Minister of National Defence Nikos Dendias attends Conference of Athens Chamber of Tradesmen Board of Directors

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Minister of National Defence Nikos Dendias attends Conference of Athens Chamber of Tradesmen Board of Directors

June 11, 2026

The Minister of National Defence Nikos Dendias, yesterday Wednesday 10 June2026 attended a conference of the Athens Chamber of Tradesmen Board of Directors, having been invited there by its President, Giannis Chatzitheodosiou.

During the conference Mr. Dendias briefed the Board of Directors Members' on the implementation of the "Agenda 2030", as well as the perspectives of the development of the domestic defence industry, through the utilisation of innovation and cutting edge technologies.

Also present at the meeting was the President of the Hellenic Confederation of Professionals, Craftsmen, and Merchants (ΓΣΕΒΕΕ) Giorgos Kavvathas.

Addressing the Board of Directors of the Athens Chamber of Tradesmen, the Minister of National Defence, specifically pointed out the following:

"Thank you very much Mr. President. I thank you principally for a very courteous welcome. I do not hide that I honestly feel myself at home. My father would take me to the Chamber of Commerce of Corfu literally since childhood. My father certainly spent more hours there than at home. It was my mother's sorrow.

So Mr. President, you will allow me to feel a sense of perfect familiarity. And please, irrespective of my official position and duties, always consider me as a friend of the institution of the Chamber of Commerce. But at an institutional level I always perceive it as a legal advisor to the State. Chambers of Commerce are not Public Law Legal Entities by Chance. They are not trade union bodies. They have a much broader role.

They form a combination of possibilities, which the State must utilise in order to maintain its contact with the business world. And, mainly with the middle business world, which forms the backbone, not only of the Greek economy, but of Greek society, which is much more important.

And if there are no open channels of communication, then I am afraid we will not achieve the great goal, which eludes us to this day, of the total transformation of our Country's productive model.

You will allow me not to read out of a text, and let me tell you a few things about what and why we are doing what we are doing at the Ministry of National Defence, beginning from the President's initial observation, which he also later answered himself.

In reality, the basic question is: "What is a Defence Minister doing at the Chamber. What is his business here, what has he to tell us?" The directly theoretical answer is that "he has nothing to ever tell us, since our fields of interest do not overlap". This self-evident answer is not true anymore. And the President explained it.

You will allow me to expand on this point, to broadly explain what we are doing, what challenges we are facing, as a country, as a society. Thereafter, Mr. President, if you think I need to answer a few more questions, I am at your disposal. If there were no cameras, I would be able to say much more, but in this Ministry there exists a barrier.

I will begin with the double challenge. This morning I was at the "birthday" of the HCDI. The HCDI is the Hellenic Centre for Defence Innovation. The HCDI is my "child". I created it two years ago, with a clear mandate and a direct mission framework to connect the Armed Forces with the Hellenic Innovation Ecosystem. The HCDI is the offspring of two great needs.

I will begin from the HCDI to explain the challenge we are facing. Our two great needs are, on the one hand bringing the Armed Forces into the new era, and on the other hand, to face one of the two basic reasons which led the Country into the 2010 bankruptcy. This reason is the negative foreign balance, that is, many more imports than exports. The other reason was the massive public debt. You can remember it.

I will now explain what has changed in the Armed Forces worldwide. This is easy: Everything has changed. Most, if not all men present, have served. Therefore, we have the Armed Forces on our minds. Now, please, forget everything you knew.

Everything we hitherto knew exists no more, and if we do not realise it, this will be the greatest obstacle to total reform. The "Agenda 2030" can be easily described:

"All, everything we know, must change". What were each country's Armed Forces in the past, not only ours (I will arrive at our particularity towards the end). They were a body of trained manpower, and the totality of weapons systems operated by them. What are they today, or what should they be?

Today the Armed Forces are a mechanism of stimuli that is information, intake, its efficient transport processing, prioritising, and finding out the best response to this stimulus. By "stimulus" you can imagine anything. What a soldier sees, what a camera sees, what a ship spots, what an aircraft spots, what a frigate hears, what a submarine hears, anything, that is, which constitutes information and a potential threat to the country.

We have to move on from where we were to a new capability. All these thousands of pieces of information each minute, since, imagine how many eyes, cameras, sensors, see, hear or understand something every second that passes, along the country's border, or in its airspace or all places we have interests. All of this should be transferred to a central system.

