Torsten Reil
speaker
213 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Torsten Reil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It allowed us to do the speed thing that I just mentioned, but a couple of other things as well. It allowed us to really focus on top talent very early on. And the second thing that it allowed us to do is to not go for innovation, projects in defense, for incubators and little grants here and there. But because we were quite well-funded, we could go for programs of record.
So the official large programs, which were hard to get and very risky, but we were well-funded enough that we could just take the risk. And that worked out very well.
I'm not sure about that. It does make it easier. I would say Helsing is a company that you can only co-found. You need to have multiple founders.
I think the watershed moment was the annexation of Crimea in 2014 by Putin, and as importantly, the reaction or lack of reaction by European and Western governments in general. And we obviously acknowledged it and took note, but we didn't really understand the threat. And the danger, even back then, that that created was that you essentially allowed someone with territorial ambitions to do more.
And it felt like the clock was ticking until that was going to happen. And so when we started Helsing in March 2021, which now feels like a very different time, we actually put in one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China.
So we got the Russia-Ukraine invasion right. What we got wrong was the timing, because we thought it was going to happen in 2025. But in the event, it happened 11 months after we put that slide together. Ever since then, we feel like it's, sadly, it is rational to be pessimistic at the moment. And it feels like this hasn't quite fully sunk in across our democratic societies.
I struggle to believe we don't understand, Torsten. I think we probably intellectually understood it, but we didn't really want to think through the consequences. Because the consequences were that we needed to start thinking about defence again, about conflict, all the suffering that comes with it, and we didn't want to think about it. We thought it might go away.
And actually that happened for many years afterwards as well, and even to some extent now. And I understand it, I understand it emotionally as well, but I think it's intellectually lazy to not take the next step and think about what actually is required to protect our democracies. Before we go into what's required, what happens from here?
The question is whether we're prepared again to think it through and commit to the next steps, which are an increase in defence spending, even if it is expensive, even if that means making sacrifices elsewhere, because the sacrifice that otherwise we'd have to make is potentially so large, it's the right thing to do. That I'm not sure is happening at the moment.
I mean, Keir Starmer's actively said we will not have an increase in defence spending. Well, I think most governments are actually committing to an increase over time. So we are at, I think, roughly probably 2% right now on average in NATO. That's quite low historically. It's been, through the Cold War, it's been 3% to 6% or so.
But if you look at Poland, Poland has gone from, I think, 2.1% or so to 4.6%, 4.7% within just a few years. So it's clearly possible. Whether every country is going to act at that speed remains to be seen. I think there are budget pressures everywhere. We understand them. And you have to convince a lot of people to actually rechannel so much money towards defence. It's not easy. I get that.
But I think it's going to happen.
Yeah, I think we've already been on that trajectory, I think starting from 2016, where obviously similar arguments were being made. And with the Ukraine conflict, defence spending has gone up, you know, sometimes part of the general budget, sometimes as part of separate budgets, like in Germany, the 100 billion. So that's already happening.
I think the need for European sovereignty has clearly become even more important. So I think we're just going to go further down on that vector. It might just be that we're going to have to go faster. the need for European sovereignty has become more important. Can you explain that to me?
Again, I mean, it's been clear for many years now that we cannot rely on partners to secure and protect Europe, at least not over a long period of time. I think right now that's still there, but I think over time there just won't be, I think, the capability even of partners, and as it looks, also not the willingness to do so.
And quite frankly, I think as a continent as Europe, which is still rich, we should have that kind of pride. We should want to protect ourselves. We should not need to rely on others. We should be equals in a partnership. And that's what our partners want as well. And so it's natural, I think, that we need to go there anyway.
We've just been so used to a different kind of situation that we just need to unlearn it now and think about security ourselves. Will Trump pull out of Ukraine? I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. It's clear what he talked about. It's clear that he's made certain statements, but we'll see what's going to happen.
Yeah, I'm not sure whether it's a boom or not. I think we'll see some countries increase their defense budget a little bit. We'll see others, I mentioned Poland, increase it drastically. And particularly the countries that are most exposed to the eastern flank, to the NATO eastern flank, are more likely to increase their defense spending. It's already happening.
It's happening in Scandinavia as well. Other parts of Europe may or may not increase it as much. That I think we'll have to see. I'm not sure I would call it a boom. I think it's an increase that will go into fixing a lot of things that are broken at the moment. And then some of that increase will go into new equipment spent as well, but only some of it.
And of that, there'll be a proportion that will need to go urgently to what's called new defense technology. But that will only be a part. Who do you determine who you sell to versus who you don't? You mean which countries? Yeah. I mean, it's a bigger topic. But the question is whether you should stop at export laws or whether you should give it more thought.
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