“No start-up survives seven-year procurement processes”
Interview with Sven Weizenegger, head of the Bundeswehr’s Cyber Innovation Hub
Russia's war against Ukraine shows that innovations in defense technology must be used as quickly as possible to either replace rare resources or develop new capabilities. It is more than questionable whether the Bundeswehr's structures could currently achieve this. In the interview, the head of the Bundeswehr's Cyber Innovation Hub, Sven Weizenegger, talks about the difficulties of bringing innovations into the Bundeswehr system and not alienating start-ups in particular.
(Source: CIHBW)
The Cyber Innovation Hub was founded in 2017. How many innovation projects have been managed since then and how many of them have already had a positive impact on the troops' everyday life?
Since its founding in 2017, the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub (CIHBw) has launched more than 160 innovation projects as the first innovation unit of a German ministry.
19 of these innovation projects are “permanent”. This means that the Bundeswehr has either decided to procure the technology or the specific product or has already rolled it out - one of which has even reached Ukraine: the flexibly adaptable light supply for mobile forces in action (faLKE). This is an LED light carpet that enables quick and flexible care of the wounded in the dark. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has ordered 2,000 faLKE copies for its armed forces to defend against the Russian war of aggression, and the federal government has delivered them as part of its strengthening initiative.
14 further innovation projects will continue to be used as prototypes by the armed forces on a temporary basis. These include, for example, ACOP (Augmented Common Operational Picture), the virtual sandbox in 3D, or Image Aware, an AI software that helps distinguish between fake news and truth by quickly collecting comprehensive text, image and video data recorded on social media and then evaluated. This allows a nuanced view of narratives in hybrid conflict situations and thus improves the understanding of the information environment by moving operational contingents.
In addition, seven innovation projects have been incorporated into ongoing Bundeswehr procurement projects, either in that concrete findings from an innovation project are demonstrably used for an ongoing procurement project or have led to the cancellation of a project.
We do not complete every project we start through to the end. If we notice that we can't find a good solution, we also cancel the projects. But every project is a gain in knowledge.
With this quota, we are the most successful innovation unit in the federal government.
More and more start-ups are discovering the defense sector as a possible business area. What options does the Cyber Innovation Hub have to make it easier for these young companies and their innovative ideas to enter the industry?
With the CIHBw, the Bundeswehr has a vehicle to implement things quickly. We have the expertise and are very well positioned to create impact from these opportunities. Because our task from the start is and has been direct pragmatic implementation in the troops, not research or administration. That is exactly what the young start-ups and their investors need and are looking for now. Working with us can function as a seal of quality and then act as a “proof of concept” for other investors or customers from the public sector. We are already noticing the effect in some of the start-ups we have worked with.
In the future, however, this will have to take place on a much larger scale than today and the state must use the current dynamic for concrete and meaningful measures.
The federal government must become a reliable and faster customer of start-ups. On average, no start-up survives procurement processes that last six to seven years and this leads to investors turning to more attractive areas. Private money will only increasingly flow into innovations in the defense sector if such investments are economically attractive.
You are driving forward many innovations with your hub. Up to what stage of development can you accompany an innovation and from when does the regular procurement process for which the BAAINBw is responsible take over?
As I said, we do the so-called “proof of concept” and check with the soldiers whether the product (we call this “innovation project”) meets the user needs. This consistent and absolute user focus is the key to success and also makes successful start-ups.
If the user is convinced, we recommend the Bundeswehr's plan to introduce it. And then the system takes over, in our case the user for cyber and IT, the Bundeswehr Digitalization Center and Capability Development for Cyber and Information Space (ZDigBw).
Topics such as procurement, long-term financing and the continuation of innovation projects are outside our area of responsibility, but they still concern us because we see extreme potential for improvement here. Currently, we are all too often faced with the situation where we successfully test innovation projects, recommend them to the Bundeswehr for introduction, but then a lengthy procurement process follows. In this so-called valley of death, innovation loses a massive amount of time and energy. In the worst case, it disappears completely.
In your opinion, what structural changes would need to be made in the Bundeswehr's procurement process in order to do justice to the rapid innovation cycles of digital technologies and to prevent the armed forces from being structurally supplied with outdated technology due to the long processes?
From our perspective, the biggest challenges are the maintenance, perpetuation and long-term financing of innovation projects as well as their sustainable integration into the troops. Because of the Bundeswehr's slow procurement processes, which are still geared towards peacetime, the innovation projects are in danger of dying in the “valley of death”. However, with our comparatively limited resources (personnel, budget, etc.), it is difficult for us to prevent this.
In order to achieve this, we need better framework conditions, additional resources and responsibilities.