This central system should process, recognise, understand what it is, and characterise it as a danger or not, as friendly or hostile. Those which constitute problems, which equal threats, it will prioritise, and not only, but suggest the proper response to the Chief HNDGS, or the threat assessor at the time.

What does "the proper response" mean? Take the situation in Iran as an example. The Iranians launch a "Shahed". A "Shahed" - for the ladies - is a drone. You know. I do not want to offend you, and besides, in the coming days I will visit the army camp to observe the voluntary recruitment of women, therefore I am relying a lot on you for the future.

So, the Iranians launch a "Shahed", which carries explosive material, and a camera or radar picks up the approach of a "Shahed" somewhere in the Gulf, and transmits the threat to a "Command & Control" centre. And the "Command & Control" centre is a General. He notices the threat and orders the launch of a "Patriot". The "Patriot" is launched and the "Shahed" is "shot down".

Who won? You would think the defensive side. And you would be wrong. It was the offensive side. For the "Shahed" costs a few thousands of euros, while the "Patriot" cost 3 million. If to shoot down something which costs a few thousands we need some millions, particularly we, who are not very wealthy, will go bankrupt in several days.

So, the system ought to possess the intelligence to suggest a proportionate countermeasure to its operator, even financially. We will not manage otherwise.

Of course, with all these thousands of stimuli which will arrive, far away from the front-line, condensed in a few seconds, imagine what would happen in such an environment of conflict. Which could autonomously and swiftly prioritise and give the operator a clear image, giving him a suggested response, meanwhile swiftly calculating what our supplies are, what our capabilities are, how many days we must hold out, what supplies we have.

Imagine how well trained humans who operate in such a system ought to be. From the last Soldier, I can remember when entering formation with rifles, we were told "at the foot of the target". From the last Soldier, who has a camera on his helmet, and sensors on himself so his Commander may monitor his condition, since he cannot do so with the naked eye. He will also have the capability of wireless transmission of information and taking orders on how to act, as well as the obligation to seek cover and survive.

The old age of heroics is behind us. All this system then, should be created within a narrow time frame. We must also keep two basic parameters in mind while forming it.

Firstly, that the threat faced (to speak of our own matters) by this system is ten times greater than us. Therefore technology should become the great equaliser. Is that feasible? Of course it is. I can continue for hours, since in our case we possess some fortunate parameters which allow us to be optimistic.

So, technology should become the great equaliser. We are now slowly approaching the matter concerning us. Well, how do we acquire this technology? How do we utilise it? Where do we find it?

I will open a parenthesis, if you may: In matters of Foreign and Defence Affairs, I leave my party identity behind. I consider there should be, if not national unanimity, national entente and understanding. We are too few and too little. If we end up quarrelling on self-evident and obvious matters, the Country will be unable to survive. I close the parenthesis.

I am approaching the question of whether we should have access to this technology. How do we do it? What have we done throughout recent Administrations? We have spent two hundred and seventy four billions on armaments since 2004. The truth is that if they had been correctly allocated, the country should have been a superpower.

The simple solution is - being a Greek tradition - we go abroad, proclaim a competition, find the technology, purchase it, and that is that. This is feasible no more. Not feasible for multiple obvious reasons.

Firstly, once purchasing a specific technology and a technological product today, for example a drone and its software, how long until its technology is rendered obsolete? Six, seven, eight months? Less than a year I assure you.

Therefore, it is not as it once was, when you purchased an aircraft, which needed mid-life maintenance after 10 years, or when you purchased a ship, which needed mid-life maintenance after 20 years. Technology is developing.

If, therefore you cannot acquire production codes, or a source code as they call it, (I am a lawyer, I will not pretend to be a technology guru, my only advantage being that I recognise what I know not, and I can recognise the need) and you do not possess the capability of developing the system, said system will simply be shelved a few months later. Yet, this cannot be the answer.

The only answer is ownership, ownership of the basic production code. Otherwise you are lost. And, obviously, you have to develop your own capabilities. I am not referring to big platforms. Greece need not construct a sixth generation aircraft. It need not do this.

It needs to produce its own category one, two, and three drones. It needs to be capable of producing its own anti-drones. It needs to be capable of producing its own acoustic border protection systems. It needs to be capable of producing a variety of technologies, cameras, infra-red cameras, which will allow it to survive, while possessing the source codes for developing the elements necessary for its survival.

So here we are now, trying to navigate this transition. The first thing you need to do to achieve this is to change the mindset of your staff. Are Greek Officers good? I can assure you - because I have served extensively in the broader public sector - that the vast majority of them are exceptional. Their average standard in high; they love their country, they are patriots, they care deeply about their homeland, they want to do their job, and they have a sense of pride within them.

