A new defence technology event built around operational problems opens at The Magazine in London on Wednesday, the first time the Apex series has been staged in Britain, according to the organisers.
Apex Europe runs on 7 and 8 October and is organised by Clarion Defence and Security, the company behind DSEI in Britain, Germany and Japan. It runs as a counterpart to Apex Defense, held each January in Washington, and the organisers describe the London edition as operator-driven, aimed squarely at European and NATO operational priorities and at solutions that could be deployed in the near term rather than in a decade.
The format puts operational leaders, acquisition staff, startups, scale-ups, investors and established industry in the same room to work through what the organisers call pacing threats facing European and allied commands.
Seven operational problems have been set as the agenda for the two days. They cover the interoperability and integration of autonomous systems across European and NATO forces; winning autonomous warfare at scale and mass; generating combat power through long-range strike and precision effects; countering undersea threats and protecting critical infrastructure; countering low-cost and rapidly proliferating uncrewed systems; enhancing layered and integrated air and missile defence across domains; and fighting in a denied, degraded and contested battlespace.
Read as a list, those seven amount to a fairly blunt statement of what has gone wrong with European defence over the past four years. Three of them concern drones in one form or another, two concern defending infrastructure and airspace that was previously assumed safe, and one concerns operating when the electromagnetic spectrum is being taken away.
Several exhibitors have timed announcements to coincide with the show. Cody Aerospace and Defence, which describes itself as building a new British sovereign prime for complex weapons, will announce its first products during the event. Labrys Technologies unveils the latest version of its Axiom secure communications platform, and Voyant Innovations arrives having just demonstrated satellite-free navigation to the Ministry of Defence aboard an uncrewed vessel in the Solent.
The exhibitor list leans towards smaller companies, with British entrants including Helix Geospace on anti-jamming antennas, Drone Evolution on first-person-view drones and training, Q5D on automated wire harness manufacture and Talos Technology on electric motors for drones. Granta Autonomy arrives from Lithuania with equipment already in Ukrainian service, and BlueShadow, founded last year and operating from Copenhagen and Kyiv, shows maritime security software.
