Conference Presentation, Panel
A New Era of Military Technology | Global Conference 2025
- Hidden Level anticipates delivering comprehensive 3D detection and identification capabilities for a spectrum of airborne objects ranging from small drones and fast-moving projectiles to fighter jets and stratospheric balloons, alongside tracking RF emitters, GPS jammers, and cell towers; the company plans to operationalize air surveillance data and "spectral weather" services in the U.S. and other large areas to cue countermeasures and identify drone origins within 24 hours of deployment.
- Epirus projects a market expansion beyond military applications into critical asset protection for nuclear power grids, financial infrastructure, and major public events such as the Superbowl and overseas soccer matches, predicting the integration of their systems with external sensing technologies to address future drone threats and support "good things" beyond shelf storage.
- NextNav forecasts that solving the economic challenge of monetizing positioning and timing data against free GPS services will require government funding and regulatory action from the Federal Communications Commission, noting that while a terrestrial network solution could be "quick to market" post-approval, the construction typically requires a capital investment of 10 to 20 billion dollars and the regulatory process for horizontal positioning rules is expected to be lengthy.
- Multiple speakers identify significant risks regarding GPS vulnerability, predicting that the U.S. is falling behind nations like China and Russia, which are actively developing terrestrial backups such as Baidu, and warning that reacting to a total GPS failure will be too late given the potential for widespread disruption to communications, power grids, and autonomous vehicles.
- Companies expect to leverage non-traditional contracting vehicles including OTAs, SIBRs, APFID awards, and MTAs to bypass bureaucratic lethargy, with Hidden Level aiming to establish a program of record in under two years rather than the traditional eight, and utilizing "buy, try, and then decide" models to secure faster revenue and operator feedback.
- Strategic outlooks predict increased conflict intensity in the Indo-Pacific region, specifically involving proxy conflicts around India and Pakistan and tensions involving nuclear-capable countries, with a specific prediction that the U.S. may face a crisis over Taiwan and address unexplained phenomena occurring domestically.
- Future industry plans include the development of unique solutions for defense primes, the establishment of modular and open systems compatible with command networks like FADC2, and the utilization of non-traditional data to identify needs for 2030 and 2040, while regulatory efforts aim to fix laws that currently equate consumer drones with large airborne platforms.