Indra develops the core capability to manage autonomous AI agents in support of military operations in European cyberspace

The digitization of the battlefield, new threats such as drones and the increasing importance of automation in onboard systems on air, land and naval platforms have expanded the risks and opportunities inherent in military activity in cyberspace during operations.

The AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Deployable Agent) project develops a comprehensive environment that will be able to assemble, train, configure, test, deploy and operate autonomous agents based on artificial intelligence capable of reducing the need for human intervention in cyberspace and shortening decision-making cycles to gain an advantage over the enemy. With a budget of €32 million, AIDA is financed by the European Defence Fund.

By detecting cyberthreats, analyzing and responding to them autonomously and aiding the human operator’s decision- making, the intelligent agents will be responsible for supporting the different combat functions on the digitized battlefield in and through cyberspace, including movement and maneuvering, intelligence, fire, sustainment, command and control, protection and information.

Indra is one of the main partners in the consortium and the sole representative of Spanish industry undertaking the project, which is made up of 28 companies, startups and research centers from 15 EU countries. The company leads the core capacity set to support this trailblazing approach in Europe, and it’s tasked with the agents’ global technological infrastructure, enabling their deployment, monitoring and recovery via a flexible and resilient platform. For this purpose, Indra will use IndraMind, its intelligence platform for critical operations and multi-domain, which facilitates the development of these services in a sovereign and secure manner, as an enabler.

Indra will provide the project with cyberspace situational awareness capabilities, integrate the agents’ functionality into command and control processes and coordinate the only demo case to make use of the agents in military operations in cyberspace. This case will be backed up by a demonstrator in Spain in order to explore the benefits for the Spanish cyberspace combat system (SCOMCE) that these agents provide.

The centralized platform developed by Indra will not only allow these intelligent autonomous agents to operate independently, it will also integrate them as parts of a large cybermosaic of elements with distributed, collaborative and swarming capabilities within the military networks of European armies. Indra’s infrastructure will connect with the different levels of the mosaic to guarantee seamless interoperability and provide a holistic vision of cyberdefence operations.

Indra is currently leading the development of this European cybermosaic within the framework of the EU-GUARDIAN European Defence Fund project, which will receive its first proofs of concept in late 2025 and for which AIDA’s contribution is expected to prove key.

“We’ve evolved from network-centric warfare to decision-centric warfare, whereby the edge on the battlefield lies in acquiring cognitive superiority to decide faster and more effectively while constantly generating dilemmas for the enemy so as to complicate and slow down its decision-making cycle. Automation, distributed performance, continuous learning and artificial intelligence are just some of the pillars set to cement the advantages of our combat forces over those of the enemy. In this regard, on a scale unprecedented in Europe, the AIDA project explores the benefits that AI and automation will bring to operations in cyberspace as the fifth domain of the battlefield”, explained Luis José García de la Iglesia, head of Cyberdefence at Indra.

AIDA is the first European Defence Fund project to support NATO’s Autonomous Intelligent Cyberdefence Agent (AICA) concept to secure active, autonomous and intelligent cyberdefence. It is unique as 28 companies from 15 countries are working closely together and making a significant contribution to increasing the AI capabilities of the European defence and fostering the competitive edge of the European companies contributing to building stronger defence capacities.

This project AIDA provides yet another example of Indra’s significant presence in the major consortia that are developing the future capabilities and systems with which Europe will ensure its sovereignty and capacity for intervention in highly digitized theaters of operations, with increasingly intelligent platforms and solutions capable of countering emerging threats.

In the field of cyberdefence, Indra has led the ECYSAP project, the largest cyber situational awareness project for defense in Europe, which has developed a platform for real-time acquisition of situational cyber awareness in military operations. It also heads the above-mentioned EU-GUARDIAN project and ECYSAP EYE, a continuation of ECYSAP. Thus, Indra is at the forefront of the developing of these capabilities on the continent, in keeping with one of the goals set out in its Leading the Future strategic plan to become the Spanish coordinator of European cyberspace programs.