Rafael’s relationship with Germany is built on more than 30 years of defense cooperation across multiple domains. That history includes: EuroSpike, a joint venture with Diehl Defence and Rheinmetall to produce Spike missiles; EuroTrophy, a joint venture with KNDS and General Dynamics European Land Systems to provide the Trophy active protection system; and now the establishment of Dynamit Nobel Defence Digital (DND Digital), a digital division inside Dynamit Nobel Defence that is fully owned by Rafael.
The DND Digital effort centers on localizing Rafael’s BNET software-defined radio technology in Germany, with DND Digital building local engineering authority, production capacity, and tactical communications expertise for the Bundeswehr and other European customers.
In this Breaking Defense Q&A, Gideon Weiss, vice president, business development and marketing at Rafael, and Andreas Dohrn, Director of DND Digital, discuss why coalition C2 has become urgent, why Germany is central to Rafael’s localization strategy, and how the German model could become a blueprint for other countries seeking sovereign, coalition-ready tactical communications.
Breaking Defense: Why are secure communications and coalition C2 so urgent for allied militaries?
Dohrn: From a European perspective, three things have changed, and basically they have changed at once. Ukraine has made all of that undeniable.
The first is basically the tempo of decision making. A commander today is making targeting and maneuver decisions in minutes, not in hours as in the past. Those decisions depend on a coalition picture, not a purely national one. If your radio can’t carry a coalition C2 conversation in real time, you’re not just slow, you’re not relevant for what is ahead of you.
Secondly is the contested electromagnetic spectrum. Modern forces need radios that assume that the adversary is jamming, spoofing, listening, obfuscating, and still being able to deliver.
Thirdly, coalitions are the new unit of action. No European army fights alone anymore. The question is no longer, does my radio work, but rather does my radio work with the Dutch and the Poles and the Romanians and the Americans under one common operating picture today?
Why are defense markets moving toward industrial collaboration and local production rather than just buying products from companies outside their borders?
Weiss: While Rafael is able to sell many of its products and systems directly from Israel, it is certainly not the case with communication. Communication is perceived rightfully as a sensitive, proprietary, and operationally sensitive piece of the puzzle in the battlefield. Therefore, nations want to make sure that they have it from NATO-certified capability and from a European supplier.
The importance of digitized communication in all of the realms of the battlefield is not only straight-up communication, it’s data transfer, it’s video transfer, it is command and control of maneuvering forces and many of the things that long-range precision fires require.
Dohrn: When supply chains run through a single foreign capital, your operational autonomy ends where that capital’s politics begin, plain and simple. Every European defense minister has internalized that, and the question is no longer, what is the best system on the market, but it is rather, what is the best system I can build and sustain and evolve on my own soil with my own engineers?
The shift has a couple of drivers. One of them is certainly sovereignty, the political demand to control what you field. Secondly, it’s the industrial base, the recognition that defense spending should create jobs in Europe and create maybe IP or reduced dependency, and also European supply resilience.
Why was Germany the right place to build Rafael’s localized digital defense capability?
Dohrn: Rafael has been a trusted partner to the Bundeswehr for three decades across multiple domains. The relationship was built on a simple principle, which is deliver capability that works and respect customer sovereignty.
Germany was the natural place to build the localized capability for two reasons. First is the scale. Germany is reinvesting in its armed forces at, I would say, a generational level. The Sondervermögen, the Zeitenwende, the mechanisms, the structural defense budget increase, the demand signal for modern tactical communications in our case is the largest in Europe.
Secondly, it’s the industrial depth. Germany has a defense industrial base that knows how to integrate complex systems. That ecosystem means, for our case, that software-defined radios don’t sit on the shelf. They get integrated into vehicles, command posts, and platforms by people who do this for a living with big players.
Those two things together, the demand and the sovereign industrial depth, exist nowhere else in Europe at the same level.
How do you build trust with a customer that demands sovereign control?
Weiss: The first part of the trust was built by proving that the technology that we have works, that it performs, and that it can be tested to the standards that the Europeans and particularly the German experts have defined of what they want to see new digitized communication perform.
But technology and proven technology is not enough. The trust needs to be built on local content, on Europeanization, if you will, of the technology.
Dohrn: If I take our own example with the BNET radio, communication is critical in the trust chain and also in the criticality of the mission success.
What it takes these days is that they have full localization of the technologies. That is not just a brand label. That means that if I have a device, that I see that the supplier is locally, fully present, not just with the sales office, but actually with full engineering capacity, with full production capacity, with all the know-how, also standards-wise, compatibility and conformity, what is necessary.
In our case, we build the BNET radios completely in Germany. Completely means that we have local suppliers, local sourcing partners for producing printed circuit boards, producing mechanical electrical parts, doing the full-scale assembly and testing of these parts in Germany, doing that according to the Bundeswehr and military standards that apply, and basically being fully traceable and fully transparent with the authorities.
