On 4 April 2025, the Ministries of Defence and Economic Affairs published the Defence Strategy for Industry and Innovation 2025-2029. This strategy contains a Strategic Action Agenda on Industry, Innovation and Knowledge for Defence.
The Working Group on Politics and Defence Technology has offered a number of comments and suggested questions on it to the Standing Committee on Defence in the House of Representatives.
The working group does not find the Action Agenda very strong, due to its repetition of previously announced plans and few concrete and executable actions to quickly solve the major known bottlenecks innovatively.
The annex, on the other hand, provides quite a number of excellent intentions to quickly innovate and make new unframed capabilities available to the armed forces.
Again, our working group argues that the Netherlands is not ahead of "the 5 Dutch knowledge areas", which was mentioned in the Defence Paper as an argument for spearhead policy.
In our opinion, in the current urgency situation, applied research for naval construction incl. maritime weapon systems; armed unmanned and autonomous systems and defence against them; artificial intelligence for intelligence and command & control; as well as advanced training and simulation are much more eligible to be further strengthened quickly. These are also the signals our working group is hearing from practitioners.
Furthermore, all research and innovation should emphatically focus on a labour-extensive armed forces. After all, personnel is the major limiting factor now and in the future. Both the tight labour market and the decreasing "willingness to die" should limit the deployment of people. This is also increasingly possible with modern technology. However, there is nothing about this in this knowledge agenda.
Finally, it is striking that the action agenda includes many points focused on the land-based domain, while it is precisely in the maritime domain that a number of large development and new construction projects are planned.
What research and innovation is focused on the large projects for the Royal Navy? Why, for instance, is nuclear propulsion for ships not mentioned, nor further development of weapon systems now that Defence seems to abandon the standard used for decades for air and missile defence?
In more detail, the working group has the following comments and questions on the action agenda: Read more.
Illustration: AI generated
