Jiří Hynek

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

it is my great pleasure and honour to contribute to the 13th year of Future Forces Forum - the international platform for trends and technologies. FFF is a unique project that enables the view on the defence and security field from different perspectives and is focused on wide scale of areas that are interconnected with the aim of providing unique platform gathering experts from the defence and security field under one roof. I am glad that this year´s FFF attracts many international experts and enables high-quality debates within the specialized programme and highlights the prestige of the Czech defence and security industry.

The term security nowadays means something completely different than it meant years ago. Negative determination defines security as the state of being free from danger or threat. That would unfortunately mean that security does not exist anymore. Europe of today is threatened. It is threatened existentially, on many levels and mainly by its own approach to threats. We might be the sixth most secure state in the world, but that should not calm us down. The maintenance of the secure state status is more and more difficult these days and EU policy is not helping us with it at all.

Dynamics taken up nowadays by defence and security industry has many advantages. Companies are being pushed to keep up with global trends and evolve constantly otherwise they will not be able to cope with the pressure of their competitors. Investment to research and development is increasing as well as the public interest in the area of defence and security. Czech companies are proving over the long period that they are competitive on the global market, they can specialise themselves wisely and thus bring added value to the defence and security industry on the international level. I am proud that I can claim this for many years already and that this claim is gaining more and more significance every year.

I believe that FFF will show its participants the whole scale of options for investment into the future of the defence and security and will become unique opportunity for getting new contacts, experience, new approach to the security and its future in the Czech Republic, in Europe and globally.

Jiří Hynek

president DSIA