Conference Presentation, Fireside Chat, Interview
European Defense Sovereignty Starts in the Factory: Stark’s Uwe Horstmann and Johannes Schaback
- Europe faces a fundamental shift away from a "default peaceful" world, driving a sustainable need for increased defense responsibility, deterrence capabilities, and structural changes to procurement processes that are now expected to last.
- The company intends to transition from pure innovation to mass-deployable, certified products for NATO forces, prioritizing industrial scaling, factory production readiness, and the selection of procurable top-quartile components over absolute leading-edge specs to ensure scalability.
- Product development relies on direct operational feedback from soldiers to address mental load and interface usability, fostering a "soldier-centric" approach that aims to secure trust and favorable procurement outcomes despite initial imperfections.
- The organization operates a venture-like portfolio of approximately 10 to 15 concurrent programs, utilizing an autonomous "small startups in a startup" structure to enable rapid innovation and a two-week experiment turnaround time.
- Strategic investments of roughly 600 million euros are planned over the next 12, 24, and 36 months to fund research, development, and production capabilities, with a focus on balancing vertical integration to solve scalability issues while allowing local suppliers to "plug in."
- Software and hardware systems are being tightly integrated to achieve sub-meter precision for striking moving targets, leveraging perception engines and reasoning to facilitate full autonomy in naval and air environments.
- Artificial intelligence will be embedded across all product modules for perception, decision-making, and mission planning, operating within a "responsibly used" framework featuring hard-coded constraints to prevent arming over inhabited areas.
- Supply chain diversification is a critical objective to increase resilience, though dependencies on raw chemicals from specific regions like China remain a challenge requiring coordinated industry and government strategies.
- Future deterrence relies on a "contractual design" between government and industry, potentially involving cloud-like contracts with surges and prepayments to secure manufacturing capacity for rapid scaling during conflicts.
- The company aims to become a primary innovation ecosystem pillar within the European defense architecture, collaborating with diverse partners to optimize time-to-market and avoid future technical debt.
- Long-term outlooks project that five to ten years from now, Europe will strengthen its role as a US partner and contribute to a world characterized by de-escalated conflicts and continued peace through robust defense capabilities.