MISSILE DEFENSE EUROSATORY NEWS: European Air Defense Needs Full Autonomy, Experts Insist By Allyson Park Marine Corps photo PARIS — As wars in Ukraine and in Iran continue, one of the most significant lessons the European defense world is learning from both those conflicts is the importance of fully autonomous, layered air defense. Johannes Pinl, CEO of global defense and security company MARSS, said that the most recent drone that flew in the Iran conflict a few days ago was shot down by an almost fully autonomous defense system, and that’s the fundamental shift that needs to occur in air defense. “In the Middle East .... we have now such a mass of incoming targets,” he said during a roundtable at the Eurosatory defense exhibition June 15. “What we had to do was automate the kill chain, from detection, classification and countering, automate that as much as possible, so we can actually deal not with one, two, 10, 50, but hundreds of threats simultaneously.” Drones are becoming more autonomous and more embedded with artificial intelligence, and the key to defending against that threat is a multi-layered, fully autonomous approach, he said. “The only way to defend against that is actually being autonomous yourself, otherwise you're too late.” Layered air defense means possessing and executing multiple kinds of capabilities and effectors depending on the threat such as laser weapons that can eliminate high numbers of threats quickly and cheaply, interceptor drones that can be launched to defend against a drone swarm and more traditional defense systems that are cannon, missile or rocket based, but are more expensive, he said. “All that needs to be orchestrated by a very intelligent command and control system,” Andreas Schwer, CEO of EOS Defence Systems, said at the roundtable. “So, matching defense versus attackers is another