence in future choices.
The need to collect, process, protect information and data but, above all, to do it safely and independently poses a great challenge to the defense industries, in particular those of military electronics (Leonardo, Thales, Bae), in a great commitment in R&D in order to recover the lost ground.
The funding provided by the EDF 2021-2027 for research and development of projects in the sector is 8 billion euros.
Already the current weapon systems, whether terrestrial, naval or air, base their potential on sensors and on the ability to analyze the data collected, also by crossing them with the information present in social media, in full integration with other systems in the field of battle managed by the decision-making centers of the armed forces.
The Italian Ministry of Defense itself has foreseen in the last Dpp 2021-2023 an allocation of 95 million euros for the creation of a "defense cloud" and 190 million for the creation of an information environment and a network of innovation centers for Artificial Intelligence.
In this scenario, Leonardo's acquisition of 25.1% of the German electronics company Hensoldt Ag stipulated last April is therefore strategic.
During the same workshop, Celia Pelaz-Perez, Hensoldt strategy director, confirmed the validity of the agreement between the German and Italian companies, pending the finalization and approval by the German government.
“With Leonardo we have the same vision and strategy to strengthen our positions in the reference markets”, said the manager of the leading company in Germany in the field of cybersecurity and sensors.
The scenario discussed at the European meeting also poses important challenges for the trade unions which will continue to follow the evolution of the sector to identify all the initiatives to protect the workers involved.
For Uilm it is necessary that the interests of workers are taken into consideration in the fora in which the decision-making processes for the future of the defense sector will be defined.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/leonardo-hensoldt-thales-tutte-le-sfide-elettronica-militare/ on Tue, 14 Sep 2021 06:43:34 +0000.