For example, on our own initiative, together with the BWI, we created the process for “maintaining prototypes”, which bridges the above-mentioned gap between recommendation by the CIHBw and “real” procurement. The soldiers can continue to use the products that we have successfully tested together, while the procurement process is initiated in parallel.
A look abroad can also provide inspiration. In the USA and other countries you can see how procurement processes have been successfully designed to be innovation-friendly for decades. For example, there is the possibility of setting up a “fast track” with significant simplifications for certain topics and tasks that are classified as innovation-relevant.
What lessons do you learn from Russia's war against Ukraine, particularly with regard to the rapid development and use of new technologies?
In Ukraine we can understand how modern and innovative technologies can contribute to a country's defense and war capability. For example, through unbureaucratic procurement and financing of start-ups, the Ukrainians managed to implement highly innovative solutions for the armed forces in a very short time and build a powerful drone army.
With the new “Brave 1” platform, Ukraine has once again significantly professionalized the availability of innovative solutions.
We in Germany must adapt to the current (in)security situation and become fully capable of acting - that is, ready for war, as Defense Minister Pistorius calls it. The ability to act also means that the Bundeswehr needs the most modern software (solutions) and digital innovations. And faster than ever before. This applies not only to the procurement of large projects, but also to the financing, consolidation and ultimately procurement of innovative solutions. We need leaner processes, faster implementation horizons and more impact on the goal. We are not lacking in ideas, on the contrary. However, as already described, we need better framework conditions, additional resources and responsibilities for implementation.
Many experts see Ukraine as the realization of the so-called glass battlefield. The time between target reconnaissance and combat is becoming shorter and shorter due to ongoing digitalization, making the battlefield increasingly deadly. What can the Cyber Innovation Hub do to strengthen the survivability and lethality of its own troops on the battlefield?
In order to master the vast amounts of data generated in modern warfare, we must move away from the old platform thinking and use technology even more as a lever for innovation. In order to create information superiority in combat, data is required that is collected by the hardware manufacturers, which in turn can only be made operationally manageable with software. But this is only possible if large and small companies, arms manufacturers and start-ups, open their interfaces to each other. As a Cyber Innovation Hub, we see ourselves as translators and mediators between these two worlds.
In your opinion, what influence will increasing digitalization and in particular the use of AI have on the Bundeswehr in the coming years and what has to happen so that this process leads to superiority on the battlefield and does not end in a structural overload of the Bundeswehr system?
New technologies - such as AI - can improve the Bundeswehr's ability to quickly analyze large amounts of data, recognize patterns and thus create the basis for better operational decisions. This leads to more efficient and effective use of existing resources. The use of AI offers the opportunity to obtain precise, automated and targeted data 24/7 and to show military actors at all management levels options for action.
We test AI from various perspectives in innovation projects together with the Bundeswehr. We test AI in the battlefield with collision drones, among other things, which can automatically fly into an enemy drone - without the control of a base station. In addition, the “Crowd Information Platform” project is testing a tool by analyzing social media data in order to verify existing military terrain models. We also try to support the Bundeswehr system with solutions from other sides, for example in procurement. With the KI-PROcure project, we are testing AI software from a start-up that supports the time-consuming creation of service descriptions.
Are there already plans for how the Cyber Innovation Hub will develop in the coming years and what are your personal ideas for your company?
The Cyber Innovation Hub is an excellently positioned and now well-tested construct. Elsewhere, many innovation units suffer from elementary errors, such as a lack of proximity to decision-makers, a lack of their own decision-making authority, and unattractive working conditions for relevant employees. We didn't make any of these mistakes. That was a good basis to prove that we can advance the Bundeswehr. And it is now the basis for rolling out our approach more broadly and creating even more impact.
In addition to the topic of stabilizing our own developments, we see great potential in closer integration with start-ups and their investors. If we manage to make the innovations developed there available to the Bundeswehr, we will gain enormous potential for our defense capability and at the same time strengthen Germany as a location. To do this, however, you have to understand exactly how start-ups work, what helps or harms them.
Innovations by start-ups, for example, should not be confused with innovations by research institutions, large companies or the Bundeswehr itself. Start-ups find themselves in a very specific situation because they are driven by the market economy and are under high pressure to succeed and time. The public discussion is currently suffering from this lack of differentiation.
Thanks to our extremely pragmatic and fast DNA and our direct daily work with the users in the force, we are ideally positioned to work with start-ups. A “window of opportunity” has just opened because start-ups and investors are very active and want to work with us. I hope that we can seize this opportunity before start-ups and investors come to the conclusion that the Bundeswehr is taking too long and move their ideas and money to other countries.
Ole Henckel asked the questions