What is DND Digital’s mission?
Dohrn: DND Digital exists basically to give European armed forces sovereign control over the tactical communications and C3I without giving up world-class capability or NATO interoperability.
We started five, six years ago as a small division inside Dynamit Nobel Defence, and we are now hiring dozens and dozens of engineers and specialists across three sites in Germany. One is Flintbek near Kiel, in the north of Germany, where the submarines are built. This is where we will build the future headquarters of DND Digital, and this is where the production site for the BNET radios is being built right now.
Then we have the development center in Berlin for radio technology, and we have a further development center in Leipzig for data management and data applications in the military domain.
Our mission is straightforward: to localize, to harden, to evolve Rafael’s BNET tactical communications platform for Germany and Europe. We are building the engineering authority on German soil. We integrate with the German and European industrial ecosystem, working together with platform integrators and the national C2, command and control stacks.
What role will BNET play in giving Germany sovereign C3I?
Dohrn: BNET is a software-defined MANET-based tactical communications platform, meaning it’s not just a radio in the old sense. It’s a network that runs on radios. Every node is a router. Every soldier is a piece of that mesh if it’s connected through radio.
Three properties make it the right foundation, as we see, for Europe. First, it’s software-defined. The capability lives mainly in code, less than hardware. That means that it evolves at the speed of software. We can implement new waveforms, modes, features, deploy as updates, and not have to change the hardware, which gives us speed and adaptability.
Secondly, we are providing a product that is mission-proven globally. It’s non-ITAR. The platform is engineered without controlled components in the path that would make European exports dependent on other countries’ licenses in this field, which is again a question of sovereignty, and that’s key.
The third one is that it’s integration-ready. We localize it in Germany with key platform integrators and partners, and with the German engineering team that is holding the authority to tailor to national coalition requirements. Localization is basically not translating a manual, but it is standing up the engineering, manufacturing, and R&D in Germany so that BNET becomes a German capability with Rafael as the technology partner and driver behind it.
What has DND Digital created in Germany beyond the technology itself?
Dohrn: We have created the early shape of a German tactical communications industrial capability that didn’t exist this way four years ago.
We are building engineering and specialist jobs today across Flintbek, Berlin, and Leipzig. The trajectory we are investing toward takes us into, looking into the future, the multi-hundred range by the early 2030s. That is software engineers, systems engineers, cryptographers, integration specialists, production technicians, and so on. These are exactly the high-skill, high-value defense industrial jobs that European governments are calling for.
Then again, it’s a full German supply chain, no dependencies here. Production and assembly and testing is happening in Flintbek, component qualification with German and European suppliers and ISO 9100 quality system, and a manufacturing capability that grows with the order book.
It’s a partnership template, I would say. The Rafael-DND Digital model is foundational IP from one side, engineering authority industrial integration on the other. It’s reusable.
How do you protect Israeli IP while giving Germany authority to adapt the capability locally?
Weiss: The significance of being able to transfer technology to Germany into a wholly owned subsidiary is very high, in the sense that on the one hand, it is a very sensitive technology that needs to be handled with care under strict supervision by the Israeli authorities.
On the other hand, the fact that we are putting this into the hands of a wholly owned subsidiary makes it safer both on the regulatory side, as well as on the commercial side, because it means that Rafael has control over it, and that DND Digital is going to retain that capability, that intellectual property, within their own company.
On the one hand, it’s an enabler, and on the other hand, it is something that, once captured by DND Digital, they can then make it European. They can make it classified European without the need to have any Israeli hand or eye overseeing or doing anything at the system level, such that it becomes European and NATO-certified.
What lessons should other allied nations take from this German model?
Dohrn: First, I would say that sovereignty and interoperability are not opposites. You can build a tactical communications capability that is under national control on cryptology, on waveforms, and simultaneously interoperate with every coalition partner. The German model we have built here proves that.
Secondly, the industrial localization that we are doing is creating value far beyond the platform itself: jobs, engineers, supply chains, and the partnership template that other allies can adopt. The product is the visible part, and the industrial ecosystem is the lasting part.
The third is that this is a template, not an exception. What Rafael and DND Digital are building in Germany is repeatable wherever a country has a sovereign industrial base, cryptology authority and national champions, and the political will to invest in its own defense industry base. That’s most of Europe and a great deal of NATO.
The German model is not a one-off. It’s a blueprint.
Weiss: We as an Israeli company not only understand but have adapted and changed our strategy and our mode of operation in the world in general and in Europe, in particular, to understand that it’s not only about partnerships and selling of our systems, but it’s a transfer of technology and localization that will in the near and far future make these systems valuable for the partner nations we work with.
Second, once these technologies are in the hands of our partners and our subsidiaries in the partner nations and they make it local, then it creates jobs, it creates value, and it creates the operational sovereignty that these nations need for their operations and their industrial base.