Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media
The rollercoaster of geopolitics continues this week. The most credible plan yet for peace in Ukraine was presented and will be rejected by Putin. Continuing its mixed signals on foreign policy, the USA agreed to sell $11B in weapons to Taiwan. The UK Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Blaise Metreweli, both made speeches indicating that the UK is under attack now, and facing a future war in Europe.
Metreweli emphasised how “Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war. It’s important to understand their attempts to bully, fearmonger and manipulate, because it affects us all.” The grey zones Metreweli was referring to include “Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Drones buzzing airports and bases. Aggressive activity in our seas, above and below the waves. State-sponsored arson and sabotage. Propaganda and influence operations that crack open and exploit fractures within societies.”
She didn’t mention space, but yesterday Resilience Media contributor, Paddy Stephens examines the potential of that domain to be exploited via grey zone warfare.
“Space is, in many ways, the ideal domain for grey zone operations and activities, because there are a lot of things you can do that fall below the threshold of overt conflict,” Todd Harrison, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and expert on defence and space policy, told Paddy.
Read more in in our Dispatches from Taipei section below.
Concerningly, Sir Richard’s speech suggested that while the UK military can learn lessons from Ukraine, a Russian war with NATO would be inherently different in practice. His logic was that NATO has a completely different military, complete with the fighter jets and artillery Ukraine lacked when Russia mounted its full-scale invasion. This meant that Ukraine had to default to things like drones to make up for these deficiencies, but NATO would not have to.
This misses the point that Russia has now evolved its military tactics and doctrine in response to Ukraine’s innovations. A war between Russia and NATO would be more like Ukraine because Russia would use the new methods they have learned in Ukraine against us. These are innovations NATO militaries have still not adopted — and worryingly seem to think they might not need to. The sluggish start for UKDI which we reported on last week suggests our politicians may not fully understand the changing nature of war and technology happening right in front of their faces.
Italian cybersecurity startup Exein closed another €100M which puts their valuation around €700M. “Cybersecurity needs to be decentralised and embedded on devices we all use every day because the nature of the threat has fundamentally changed,” Gianni Cuozzo, CEO, said. “We’re seeing more attacks on infrastructure and physical systems, not just on services or websites. When attackers target firmware, the damage isn’t just digital. It becomes physical.” More on that in our Funding Announcement section below.
Elsewhere on Resilience Media:
- Skana wants to shore up coastal defence with amphibious vessel for shallow waters
- CHAOS Industries joins U.S. Army G‑TEAD Marketplace
- Quantum Systems picks up Fernride to move into autonomous land vehicles
- And Quantum Systems teams up with Frontline to mass-produce Ukrainian combat drones in Germany
- DefHack takes defence tech to the streets
Got a tip, funding announcement, or news? Send it our way. I’ll be back in your inboxes next week.
-Leslie Hitchcock, co-founder and Publisher, Resilience Media
Welcome to the grey zone of warfare in space
The war-fighting domain is increasingly extending into space. With it come new applications of a familiar authoritarian playbook: salami-slicing of red lines, service disruption, intimidation – and plausible deniability. Welcome to the age of greyzone space operations.
“Space is, in many ways, the ideal domain for grey zone operations and activities, because there are a lot of things you can do that fall below the threshold of overt conflict,” Todd Harrison, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and expert on defence and space policy, told Resilience Media. “You have a whole suite of non-kinetic forms of space attack that can and have been used without triggering escalation or overt conflict.”
Experts highlight a broad range of space capabilities that could be used for greyzone activities.
One category is electronic, targeting satellites as information systems. It includes cyberattacks, radar jamming and interference in GNSS systems like GPS. Keep reading here.
Exein, the embedded security startup, nabs €100M at ~€700M valuation
Malicious hackers — backed by adversary states like Russia and China or organised crime — are cracking complex cryptography by weaponising artificial intelligence and advanced computing power. And a major target for worming their way in to attack is not just the cloud, but the tens of billions of connected devices that are being used by individuals and organisations. One way to fight that is through embedded security: solutions built directly into the very chipsets that connect those devices to data networks.
Exein — one of the startups building that embedded tooling — is today announcing significant funding, underscoring the focus on the approach and its own traction in the market and the impact it’s having on companies in sectors like energy, healthcare, defence, automotive, aerospace, industrial automation, semiconductors and robotics.
The startup out of Rome, Italy has secured €100 million in a mix of equity and debt, roughly in a 50:50 split, according to Gianni Cuozzo, the CEO who co-founded the company with Gerardo Gagliardo, CFO and Giovanni Alberto Falcione, CTO (pictured above with Cuozzo centre). Read the rest here.
On Our Radar
In this secret missile factory, Ukraine is ramping up its domestic arms industry
Local Spies With Lethal Gear: How Israel and Ukraine Reinvented Covert Action
Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift
Gambit Cyber Raises $ 3.4 M Seed round
The New Martial Plan: Back to the Future for Private Capital