But that's not the point; the point is in which facilities they serve. When I began the reform here, Greece had more camps than the United States. Is that even possible?

And when I set out to close 130 of those - we had over 800 military camps, you cannot imagine what I went through. I have a whole stack of questions they asked me in Parliament, or the fiery speeches claiming that the country's Defence is being weakened. As if we don't have a camp in every village; we're more powerful, but our forces are too scattered. In any case, we had to change the structures, make them smaller, more flexible, and more centralized.

We had to develop new tools within the existing structures.

IT Corps: What is more important for a 21 st -century Army, Artillery or IT? Not to mention the other point: is it even possible for Artillery to function without IT? It's impossible. We didn't have it.

Innovation: We've created an Innovation Directorate. What does the Innovation Directorate do? The Innovation Directorate does something very important. I used to tell you that when we wanted something, we would go and say, "We want, let's say, tanks", and we would go to Germany (because most of the ones we have are German). They are very good tanks, and we would go and buy them.

That's not the 21 st -century way. The 21 st -century way is to train your staff - not to have them ask you for things, but to ask you questions and present operational needs. In other words, to say "I have this problem; how can I solve it?". For example, I mention this all the time because it's simple and well-known: the "Centaurus".

The "Centaurus" is an anti-drone system we built ourselves, at half the price of what we would have paid to buy it, with the source code in our possession. It was first tested covertly, then openly under combat conditions, and is now the primary anti- drone system on existing Greek frigates.

How did this come about? It started with a question. What was the question? "How do we deal with swarms of drones in the Eastern Aegean and in Thrace?" That was the question. It wasn't "Bring me a system", "Bring me something". So we looked into it; they looked into it, and in fact, a large part of it was done by the state-owned enterprise, which shows the human resources we have in this area as well.

So, to cut a long story short, we're back to the creation of a new structure - one that learns and is taught to ask questions, and which, when it comes to innovation, conveys those questions to the entire ecosystem.

And at this point, I'd like to turn to small and medium-sized businesses, which, in my view, are far more interesting than the foreign giants. What does HCDI do? HCDI takes the question and channels it into a mapped ecosystem of small and medium- sized enterprises.

Small and medium-sized enterprises don't have to be defence industry companies, as we used to say. There's the magic term "dual use". Most products today aren't single-use. They're multi-use. So the ecosystem we can engage with and ask for answers from is much broader than it used to be.

And it also really applies to young people, young kids, who might not even be running a business in the traditional sense of the word. My father had his own shop; I'd go in and so on. Now, a small startup might have a rented little office somewhere, and it might be a young person working in a building where they own nothing - not even the desk they're sitting at. But that is the future. That where the new ideas will come from.

But imagine that we ask this young person the question. We way to him, "We want a sophisticated drone". And I'm using drones as an examples, because it's easy for me to explain more complex concepts using them.

We want a drone with specific features: a certain speed, a certain payload capacity, a certain explosive payload capacity, a certain camera-carrying capacity, and a certain cost - cost is always a factor. So, this young person comes along, sitting there in his little office, designing it, building it, figuring out the math, and typing it into his computer. There are some specialized systems now that you can buy very cheaply for computers, and they can be useful tools. Even I, who am as clueless as a lawyer, have learned a thing or two.

So he designs it, builds it, and figures it out, and now he says that to produce a prototype to show them, I need 20.000 euros. I have to go to Leroy Merlin, I have to go to Praktiker, because most of the parts needed to build these are freely available on the market. I might need to get a small 3D printer to print some of the parts - where am I going to find twenty thousand euros?

Imagine this young man, then - who might be a poor kid whose father is a grocer - like mine was, walking into a bank - maybe a little scruffy, in jeans, with slightly long hair - and going up to the manager to say, "Sir, I need 20.000 to build a drone". How long would that young man stay inside the bank before they kicked him out? If the Manager is polite, he'll say, "Sorry, young man, that's not our line of business". If he's rude, he'll say, "Get out, sir."

So what were we supposed to do? We had to create an entity that would take on this need - this kid's need - someone with a clever idea, or perhaps not a kid at all, but someone older, to fund it, to give him the money to build this prototype.

