🇩🇪 🇪🇺 🌍 The time for safe drone capture has arrived, and it could be the biggest commercial opportunity in the history of defense. Why I'm proud to be working on this, and what's next...

Germany has just passed the Second Amendment to the Aviation Security Act. The change I want to highlight is shared responsibility for detection and countermeasures between the state and critical infrastructure providers (energy, transportation, etc.).

There are other changes, like expanded powers for the Bundeswehr to take down drones from civilian airspace. But there's of course clear guidance to use force only if necessary. Nobody wants lots of Mavics shot near civilians.

It's early days but an exciting path is emerging:

1️⃣ Critical infrastructure providers and security agencies (like police) will seek far more counterdrone detection and mitigation solutions because of this legislatory development.

2️⃣ I expect demand to scale dramatically worldwide based on similar legislation, exacerbated by demand-increasing conflicts like the war in Iran, and the Cambrian Explosion in commercial and attack drone diversity.

3️⃣ Kinetic solutions will only be able to serve part of this demand, and I expect the largest growth by far to be in detection-, non-kinetic-, and zero-collateral solutions.

This is great news for our societies, but also for companies working on safe mitigation solutions. An expansion of demand for non-kinetic mitigation doesn't make desctructive interceptors go away, and my work on those will continue.

The point I want to make for founders and investors is that while non-kinetic intercept might be one of the hardest challenges, it is also starting to also look like one of the most rewarding ones to work on; now, also in terms of potential ROI.

There are a bunch of extremely hard and unsolved problems in this field, many of which I write about on TECH WARS frequently. In fall last year I wrote about what makes safe capture so mind-bogglingly tough. It's understandable that most decide to not even attempt to tackle it.

As such, there are few folks who dare to work on this extremely hard challenge, and I'm proud and grateful to be working on exactly this problem with some of the brightest and most forward-thinking, action-biased people in Europe:

The team of the Anti-Drone Response 2.0: Felix Rothe, Patrick P. Rose, Julia Ebenauer, Jano Costard, and everybody else pushing this topic at SPRIND - Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen, and of course the wonderful Swedish partners Erik Borälv, Stina Lundgren Högbom from Vinnova, Sweden's Innovation Agency, the daring teams that have made it into the program, as well as the veteran expert cast which is serving on the Jury.

In typical SPRIND fashion, we're not blueprinting around, but getting right to it, and I look forward to the first sessions on the airfield, and pushing the performance envelopes of each of the participating teams.

Lots more to follow; watch this space!