Indra leads European defence
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Union formally approved the Strategic Compass, an ambitious action plan to strengthen the EU's Security and Defence Policy. In this way, Brussels set among its priorities the need to reinforce the capacity to respond quickly to any international crisis. Indra is coordinating the work of some of the continent's most important companies that will make this possible, as reported by La Razón.
The Spanish technology company is leading two of the most important projects to provide the EU with the tools to plan and deploy an international force in a coordinated and rapid manner anywhere in the world.
The Spanish newspaper highlights the future European command and control system EC2 (European Command and Control) and the cyberspace situational awareness platform ECYSAP (European Cyber Situational Awareness), two projects financed by the European Defence Fund.
The company recently showcased some of EC2's capabilities during the first real military exercises conducted by the EU, in which an amphibious force of more than 3,000 soldiers from 19 different countries was deployed under the command of the Spanish Armed Forces as part of the MILEX exercise.
The EC2 system will provide the necessary capacity to coordinate the intervention of a force made up of armies from several countries and to simultaneously manage different missions in different countries. It is therefore a fully interoperable system, capable of seamlessly exchanging data with the command and control systems used by the various EU and NATO armies.
The platform also provides a highly advanced capability to integrate mission planning and management from the strategic to the purely operational levels, thus providing commanders with the level of detail they need to make decisions.
It will also be a system capable of interoperating with other agencies' civilian systems, which makes Indra's future European EC2 system one of the most avant-garde solutions available, according to La Razón.
Indra's director of Ground Systems and Command and Control, Antonio Hernández Bejarano - quoted by the Spanish newspaper - explains that "the company coordinates the work of Leonardo, Eviden, LuxGovSat and Thales Edisoft and 16 other companies" to deliver a state-of-the-art command and control system and highlights "the essential support of the Spanish Ministry of Defence, which has driven this initiative from the outset and which is also leading the EUMILCOM project - involving Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and Portugal, in the framework of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) - that will take the development of this solution to its final stage of technological maturity, accelerating its implementation and commissioning".
The EC2 system will incorporate state-of-the-art technologies linked to a modular and open architecture. It will also be one of the first systems designed to manage multi-domain operations, in which, by coordinating the intervention of land, naval and air units, the degree of effectiveness and control of any situation is multiplied.
As La Razón reminds us, "the planning and conduct of any mission today cannot be considered complete without taking into account cyberspace, a new domain that has acquired a capital degree of importance".
In this sense, and to ensure that Europe maintains control over this domain, Indra is coordinating the development of the ECYSAP situational awareness platform, one of the most cutting-edge systems in existence and which is arousing enormous interest among defence ministries across the continent and NATO allies.
The system is being designed both to operate autonomously and to integrate with the EC2 command and control system, providing a real-time view of potential threats, risk levels and cyberspace events to which any mission may be exposed. It will also make it possible to assess the impact of possible cyber-attacks and provide the capacity to choose the most appropriate response at any given moment.
For Indra's deputy director of Cyber Defence, Luis J. García de la Iglesia, this platform provides commanders with "a precise image of the possible threats and risks to which the deployed force is exposed".
It is also a project for which the Spanish Ministry of Defence has made a firm commitment, which has led Indra to coordinate the work of leading companies from France, Italy and Estonia such as Airbus, Leonardo, Cybernértica, EntelgyInnotec, S2Grupo and CY4 Gate.
Indra's deputy director of Cyber Defence explains that "the capacity of this system, which can be used both by the European Union and any of the cyber commands of the Member States and even NATO, will be tested in use cases that replicate the threats that the armies will encounter in conflict zones, including the protection of communications systems and critical management systems for the operation" and stresses that "Indra is proving to be a pioneering and leading company in the continent in terms of the development of mission critical systems".
