The Purpose Does Not Change; the Weapons Do: The Imperative of Convergence

By General Didier Tisseyre, French Air Force Corps General (Ret.)

Senior Consultant in Cybersecurity and Digital StrategiesFormer Commander of French Cyber DefenceFormer Director of Infrastructure Networks and Information Systems at the French Ministry for the Armed Forces.

One hundred and seventeen thousand-dollar drones destroy forty strategic bombers deep inside Siberia. A robotic assault captures a position without a single infantryman setting foot on it. In just a few years, Ukraine and then the Middle East have demonstrated that mass no longer looks as it once did. Yet behind these images of rupture, one thing has not changed: the purpose of war. Each belligerent still seeks to impose its will on the other. It is in this gap — between an unchanging political end and revolutionary means — that the future of our defence industries will be decided. And this is precisely what Eurosatory brings together: the industrial base and innovation, at the exact point where their convergence must take place.

The Constant: The Political Target

Since the Cold War, every conflict has either confirmed or disrupted our strategies — joint coordination and the revolution in military affairs in the Gulf in 1991, the projection of air power in Kosovo, the real-time integration of special forces, intelligence and armed drones in Afghanistan and Iraq, hybrid warfare followed by high-intensity warfare in Ukraine, and extreme hybridisation and global access denial in the Middle East. To identify the major trends, and therefore guide constrained budgets, one framework remains illuminating: that of John Warden, which has structured Western military thinking since the 1980s.

Warden models the adversary as a living body, organised into five concentric circles in descending order of strategic importance: the government, which acts as the brain; organic essentials — energy, finance, supply chains; critical infrastructure — transport, telecommunications; the population; and, only lastly, deployed forces. His lesson is that, to paralyse a system, it is more effective and less costly to strike directly at decision-making centres than to confront armies head-on, thereby triggering a domino effect. This logic sheds light, across all recent conflicts, on the targeting of leaders, resources and infrastructure.

That political purpose remains. Everything around it has changed.

The Revolution: Intelligent Mass — and Its Digital Downside

The watertight hierarchy of Warden’s circles no longer holds. Hybrid strategies prescribe targeting them all at once, operating below thresholds; digital technology, for its part, cuts across every domain and interconnects them. The lessons from Ukraine have shown this clearly: technological and operational innovation, driven by a genuine war economy, has become the decisive lever for rebalancing an asymmetric fight and offsetting the attrition of high-intensity warfare.

Two concepts sum up this shift. The first is intelligent and affordable mass — expendable, modular platforms equipped with embedded software intelligence, admittedly less capable than sophisticated systems, but available at an entirely different cost scale. The second is the weaponisation of civilian technologies, which places commercial-world infrastructure, terminals and applications at the service of combat, even enabling the population to feed intelligence. Combined with the most advanced capabilities, these masses open the way to highly effective strategies of saturation and access denial.

But — and this is perhaps the most dangerous blind spot — what comes from the civilian world is rarely protected like military equipment. Every terminal, every consumer application expands the digital attack surface. Affordable mass is also vulnerable mass. There can be no data sovereignty without cybersecurity by design, and no resilience without agility, diversity and redundancy of means to evade both strikes and intrusions. This is the condition required to ensure that the advantage of mass does not turn against those who deploy it.

Command: Connecting Sensors, Decision-Makers and Effectors

To respond to these multifaceted conflicts, operations are now planned across all domains — land, sea, air, space and cyber — and across all fields, including the electromagnetic and information environments, while synchronising different timelines. It is no longer enough to issue orders and control their execution through a vertical chain of command. What is needed is an ultra-connected and secure system linking sensors, decision-makers and effectors in a mesh network, capable of accelerating the decision-action loop in order to gain the upper hand, and supported by artificial intelligence to absorb and make use of a volume of data that has become colossal.

This integration requires modular, scalable and sovereignly controlled platforms, weapons and information systems. Above all, it requires something that technology alone cannot provide.

The Call: Converge, Now

Everything points to the same requirement: bringing the defence industry and digital companies closer together. They do not yet speak the same language. Cultural constraints — contracting, intellectual property, capitalisation models, pace of innovation — still separate two worlds that war has already brought together on the battlefield. Bridging this gap is no longer an industrial convenience: it is a condition of sovereignty.

The State, prime contractors, start-ups and investors each hold part of the answer. None holds it in full. Eurosatory is one of the few places where they come face to face: let them come not to exhibit finished products, but to decide to accelerate together. The purpose of war will not change. It is up to us to ensure that our means change fast enough.