Dr. Greg Ombach, CEO-Level Deep-Tech Operator & Board Member, Senior Vice President at Airbus.
For years, dual-use sat at the edge of aerospace strategy, somewhere between defense policy, export controls and advanced research. That position is shifting.
In aviation, dual-use is moving toward the center and becoming one of the main ways important technologies are developed, scaled and governed. The reason is not only geopolitics, but industrial logic. The boundary between civil and defense technology is becoming more permeable, and companies that know how to work across both can move faster than those still operating in older categories.
The next wave of advantage in aviation will not come from the aircraft alone. It will come from the systems around it. For a long time, competition was framed mainly around platforms such as faster aircraft, lower fuel burn, better economics and stronger mission capability.
That all still matters, but it no longer captures the full picture. Value is shifting toward the systems that make aviation more resilient, adaptive and scalable. Navigation, connectivity, autonomy, airspace management and advanced performance technologies now shape outcomes across the civil and defense domains alike.
