{"id":7024,"date":"2026-04-02T23:57:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T21:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=7024"},"modified":"2026-04-02T23:57:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T21:57:54","slug":"trumpf-has-broken-a-historic-taboo-and-started-making-anti-drone-lasers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/trumpf-has-broken-a-historic-taboo-and-started-making-anti-drone-lasers\/","title":{"rendered":"Trumpf has broken a historic taboo and started making anti-drone lasers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ditzingen lies fifteen kilometers northwest of Stuttgart city center, in the heart of the industrial Swabia that has driven the German economy for decades. This is also where Trumpf has its plants \u2014 a world leader in laser technology. Square buildings, large glass facades, long and wide raw-concrete corridors: everything is designed to convey solid industriousness and enlightened entrepreneurship, no-frills, in keeping with the Lutheran pietism from which W\u00fcrttemberg’s great prosperity grew. The Leibinger family has owned Trumpf for three generations. Recently, after a lengthy internal consultation, the family broke a taboo that was once considered inviolable: a project in the defense sector, to contribute to Germany’s Zeitenwende<\/em>. On October 22 of last year, Trumpf announced a partnership with Rohde & Schwarz to develop a laser-based anti-drone system. With revenues of 4.3 billion euros in 2025 \u2014 down 16 percent from the previous year \u2014 Trumpf too needs something new. “We are repeatedly asked whether this is some kind of lifeline,” but it is not, “we feel it is our duty to do this, because Europe needs to strengthen itself. And Germany in particular has a great deal of ground to make up,” says Trumpf CEO Nicola Leibinger-Kamm\u00fcller, speaking to a group of journalists in Ditzingen. Leibinger-Kamm\u00fcller is the sister of Peter Leibinger, who in 2025 became president of the Federation of German Industries and who, at last February’s Munich Security Conference, had said: “The civilian and defense industries must come together strategically.”<\/p>\n

“We have the ambition to meet all the demands coming from Europe,” explains Hagen Zimer, CEO of Trumpf’s laser division. The project is “purely defensive. With a laser anti-drone weapon, we will not be able to kill people,” Zimer is keen to stress, adding that the real potential lies in the return on investment: “A laser weapon has acquisition costs that can run into the tens of millions \u2014 for the vehicle or other components. But each shot will cost perhaps fifty cents, so less than a dollar.” The road ahead is still long: it will take three years to bring the laser to market, and there is as yet no contract with the Bundeswehr \u2014 which, at least for naval lasers, is already working with Rheinmetall-MBDA. Then there is the question of the supply chain. Even if the company’s anti-drone laser production is “entirely anchored” in Germany, Zimer himself acknowledges that at “some point you always end up in China.”<\/p>\n

“In Germany there is a recognizable trend: companies that until now were not active in the defense industry want to enter the sector. This is driven above all by the fact that, thanks to the loosening of the debt brake and the special defense fund, there is a great deal of money to be had in the country. The Bundeswehr is rearming across all its branches, and naturally many companies are pushing into the market,” says Max Becker, fellow at the DGAP Defense Center in Berlin. “On one hand, there are companies that have faced economic difficulties and have for that reason been acquired by defense firms. But there are also companies that are actively choosing to enter the market.”<\/p>\n

German defense spending now runs into the hundreds of billions, and Rheinmetall has overtaken Volkswagen in stock market capitalization. For a civil industry in crisis looking to reinvent itself, turning to defense becomes an almost automatic attraction. The historic engine manufacturer Deutz has, within a few years, acquired Sobek (drones), invested in Arx Robotics (autonomous vehicles) and Tytan Technologies (AI-based anti-drone). Deutz CEO Sebastian C. Schulte explained at an industry event that moves like these once carried a faint stigma \u2014 and then the Zeitenwende<\/em> arrived. Meanwhile, military innovation startups such as Helsing and Quantum Systems continue to grow. The Schaeffler Group is shifting from automotive components to the defense industry. An Alstom plant that once produced trains in eastern Germany has passed to KNDS for tank production. In February, SAP opened a Defense Innovation Hub in Munich and sees defense as its most dynamic area of growth, while last August Porsche SE announced an investment platform in the military sector. Just this March, Volkswagen presented two new military vehicle prototypes \u2014 the MV.1 and MV.2 \u2014 at the Enforce Tac trade fair in Nuremberg. And so it goes, announcement after announcement.<\/p>\n

But things are not so straightforward. There is not room for everyone. Heavy industry cannot all reinvent itself in defense, still less the automotive sector. “That cannot happen, because the German defense industry has a market that is very, very much smaller than that of the automotive industry,” confirms Becker, who also points to an equally important practical consideration: “The transition from a civilian company to a defense and armaments company is complex. You need to put your employees through security checks, hire security personnel, upgrade infrastructure, and protect and shield production facilities.” In short, it means knowing how to change your skin \u2014 and, even before the skin, changing your muscles and your soul. Andrea Rotter, head of the security division at the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Munich, explains that “because of the war in Ukraine and the Russian threat, a shift is taking shape in the mindset of politics and society, one in which an innovative and competitive defense industrial base is seen as a precondition for deterrence and defense capability.” But this transformation “still needs to be put into practice by the people working day-to-day in the relevant offices and authorities.” Only then, with the right political and bureaucratic conditions in place, will German and European defense capability be able to draw on “the expertise, skilled workforce, and production-scaling potential that civilian companies can offer.”<\/p>\n

Trumpf and the others are taking their first steps in a transformation far more heterogeneous than it might appear. The popular notion of a German plan to smoothly replace the car industry by building tanks is not just superficial \u2014 it is wrong. The productive metamorphosis will be far more uneven, including a growing implementation of dual-use civilian-military projects. In Germany, as in the rest of Europe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ditzingen lies fifteen kilometers northwest of Stuttgart city center, in the heart of the industrial Swabia that has driven the German economy for decades. This is also where Trumpf has its plants \u2014 a world leader in laser technology. Square buildings, large glass facades, long and wide raw-concrete corridors: everything is designed to convey solid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":153,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7024"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7129,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7024\/revisions\/7129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}