The presentation of the Leonardo's 2024-2028 industrial plan It mainly offers two points for reflection, beyond the dynamics strictly linked to the evolution of the main Italian AD&S industry.
The concept of business model transformation from DEFENSE a Global Security it is a different way of calling the expansion of "traditional" defense (that properly identified as a military affair) to that suitable for countering the hybrid and multi-domain threats of the 21st century.
Digitalization, multidomain interconnection, development of artificial intelligence and the system of "competitive globalization" - which has definitively archived, like the Ukrainian war, African instability, US-China competition, the Gaza conflict, the Sea crisis Red and also the political implications of the energy transition and the race for rare earths are dramatically bringing to the surface traditional globalism and the security mechanism centered on the West - have enormously broadened the concept of "war" as we had learned to know it through the Clausewitzian declension of "continuation of politics by other means", almost overturning it and transforming it into an immanent reality in relations between States and human communities of any type.
Normal that the slogan "Bullets & bytes", often repeated by Leonardo's CEO, Roberto Cingolani, then represented the "doctrinary" framework around which the Piazza Monte Grappa Industrial Plan was built. But, in fact, the mix between bullets (to be read as conventional weapons or "traditional war") and digital technologies (the "hybrid war" of cyber, economic, infrastructural and so on) is already determining the transformations of international politics.
The increasingly widespread capillarity of infrastructural networks and the transformations of the world economic system, which requires greater interconnections in the face of increasingly structured and "systemic" competitiveness, have now caused the diluting of the fault line between military affairs and civil affairs, extending the reasons for conflict and the tools available to conduct it. Clearly, the development of ever new technologies, especially "dual use" ones - and the gaze can only focus on aerial, naval and submarine drones, as well as satellite navigation and observation systems - is an integral part of this system.
And in the technological challenge, a leading role is played by the space race, which has received new life from the development of telecommunications and the need to always find new natural resources for terrestrial production even - in the near future - outside planet Earth.
Leonardo's Industrial Plan has identified one a question that analysts and experts in space policies and space economy have not yet highlighted sufficiently: it is true that private individuals are playing an increasingly important role in the space race and that, indeed, very often they are dictating the times and methods; but it is a mainly extra-European phenomenon.
In the Old Continent, the States still have the majority share in decision-making processes for Space, very often - as happens for Defense - with limited resources compared to the other imperial blocs. This is why in this context it would be necessary to invest in a true continental "space alliance" just as in common defense mechanisms, strengthening consortia and cooperative projects in this sense.
Photo: Defense Online
