European defence production is growing at a pace the sector has not seen in decades. ReArm Europe targets 800 billion euros, the SAFE instrument adds a further 150 billion in loan capacity, and national NATO budgets are expanding in parallel. But according to Viktor Eliasson, Chief Executive Officer of Diadrom, another challenge risks being overshadowed.
"For every new platform, variant and software version, a complexity is built up that many organisations underestimate. There is not always someone who holds overall responsibility for the whole picture," he says.
According to Eliasson, the defence industry is facing a development that resembles the transition the automotive industry underwent during the 2010s.
"The automotive industry has already been through this journey. The defence sector now faces many of the same questions, but the consequences could be greater because these are systems where availability is directly linked to operational effect."
He describes a scenario that is becoming increasingly common when the same platform is sold to several different countries.
"Every customer wants their own sensors, their own communications solutions and their own adaptations. After a few years, you no longer have one product but hundreds or thousands of variants that need to be managed and kept up to date."
The result is that software management evolves from a technical issue into an operational one.
"The central question is actually quite simple: do we know which software is installed on each individual unit, and can we update it when needed?"
Colonel Håkan Petersson, responsible for the armaments unit and land-based systems at the Swedish Armed Forces (Försvarsmakten), agrees.
"The more complex the systems become, the more important control over configurations, maintenance and updates becomes. Otherwise you risk losing availability precisely where you need it most," says Håkan Petersson.
"That is really the whole point. Operational effect is not only about performance. It is also about systems functioning over time, being maintainable, and having control over your configuration," says Eliasson.
He argues that the defence industry is now approaching the same kind of software discipline that has emerged in the automotive sector through standards and working methods for cybersecurity, functional safety and lifecycle management.
"It is not the technology itself that is new. What is new is that the same working methods need to move into the defence sector."
Diadrom has its roots in research at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg (both in Gothenburg, western Sweden) and today works with software lifecycle management, diagnostics and integration issues within complex technical systems. The company's software is used in, among other vehicles, the Volvo EX90 and EX60, while the company has also delivered vehicle diagnostic systems to the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) for twelve years.
"In complex technical systems, the real challenge is getting the entire chain to work together and actually function in all conditions. We are loyal to function, not to any individual system or supplier."
Diadrom describes its role through the concept of Diadrom Inside, which according to Eliasson is about ensuring that the whole works, not just the individual parts.
"The defence industry is facing a software-defined transition. The question is not whether it will come, but how well organisations manage to handle it."
In the next part of this series of reports, Viktor Eliasson elaborates on how experience from the automotive industry can be used to reduce risks as the defence sector takes the step into an increasingly software-defined reality.