Established in 2000, Thales is a French company renowned for its diverse range of defence and security systems and solutions. Over the years, Thales has gained extensive experience and earned the trust of military forces and key defence institutions worldwide, making its services a hallmark in the defence and security sector.
To gain more insight into the company’s direction and key projects, Al Jundi Journal interviewed Pascale Sourisse, President and CEO Thales International, during the Eurosatory 2024 exhibition and had the following dialogue with her:
What are Thales’ main products at Eurosatory?
Eurosatory is one of the most significant defence and security exhibitions in which Thales consistently participates. This year, our focus at the exhibition was on the concept of trusted intelligence serving the forces and when we speak about intelligence, it’s a combination of three components, human intelligence, systems intelligence, and artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is not only something for the future for us, it’s already embedded in our systems. After years of research and development, we are now integrating AI into our systems, enhancing their capabilities while maintaining human control.
Moreover, we have organised our booth into four domains or zones:
Engage: “Engage” is all about the dismounted soldiers, vehicles and drones, including how to use drones for terrestrial operations to augment the capabilities of armies.
Command: Command focuses strongly on using all forms of connectivity with a hybrid approach between military communication means and the use of civil communication systems. Additionally, command includes AI-powered command and control systems and how they are used to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of military operations, while improving the quality of decisions because AI enables you to have more accurate data and identify the relevant information more easily, facilitating the decision-making process in headquarters.
Protect: This is about protecting sites, and territories, so it’s focusing a lot on air defence, with all its components including radars, command and control systems, weapon systems, and effectors, of which we are displaying a complete series.
Training and sustaining: This involves training the necessary troops. We have a very interesting offer in terms of live training, training for all types of applications, land forces, helicopter pilots, etc.
The other part of training and sustaining is how to maintain equipment in a very efficient way. Thus artificial intelligence is used to enable us to have some protective maintenance rather than wait until a failure happens, so it optimizes the readiness of the corresponding system.
So we have a complete presentation, with a very strong focus on how we’re using artificial intelligence to augment the capabilities of the various solutions.
Thales has good relations with several countries around the world, how important is the GCC market for you?
The Middle East market is a major region for Thales. We’ve been present in the region for 50 years. We have about 2,000 people in the region and we are very eager to serve all our customers there with a long-term view of the relationship. We are very involved in localizing more competencies to adequately live up to the expectations of our customers and we are building engineering competencies, production facilities, as well as service centres to support our install base.
How were IDEX and NAVDEX important for Thales’ business within the region?
IDEX and NAVDEX are extremely important for Thales. We’ve been participants since the beginning. Every time we come and we have the opportunity to meet with many customers and partners, so we have taken the opportunity of the previous IDEX exhibition to announce that we were building a radar factory in the Emirates that will be localized in our subsidiary, Thales Emarat Technologies. So we will continue to talk to our partners and customers about what we do to serve the country.
I would like to also point out that at the end of May, we participated in the “Make it in the Emirates” convention, and we are strongly involved in developing a strong supply chain involving many Emirati companies. We are very happy with that.
How is Thales addressing the increasing importance of drones in modern warfare?
We are strongly involved in this domain. The first step that Thales is taking is to equip drones with the necessary sensors and communication systems to control and monitor these drones enabling us to offer a complete solution. Moreover, we always rely on a partner to supply the drone platform. So what we have developed at Thales is solutions to monitor and manage drone fleets, to equip these drones with the necessary sensors and effectors.
Moreover, we have anti-drone solutions capable of detecting drones that are usually quite different from classical aircraft or high-speed ammunition.
With drones, you need to be able to detect threats at low altitudes and low speeds. This is what our radars do before our air defence solutions neutralise the threat.
How do you explain AI being the trend in the defence and security sector and how does Thales address this tending technology?
For us, AI is a solution that is already embedded in our portfolio. It is typically used for military operations to improve the performance of sensors and to support a better decision-making process.
For instance, we have embedded AI in some of our sensors, like the target designation pods on board aircraft to designate and target the threat we want to neutralise.
However, the accuracy of this generation of pods necessitates taking lots of images and collecting a huge amount of data, increasing the operating burden on the pilots. This is where AI comes in to accelerate the process of analysing this data, identifying the relevant information and proposing a decision to the pilot, reducing the amount of time needed to reach a decision by a factor of 100.
Another example of how we use AI is to optimise energy consumption. Given the energy consumption constraints onboard aircraft or vehicles, it is crucial to optimise the use of computing power on these platforms to reduce energy consumption.
Moreover, AI can enhance the decision-making process by providing more accurate information. We use AI to process large volumes of data to identify patterns, leading to a better understanding of threats. This allows for the automatic designation and categorisation of targets, determining if a target is a threat and to which category it belongs. The system can then recommend the appropriate weapon system to neutralise the threat.
AI is essential to fully utilise the information captured about targets from various sensors, such as radars, electronic sensors, and possibly underwater sonars.
Can you tell us about the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Thales signed with EDGE?
We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with EDGE, focusing on radio communication systems. The aim is to establish a partnership for developing specific types of radios, particularly long-distance HF radios.
This agreement is significant as it reinforces our ongoing cooperation with EDGE on various topics. It supports our objective to strengthen our collaborative activities with Emirati companies. We are very pleased to have signed this agreement with EDGE, in the presence of the CEO.
Could you tell us more about Thales Emarat Technologies?
Established in 2019, Thales Emarat Technologies is our subsidiary in the UAE and is progressively developing its activities. Currently, we have three competence centres within Thales Emarat Technologies: one for radars, the second for digital technologies including radios, and the third for providing support services for our extensive installed base of equipment in the UAE. We currently employ 160 people at Thales Emarat Technologies and plan to double this number by 2025. A major initiative driving this increase is the establishment of our radar factory in the UAE. This factory aims to serve the needs of the United Arab Emirates and export radars globally.
Do you have any message for Al-Jundi Journal’s readers?
Thales is very satisfied with the strong level of trust between the UAE authorities and our company, which has been present in the country for 50 years. This trust means a lot to us, and we are pleased to be able to strengthen our relationship with many Emirati companies. Our collaboration is progressing extremely well, with these Emirati companies now integrated into Thales’s global supply chain. This integration not only benefits our operations in the UAE but also provides opportunities for our partners in the supply chain to serve not only the United Arab Emirates but also the global market, exporting from the UAE.
Interviewed by Aljundi
