Minister of National Defence Nikos Dendias Addresses StartSmart Summit 2024 South Eastern Europe

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Minister of National Defence Nikos Dendias Addresses StartSmart Summit 2024 South Eastern Europe

June 27, 2024

On Wednesday, 26 June 2024, the Minister of National Defence, Nikos Dendias, attended the "StartSmart Summit 2024 South Eastern Europe" at Eugenides Foundation, opening its works with an address.

In his address, Mr. Dendias mentioned the following:

"Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, officers, it is my great pleasure, my great honor to have the opportunity to be invited, first of all to this Summit, by the StartSmart South Eastern Europe, here at the
splendid Eugenides Foundation.

The first basic question I assume there has been is what am I doing here, why would the Minister of Defense be here, why would so many uniforms being in the audience. But that was answered already

So I am just going to say a few words on how we view in the Ministry of Defense this binding between the ecosystem and the needs of our Armed Forces and of course the need to guarantee the independence and
sovereignty of our country.

Because we have, ladies and gentlemen, now the experience of the Ukrainian battlefields. And those battlefields, those battles confirm the role of innovation. This new type of warfare involves the wide use of high-tech weapons, new methods of surveillance, new autonomous systems.

And in this particular theater for the first time, maybe, we so clearly saw a demonstration of the ability to rapidly develop and integrate innovative technologies. And of course this is a war that we can learn from and adapt what we have learnt in our own context.

Once I was driving from Tel Aviv airport to Jerusalem and I was at the same car, I was Foreign Minister at the time, with the Foreign Minister of Israel, at the time Gabi Ashkenazy. Gabi Ashkenazy his previous role
was Head of the Israeli Defense Forces, what we call Chief of Staff. And I asked him, that was before Russian invasion in Ukraine, and I asked him: how did you manage and from an agricultural economy in the 70s you became such a powerhouse in innovative technologies and especially in the field of defense? And his answer was so clear and so obvious. The answer was: the need to survive. That is what it is.

And so this need, also for us, to survive in this very difficult world, leads us toward understanding the role of artificial intelligence, the role of cyber security, the role of unmanned systems in the air, on the land, on the sea, under the sea. All these applications which, as Mr. Eugenides pointed out right before, could clearly have also dual use.

Now, the Greek Arm Forces, we need to change it. And that is obvious to all the gentlemen and ladies, ladies and gentlemen in uniform right here in this audience today, we have to modernize, we have to modernize the way we think first of all, we have to modernize then our equipment, we have to modernize our training.

And let me be frank. The existing, up to now disconnection between the ecosystem of startups and the Armed Forces, the absence of a stable funding source for research, the absence of clear career and academic
opportunities, both in our universities and in our military academies and our research institutes, can not continue any longer.

They have contributed to the brain drain and they have contributed to the limited capacity of our ecosystem up to now.

Because we all know that we do have the human capital necessary to move forward. So, in order to make this vision of ours a reality we have to create a new environment that encourages collaboration, encourages
risk-taking, encourages innovation. And that will promote a defense ecosystem which of course will include in a holistic approach the Armed Forces, the defending industry, the startups, the research centers, the
academia, including the military academies.

So I am very pleased with the initiative to establish the Hellenic Centre for Defense Innovation, ELΚAK. Pantelis Tzortzakis comes to serve ELΚAK from a completely different ecosystem, he was never involved in
anything that had to do with military in the past, but he realized how important the challenge is.

So, and allow me to say something that gave me huge amount of optimism. I presented ELΚAK at the Greek Parliament just one week before the European elections, and you know Parliament is not exactly the place in Greece where consensus is being created, especially right before an election, rather the opposite. Yet again, yet again in this bitter political environment ELΚAK was voted by 80% in principle and by 90% on
various articles, which is quite unique for the Greek Parliament, and believe me I know what I am speaking about, I've been there for 20 years now. So, the Greek society understands and the political system
understands and feels what we have to do.

So, we do believe that we can make a change. We can make a change to the Greek Armed Forces, we can make the change to the Greek economy and we can make a change to the Greek society, and most and more important of all for the Ministry of National Defense and the Greek Armed Forces.

We can guarantee the sovereignty and the independence of our country in the years to come, the difficult years to come.

Thank you so much."

The "StartSmart SEE Summit 2024" of StartSmart South Eastern Europe (SEE) is dedicated to the promotion of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship and took place on 26 June 2024 at Eugenides Foundation.

The Summit was presented and moderated by journalist Maria Nikoltsiou.