Admiral Davide Berra, former commander of Italy's Joint Intelligence Center provided the morning keynote address, which also helped to shape some of the day's discussions. Admiral Berra said, "We are living in a complex scenario." He said governments are comfortable managing this complexity, but it becomes a much bigger challenge when these complex scenarios change in non-liner ways.
He also echoed some of Scharfe's earlier points about innovation. "We must embrace innovation as a central pillar of our collective defense strategy," he said. "The innovation is not just technological, but it's a state of mind. We need not to be focused on what we have now but we have to focus on what will be tomorrow – on the moment that is to come."
In terms of future developments, he said that multi-domain operations create new challenges. "It's important to have in mind that now we have no time to decide…. It requires great agility and a great precision in data collecting, in analyzing, in storing and retrieving," he explained. He noted that in the past, scenarios were less complex: the enemy was usually approaching from one direction in one domain. "What is the enemy doing now? To answer this question is very, very, very complicated because the enemy moves not only on land, on the sea, under the sea, [and] in the air, but [also] moves in space, moves in cyber and moves at the same time in all these domains." This multidomain complexity, he said, emphasizes the capability to fuse data, "to understand very quickly what's going on"
Admiral Berra also discussed the importance of AI and the role of human intelligence. "AI is important," he said, "but it is not the solution to all of our problems. So artificial intelligence is fantastic, it's fundamental, it's central. But it needs to be trained, needs to be taught, needs to be managed by a human. Please, when you think of your system of the future, when you think, when you manage the system that you have, when you use the system you have, keep in mind that the human factor remains central, even in front…of artificial intelligence." – JED Staff