Defence and Innovation: When Agility Becomes a Strategic Imperative

This week, the Odysseus Defense Partners team attended the Cercle de l'innovation et du combat futur, whose latest session focused on a central topic: the industrialisation of defence innovation.

One observation stands out immediately: startup vocabulary has deeply permeated the defence sphere. Agility, speed of execution, iteration, scaling — these terms, used without hesitation by the CEMAT, General Pierre Schill, DGA Director Patrick Pailloux, and General Bruno Baratz, commander of the Commandement du combat futur (CCF), reflect a fundamental shift. The goal is no longer merely to optimise existing programmes, but to rebuild genuine industrial capacity in the near term, around innovative players such as HEXADRONE and its founder Alexandre Labesse.

An Echo of the Digital Transformation of the 2010s

The parallel with the digital transformation of the 2010s is striking. Back then, the challenge was to break out of long-cycle logic, shorten lead times, test quickly, learn even faster, and put the product and its uses back at the heart of organisations. The cardinal idea, which became almost a mantra: it is not the big that eats the small, but the fast that devours the slow.

This language is now resurfacing forcefully in the defence domain. A recent interview published by Le Grand Continent with Mouad M., CEO of Harmattan AI, offers a striking illustration. Familiar markers appear throughout: strong vertical integration, the capacity to iterate rapidly, an obsession with time-to-deployment, a scale-up logic built in from the design phase, and engineering driven by operational use.

Real Differences

Yet several major breaks distinguish this dynamic from the digital transformation of past years.

First, in defence, speed is not merely a competitive advantage — it becomes a condition of strategic credibility. The stakes are not about gaining market share; they are about influencing a balance of power that can shift dramatically within weeks on the ground.

Second — and this is where the complexity is of an entirely different order — the task is not to "launch a POC." It is to build infrastructures capable of delivering, maintaining, adapting, and mass-producing physical products that depend on supply chains that are often fragmented and subject to the geopolitical and industrial upheavals of our time.

A Living Industrial System

This is where the real break lies, according to Odysseus Defense Partners. What we are witnessing is the emergence of a defence conceived as a living industrial system, rather than a succession of heavy, lengthy, near-perfect but slow programmes.

Some pit new entrants against traditional players. This would be an analytical error. The two complement each other. The war in Ukraine has imposed a highly agile reading of the battlefield, applied to questions of sovereignty, mass, and deterrence — questions that only a combination of both worlds can address seriously.

The industrialisation of defence innovation is not one trend among many. It is the defining challenge of the decade.