By Graham Wallace, Managing Director, EMEA
Last month, my colleague Markus Rohr and I were in Paris representing Senetas at Eurosatory 2026. Exhibiting as part of the Australian pavilion alongside the Department of Defence and Austrade was a brilliant opportunity to showcase true Australian innovation and advanced sovereign capability to a global audience.
If you want to see where the defense industry is heading, Eurosatory is the place to look. Walking the halls, the overarching themes were impossible to miss: building resilience across land, sea, and air domains, alongside a massive focus on the rapidly accelerating integration of autonomous and uncrewed systems.
As a company proud of our roots, it was fantastic to see such a strong Victorian presence on the world stage. Our global distribution partner, Thales, chose Eurosatory to unveil the Bushmaster Mulga—their next-generation utility variant built in Bendigo, Victoria. Just like Thales, Senetas designs and manufactures locally in Victoria. Seeing their launch was a great reminder that “sovereign capability” isn’t an abstract concept; it’s being engineered and built at home, then trusted worldwide.
Julien Assoun, Vice-President of Vehicles and Tactical Systems at Thales, launching the Bushmaster Mulga
Naturally, encryption dominated our conversations on the stand. The timing couldn’t have been more relevant: just a week prior, France’s cybersecurity agency (ANSSI) announced that by 2027, they will stop certifying IT security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption.
The driving force behind this regulatory urgency is the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat—where adversaries intercept and store encrypted data today to crack it down the line once a quantum computer is available. For defense and government agencies holding sensitive, long-life data, that threat is a present-day issue, not a future hypothetical.
What struck me most in our discussions was the shift in appetite. Given the current geopolitical realities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, defense leaders aren’t interested in future roadmaps or “coming soon” brochures. They want capability they can deploy right now. The clear demand is for certified, crypto-agile, quantum-safe encryption that secures data-in-motion instantly, without degrading network performance.
That is exactly the gap Senetas fills. It’s why our encryption technology is already trusted to protect the sensitive communications of governments and defense organizations across both Five Eyes nations and NATO member states.
Ultimately, Eurosatory reinforced a major shift in the industry landscape. Regulatory mandates are tightening, the threat to data is real, and Australian sovereign technology has a vital role to play globally. The forward-thinking organizations we spoke with are the ones treating quantum-readiness as a critical decision for today, rather than a problem for tomorrow.
Australian defence industry represented on the Australia Pavilion at Eurosatory 2026, Paris
