The New Defense Post #24

Welcome back to the #24 edition of The New Defense Post!

In this edition, we’ll cover:

When we connected for this interview, Yaroslav Azhnyuk was calling from Kyiv.

The previous day, another strike had hit Ukraine’s infrastructure, leaving him without electricity at home. We recorded the interview, and after the call, he planned to head to the office—one of the few places still with electricity.

That context is more than a backdrop. It shapes how Ukrainian entrepreneurs think about technology, manufacturing, and the pace of innovation. In this conversation, Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of Odd Systems and The Fourth Law, explains his transition from consumer hardware to defense systems.

He also shares why autonomy and local supply chains will shape the coming decades, and what needs to change for Ukrainian defense technology to scale across Europe.

Read the full interview on The New Defense Post

🗣 Katherina Reiche: “Drones are enablers… This technology is not developed at a desk alone. Its evolution is shaped by real operations, by experience from the field, including Ukraine.” (Defense Industry Europe)

📰 Our Take: The fastest path to scale is pairing a start-up that is also a specialist in interceptors, sensors, autonomy, and EW with a prime that already owns platforms, procurement pathways, and integration muscle.

When following this path, one thing to keep in mind is to closely manage and, as much as possible, own the procurement process as a startup, not just the agreement with the prime. Your reputation is directly tied to your partners, and as a small startup, you cannot afford to lose credibility when you sell to only a handful of large customers (MoDs).

🗣 Jan-Patrick Helmsen, Chief Sales Officer at STARK: “The contract award is a clear sign of confidence in our technology and our ability to turn operational demands into capabilities quickly.”(Resilience Media)

📰 Our Take: This is a defense scale-up that is moving fast and breaking the “one country, one army” trap. Many experts were concerned about the political risks in this space. Every country would push its own champion, and nothing would get done on a European scale.

This is a good sign that European countries may be ready to work with vendors from other European countries, without necessarily pushing their own national champions.

What would be interesting is for the EU to invest directly in neo-primes to avoid the “state favorite” traps that many partially nationalized and strategically relevant primes have fallen into.

🗣 Michael Traut, German Space Command: “(We need to) improve our deterrence posture in space, since space has become an operational or even warfighting domain… our space capabilities need to be protected and defended.” (Reuters)

📰 Our Take: This is very different from the kind of defense tech we normally see deployed on the battlefield. It’s not based on consumer technology or simple components, but on very deep-tech systems.

Offensive capabilities in space might be the most exciting field to start building in right now. Major General Michael Traut calls for avoiding the development of space weapons that would create debris, but to be fair, Russia is already testing anti-satellite missiles, so it’s only a matter of time before we’ll see them as well.

Rheinmetall’s expansion “from arms to orbit” is rattling rivals as it pushes deeper into space programs and drone/satcom plays, including a satellite tie-up with ICEYE (Financial Times)

The EU’s SAFE facility (up to €150bn in long-maturity loans for defence procurement/industrial capacity) keeps showing up as the financial backbone behind the “produce more, faster” push (European Union)

Electro Optic Systems (EOS) opened a Singapore production hub for anti-drone high-energy lasers, but the Europe angle is strong: it cited a Netherlands contract and hinted at shifting HQ/listing toward Europe as demand rises (Reuters)

At the Singapore Airshow, counter-drone tech was a headline theme, including systems from Europe-linked primes like Saab and Thales—a useful signal of where EU C-UAS product lines are headed (Business Insider)

Quantum sensors are increasingly important in defense because they can measure the physical world with extreme precision in environments where classical sensors struggle.

The biggest near-term use is positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) without relying on GPS/GNSS, along with sensing modalities that support subsurface mapping (tunnels, bunkers), magnetic anomaly detection, and resilient navigation on moving platforms.

In practice, that means inertial and timing stacks that remain accurate through jamming, spoofing, or satellite outages, and new ways to “see” gravitational or magnetic signatures that are hard to fake and can serve as landmarks.

Two European examples working in (or adjacent to) defense-relevant quantum sensing are Aquark Technologies, which has been trialing a cold-atom atomic clock (“AQlock”) with the Royal Navy as a step toward more resilient, GPS-independent PNT at sea.

Another example is Nomad Atomics GmbH, which develops high-precision quantum sensors, including deployable quantum gravimeters—a sensing class often discussed for applications like underground structure detection and high-fidelity terrain/subsurface characterization.

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