Indra presents NATO countries and allied armies with Europe's first new generation mission system for military vehicles
Indra presented this week its new Maestre mission system at one of the world's most important international armoured vehicle forums, the 25th edition of the International Armoured Vehicles Conference (IAV) held in the United Kingdom and attended by commanders of the main NATO allied armies and other countries.
A solution designed to act as the backbone and brains of battleships, it has become the first new-generation system in Europe to go into series production for operational deployment.
The European defence industry has been working for years on the development of systems such as this one, which meet the demanding architecture requirements defined by NATO (STANAG 4754 and others), in order to have an open and scalable interoperable solution that allows for simple and intuitive control of the growing number of systems and sensors that modern battleships carry, which will continue to increase in the coming years.
Indra designed the Maestre system for the Spanish Army's 8x8 Dragon vehicle, which is currently in the production phase, and has already integrated it into the first units that have been manufactured, with the main objective of facilitating operations. In particular, the identification of alerts and threats through the use of Artificial Intelligence and advanced 360º artificial vision models, the management of operations, targeting and firing on targets and the driving of the vehicle. All of this with the aim of increasing mission survivability and effectiveness.
Indra's system has thus become the first of its generation in Europe to reach this level of maturity and begin mass production with a view to its use in real deployments.
Its implementation also represents a turning point for the development of the military vehicles of the future, whose progress depends on the evolution of this technology, which is key to having the degree of interoperability necessary to carry out multi-domain operations, in which multiple platforms and systems are coordinated to act simultaneously in different domains of land, air and cyberspace (in some cases also marine). This requires much smarter, interconnected vehicles first, equipped with systems such as Maestre, which allow data to be exchanged at enormous speed through a combat cloud.
Presenting the Maestre system at the forum held at the Farnborough International Exhibition Centre, Indra's Deputy Director of Land Systems, Ignacio Ruiz, said: ‘Indra is already one of the main players in the armoured systems market in Europe and is evolving towards a role as a top-level integrator, having taken a majority stake in the military vehicle integration company Tess Defence. It also plays a key role in the Spanish Army's battleship programmes and in the main development projects promoted by the European Commission through the European Defence Fund (EDF), such as Marte, Famous I and II or Commands’.
Indra's executive explained that Maestre arrives to completely transform the way of operating an armoured vehicle and compared the leap that its implementation entails to the difference between flying a World War II aircraft, equipped with direct analogue controls and numerous indicator devices, and flying a modern aircraft, equipped with a digital architecture, controlled through computers. ‘Maestre automatically coordinates all the systems, merges and presents the information to the crew and offers an ease and immediacy in the operation of the vehicle unthinkable until now, substantially improving decision making and reliability, which in turn means greater safety, both for the crew and for the mission,’ he stresses.