Frank Leidenberger, chief digital officerat BWI, talks about the state of digitisation in the Bundeswehr. He explains that the goals set in 2017 have not been achieved yet. He continues by naming 2 reasons for this being the case. First, he states that money was and is a key problem because even with the large special contingent of 100 bil. euros the maintenance that is especially required with IT equipment in form of updates etc. cannot be covered. At least not without stable financing. As a second point he names the operative idea which in case of the Bundeswehr now seems to be what formerly was known as “skirmish of combined arms” and upgrade the same in one or two ways. That, Leidenberger said, is a smaller step compared to moving to indirect fire.
The role the BWI is going to play in this digitisation, is probably going to grow since they continue to get more new projects assigned to them. With this growing application area and workload Leidenberger said, that civil IT very well could be used in future military IT as it is seen in the Ukraine War now. As a reason he pointed to the fast development of technology and the long time it takes to upgrade the military equivalent even though in the technical core they are the same.
