10 May 2026

Digital technologies and defence have become inseparable, and Europe is under pressure to act on that reality faster than it has so far managed. At EIF, we organised a lunch debate bringing together European Commission officials, NATO representatives and telecommunications industry leaders to examine how dual-use innovation can be scaled into genuine defence capabilities. Three questions ran through the discussion: how to accelerate the integration of civilian technologies into defence, how to make the funding architecture work for new entrants as well as established players, and how to structure public-private cooperation for an era in which critical infrastructure is almost entirely owned and operated by the private sector.

The new digital & defense nexus

Opening remarks

Inese Vaidere MEP opened by challenging the framing of dual-use as a future concern: for countries on Europe's eastern border, it is an operational reality today. Drawing on Latvia's experience, MEP Vaidere described how hybrid attacks along the Baltic and Polish borders gradually shifted European attitudes toward dual-use infrastructure, from initial hesitation to growing acceptance of surveillance systems and digital border management tools. Latvia's role in the International Drone Coalition for Ukraine served as her central example of dual-use in practice: a single initiative simultaneously supporting Ukraine's defence, building national military capability and growing a domestic drone industry. She identified three priorities for the discussion: scaling innovation and reducing barriers for SMEs entering defence-related markets, achieving better integration of defence industries within the single market, and above all accelerating the speed of Europe's response to a geopolitical environment that is not waiting for slow institutional processes.

The Commission's views

Kristine Rudzite-Stejskala, Team Leader in the Defence Policy and Innovation Unit at DG DEFIS, argued that European digital sovereignty and the European defence agenda are not two separate policy tracks but two dimensions of the same strategic challenge. Dependencies on non-European technologies are not merely an industrial policy concern, she stressed; they are a direct security vulnerability. Ukraine, in her assessment, rewrote the rule book in two ways: it confirmed the battlefield decisiveness of AI, sensors, secure communications and drones, and it fundamentally compressed the expected timelines for innovation from years to weeks. The Commission's response, articulated in the European Defence Industry Transformation Roadmap published in November, is built around speed, agility and greater risk-taking. She walked through the instruments now in place: the European Defence Fund, which has committed close to €6.5 billion to defence research and development and brought nearly 70% of its participating companies from outside the traditional defence sector; the newly proposed AGILE instrument designed for faster, higher-risk support; the European Defence Industrial Programme; and the SAFE instrument worth €150 billion. For telecommunications, cloud and connectivity companies specifically, she was direct: 5G networks capable of AI-based drone detection, spectrum data patterns and edge computing are now defence assets, and the architecture and funding to support that transition are in place.

Other stakeholders' perspectives

Nathan Robinson Grison, Director of the Committee on Democracy and Security at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, structured his contribution around two interconnected imperatives: societal resilience and defence deterrence. Modern militaries depend on connectivity, data fusion and networks for intelligence, targeting and command and control, he noted, and adversaries including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are actively testing the vulnerabilities that digitalisation creates. The central lesson he drew from Ukraine was that resilience cannot be built in a crisis; it must be designed in from the start, as the Ukrainians had done in the years following 2014. Alongside resilience, he stressed agility: the ability to integrate new technologies at the speed of relevance, in weeks and months rather than years. On the institutional side, Mr Robinson pointed to NATO's baseline resilience requirements agreed in 2016, which include dedicated standards for communications and digital infrastructure, and to the outcome of The Hague summit, where for the first time a concrete target of 1.5% of GDP was agreed for defence-related investments including resilience and critical infrastructure protection. He cited the Defence Innovation Accelerator DIANA as a working example of how governments and industry can be brought together to speed both development and adoption of new technologies.

Frédéric Polycarpe, Director of Strategy, Innovation and Partnerships in the Defence and Homeland Security Division of Orange, opened with a concrete illustration: Orange provided NATO with the STANAG 5665 standard for 5G, pointing to how commercial telecommunications infrastructure is already embedded in defence architecture. Operational superiority today, he argued, depends on who can connect, sense, protect and exploit information faster and more reliably than others. That requires not standalone technologies but end-to-end digital chains designed for trust, resilience and interoperability, where connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity and AI function as a single operational system rather than separate layers. On anti-drone capability specifically, he described Orange's work deploying 5G-based drone detection systems across hundreds of kilometres of territory, including in Romania and with Polish partners along Europe's eastern frontier, as a live example of civilian infrastructure serving a direct defence function. Mr Polycarpe's broader argument was that defence capability is becoming software-defined, data-centric and service-based, and that telecommunications operators are positioned to contribute at scale if the ecosystem creates the right space for new entrants alongside established defence primes.

Henrik Bliddal, Head of National Security and Defence at Nokia, distilled his message into three points: European defence needs a genuine AI and digital transformation, it needs new commercial entrants who bring not disruptive technology but the scale and speed that the existing defence industrial base cannot match, and the ecosystem needs to be shaped around the capabilities Europe requires rather than around the industrial base it has inherited. Information and decision superiority has always determined military outcomes, he noted, but the Ukrainian experience has made that visible at a speed and scale that leaves no room for gradual adaptation. Nokia's response has been to build a dedicated defence business incubation unit combining military communications experience with co-creation alongside startups, focused on two areas: providing the end-to-end communications backbone that allows sensor data from the battlefield to reach decision-makers without siloing, and developing 5G and eventually 6G networks as active sensing infrastructure, effectively doubling as radar stations. Mr Bliddal's call to the EU was specific: dedicate genuine innovation funding, connect that funding to equipment procurement streams so that promising technologies can transition into large-scale programmes, and align innovation-to-deployment models across member states, because companies operating at Nokia's scale cannot deliver bespoke solutions for 27 different national requirements.

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