Combat-Proven Is Not Certification-Ready: Notes from the Berlin Defense Tech Forum

I came to the Berlin Defense Tech Forum expecting a technology conference. I left with something closer to a personal experience.

Over two days at Marienpark's resilience technology campus, I listened to and spoke with soldiers, combat medics, drone pilots, developers, investors and founders — many of them fighting, working, and building for Ukraine's survival. Whatever you think you understand about this war from the news, being in a room with the people living it is different. It is a truly motivating experience, personally and professionally.

And through every conversation, one theme cut through: the software is moving faster than the system that is supposed to trust it.

What the battlefield has already decided

A few facts from those conversations reframe everything. More than 80% of combat wounds in Ukraine now come from blast injuries — most of them caused by drones. In a recent NATO battle simulation in Sweden, a full Swedish battalion was defeated three consecutive times by a small group of Ukrainian drone pilots.

Late in the day, I found myself on the airport bus next to a German Bundeswehr officer I had met earlier — now in uniform. We talked about how soldiers are still trained today. It struck a personal chord: my son is doing his military service in Norway, learning to fight with a rifle — while the enemy he would most likely face in the field today is a drone.

The battlefield has already decided what the next generation of warfare looks like. Drone software is iterated in days, pushed to the field, and judged by the only test that matters there: does it work under jamming, electronic warfare, and countermeasures that evolve week by week. That velocity is now the benchmark for all of European defense.

The wall between the battlefield and the European market

But here is the tension nobody at the forum could talk around: combat validation and certification evidence are two different currencies, and they do not convert automatically.

I spoke with founders of drone and drone-software companies — from early-stage teams to a company that just closed a nine-figure funding round — and with investors backing Ukrainian defense tech on both sides of the Atlantic. The moment a combat-proven system needs to enter NATO structures, European programs, or civil-adjacent airspace, the questions change:

• Where is your airworthiness evidence?

• How do you demonstrate compliance with DO-178C, STANAG 4671-derived requirements, or the applicable military airworthiness rules?

• Can you show traceability from hazard analysis through safety requirements to verification results — for software that changes every sprint?

A flight log from the front line is proof of effectiveness. It is not a safety case. And today, producing that safety case is a manual craft: months of scarce specialist effort per release. For software that ships weekly, a certification process measured in months is not a formality — it is a structural incompatibility.

This is the paradox of European rearmament: we want Ukrainian-speed innovation and European-grade assurance, but the assurance layer still runs at pre-war speed.

Faster software needs faster evidence

The answer is not to lower the bar. Safety standards exist because these systems share airspace, borders, and battlefields with humans. The answer is to industrialize the production of evidence itself.

That is the layer Tymaton builds: automating the functional-safety lifecycle — hazard and risk analysis, safety requirements, traceability, verification evidence, certification-grade documentation — so that each software iteration regenerates its evidence in days instead of months. Human engineers stay accountable for the sign-off; the machine does the transcription-heavy work that today consumes the scarcest people in the industry.

We have already taken a safety-critical software product through TÜV certification with this approach — with the AI's role disclosed to the assessor up front, and no separate tool qualification required. Code is not evidence; but evidence can now be produced at the speed of code.

Where this goes next

If Europe is serious about integrating combat-proven technology into its defense supply chains, certification throughput becomes a strategic capability — as real as production capacity or ammunition stockpiles. The companies that can pair battlefield iteration speed with certification-grade assurance will define the next generation of European defense tech.

That is the conversation we came to Berlin to have — and the one we continued on the airport bus. If you are building or buying drone autonomy and hitting the certification wall, we should talk.

Tymaton automates the functional-safety lifecycle across ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 61508, IEC 62304 and EN 50128 — compressing certification timelines from months to days. www.tymaton.com