And between us, even if it doesn't go well, it doesn't matter, because it just one in ten works out, we've made our money back. The Greek taxpayer will have gotten their money back. So that all small and medium-sized businesses that want to respond to calls for proposals - because that's what they do - can have access to initial funding. Not under the usual banking criteria - "put your house up as collateral" - that's not how the new economy works. And this needs to happen quickly. Quickly, because technology is changing.

Example: Remember that Ukrainian drone we found? You do. We have that technology. So we issued a call for proposals saying "We want you to build this for us" - we didn't want explosives, let's say; we wanted cameras. "Sure, great." This technology, like this drone, is remote-controlled technology - it can be controlled from a long distance, but it's remote-controlled. It's useless today.

Today, with artificial intelligence, you don't need remote control; the machine itself, the autonomous system itself, must scan the environment and, based solely on the commands embedded in its code, decide where to go and, moreover, handle changing conditions. What we've found is from another era. It's already a "dinosaur", and this technology has changed within seven to eight months.

We must therefore be able to help small businesses and young people, who are eager to come up with new solutions and get involved, so that they can produce solutions and innovations. And these solutions and innovations must achieve two things at the same time: first, they must support National Defence; second, and equally important, they must held the Greek economy by transforming its production model.

To be able to meet needs that would otherwise require importing the product from abroad, or - even better - to create a product that is entire suitable for export, thereby also fostering national development and economic growth.

If I may, since I'm here, I'd like to share a couple of broader thoughts on the Economy in a few lines. What is our GDP? 230, 240, 250 billion euros. Why does Israel have 380, even though it's constantly at war? Some people say, naively, "Because they get money from America." Want to hear a joke from New York? The joke goes: "How do you become a millionaire? You start out as a billionaire and go invest in Israel." So, it's not true that they found the money. It is the fourth-largest exporter of defence systems on the planet - and not just defence systems, but also cameras, software and know-how. But do you want to leave it out, to exclude Israel, which some people don't like? Very well, fair enough.

The Netherlands? A GDP of one trillion with a population just one and a half times that size, and a country that lies below sea level. The cost of addressing the environmental challenge alone is enormous. Why should we be at two hundred- something? Why must we say that with a growth rate of two-something percent, we're going fine? Why must 60-65% of the European average per capita income be our acceptable limit? Why can't we overcome all of this?

And of course we can overcome all of this. I assure you that we have the best human capital there is. But that's it - I'll wrap this up because I've kept you waiting long enough - this idea fosters the conditions for creative growth within the country.

We're putting public funds - the savings of Greek taxpayers - to work as a multiplier within the Greek economy. And on the other hand, where we can't or don't have time, because this will take a few years to mature, where we don't have time and have to spend money today, because unfortunately, you know, there's the old saying, "A little Turkish money goes a long way", but that doesn't hold true in real life.

So, since we need to act immediately, I've set a limit of 25% - every purchase will be invested in Greek businesses, whatever that may be. If that's not the case, it doesn't matter; there are other options out there. So that we can, and indeed not just 25% in secondary investments - remember those we used to call "offset benefits"? No such jokes, because offset benefits were a very clever trick; let's not remember why.

Serious business! 25% that is fully quantifiable, based on invoices or calculations made by the Ministry of National Defence's General Directorate for Armaments. A 25% figure that would allow even the major platforms to reinvest in the Greek economy. So, a leap toward innovation and investment in areas where we still have a long way to go, particularly in the major platforms.

At the time that we are discussing the defence sector as a whole, its contribution to GDP was 0.7%. We all understand that this is ridiculous.

Let's say one-third of its tourism. Is that even possible? For a country that has the second-largest Air Force in the European Union? Which has one of the largest Armies in Europe? Which has more tanks than England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and two or three other countries combined? Combined - we have more tanks. Is 0.7% even possible? For God's sake!

So, in conclusion, I hope we'll make it. We call it "Agenda 2030". Why do we call it like that? Because based on current projections, we believe the work will be completed by 2030. What is the work? What is the "job description", as the British would say?

It is to create the strongest Armed Forces in the history of Hellenism. But not merely in terms of descriptions of weapon systems, but through a real analysis of capabilities and survivability in the event of a conflict, and the renewal of their systems in the event of a crisis. The internal development of new technologies,whether in times of need or even in peacetime. The creation of a virtuous cycle of reinvestment of funds spent on Defence, into the broader Greek economy and the overall distribution of profits to the entire population.

Only in this way do I believe we can create the ideal model that will help us address the - I assure you, and I say this with regret, because I wish our Country did not have this need to address the very real, manifest, articulated, and legislated threat to the constitutional boundaries of Hellenic.

Thank you very much".