ATHENS, Greece — Top U.S. and European officials convened earlier this year here to chart a path forward on key defense objectives in a world filled with growing threats to western civilization at the Athens Defense Summit.
The summit comes as much of the world has been moving in the direction of American President Donald Trump’s vision—something that the president himself told Breitbart News during a recent Oval Office interview that he has noticed when asked if the world is moving his way—when it comes to bolstering defense spending. NATO countries are now agreeing to significantly increase defense spending as compared to their GDP thanks to Trump, while many nations are seeking to increase their ties with the United States and follow Trump’s vision for the world. Greeks in particular are proud of their ties with the United States, and the fact that they have regularly outpaced much of the rest of NATO already on things like defense spending. But at this event, it was hardly just Greeks talking about this new order of things worldwide—representatives from many other nations and from top businesses around the world, including leading American defense companies, were present to push the case.
Founded by Forbes 30 Under 30 geopolitical entrepreneur Basil Gavalas, the Athens Defense Summit featured several U.S. and European officials focused on the future of defense in the world.
“We need institutions that restore our belief in power,” Gavalas said in a statement to Breitbart News. “This is not an objective Summit. We take a stand for our Western values and dynamism. What inspires us about the United States is actually its defence dynamism: its willingness to trust founders, reward risk and move at the speed of danger. Peter Thiel understood earlier than most that technological sovereignty and national power are inseparable. The ADS was built in that same spirit: less complacency, less bureaucracy and more capability. Strength is not the opposite of peace. It is its prerequisite.”
Featured at the summit was top U.S. energy official Joshua Volz, Special Envoy for Global Energy Integration at the U.S. Department of Energy.
“I bring you greetings from Washington, Secretary [Chris] Wright, and President Trump, who could not be more thrilled at the direction of travel and continuing strengthening of the relationship between the Hellenic Republic and the United States of America,” Volz said.
Volz explained what he called “the Parthenon Principle,” and “five pillars that I think underscore the relationship between the United States, the Hellenic Republic, and our partners and allies throughout the region.”
“The first is people, the second is prosperity, the third is protection—which everybody here knows well—the fourth is politics and the fifth is progress,” Volz said. “People are the backbone of everything that we do. There’s no company, there’s no institution, there’s no country without the people that comprise it. The relationship between the American people and the people here in the Hellenic Republic goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. The diaspore community in the United States of Greek Americans includes some of the most impressive individuals we have in the United States—leaders of industry, titans of entertainment, politics, and the list goes on. That exchange between people and the ability of cultures to come together is really the foundation of all of the relationships we have between the Hellenic Republic and the United States of America. Prosperity—there is no prosperity without people, and there is no protection without prosperity. Our ability to bring economies together and drive the growth in economic opportunity is also something that lays at the heart of the relationship and something we have begun to focus on increasingly within the Trump administration, taking economic opportunities and putting them at the heart of our defense industrial complex.”
Volz laid out how Trump’s Department of War has created the Office of Strategic Capital which is, he said, “specifically to seek out opportunities to enhance the defense industrial base in the United States and to bring the private sector closer to alignment with the goals and strategic national security interests that we share.”
Volz also noted that “energy is the threat that ties all of those things [the five pillars he laid out] together.”
“Without energy, there is nothing that can be done to drive prosperity,” Volz said. “Without energy, you do not have the ability to industrialize and create material necessary to defend nations and to meet NATO obligations in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world. As good as wind turbines and solar panels may be at subsidizing and bringing down the levelized cost of energy, they cannot replace the combustion that is necessary for high-process heat that creates steel, that creates armaments, that creates the material necessary to defend our nations.”
WATCH: JOSHUA VOLZ ADDRESS AT THE ATHENS DEFENSE SUMMIT:
The two-day-long summit in May gathered top officials and business leaders from around the region and the world, and one key session during it focused on the future of warfare and laid out how future wars will be won by nations and alliances capable of combining military experience with technological speed not by the biggest bureaucracies. That panel included representatives from Anduril and Palantir, who laid out the transition that Gavalas speaks of.
“One of the greatest dangers in moments of technological transition is that institutions continue to speak the language of an older world long after reality itself has changed,” Gavalas said opening the panel. “We all know that reality has indeed changed. The battlefield is autonomous. It’s software-driven. It’s data defined, and is increasingly computational. Decision circles are compressing. Technology companies, our friends on the panel know that very well, are moving into the battlefield speedier than any government could ever do. Drones costing thousands can actually destroy systems costing millions. But you know what Ukraine demonstrated is that at the same time some of the oldest realities of war have returned, and I mean heavy manufacturing, I mean industrial capacity, geography, energy, political will, attrition, stockpiles. So the question is what emerges? But I believe what emerges is not a total replacement conventional warfare by technological warfare, but instead a new synthesis essentially. Those who have the strategic advantage in the future, or maybe now, are those who understand what integration is means.”
On Gavalas’s panel, titled “The Future of War: Power, AI, and the New Battlespace,” were business leaders like Palantir’s Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Anduril’s Robert Smith, former Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, Helsing’s Dr. Ben Tallis, and several Greek and European Union officials focused on AI and defense.
Gavalas turned after his opening comments to Palantir’s Lymberopoulos—the defense company’s head of machine learning—to respond, who said “I absolutely agree with you.”
“Data integrations are super important,” Lymberopoulos—who flew from Seattle, Washington, to Athens for the event—said. “You’re absolutely right that Palantir kind of saw that very early on in the process mainly working through the government and we’ve been going after it pretty hard and we’ll be seeing a lot of value into it and we also see that same value with our commercial clients as well.’
Lymberopoulos added that a huge focus of Palantir is on “how we enable real-time decision-making.”
“I think that’s going to be a differentiator in the future—whoever can get access to the information to begin with, can process it right away and can make sense of it right away in real time will have a huge advantage,” Lymberopoulos said. “And I think this is where the AI race comes in. I think this part—I want to break it down a bit because it’s a bit more complicated and many people hear real-time decision-making and think it’s a straightforward thing. It’s not. The devil is in the details. To me, real-time decision-making has a few layers we need to attack. The first and very important and very basic one is what you just mentioned, data integration. We’ve been working the government, the U.S. government, for a very, very long time and what we see is gathering all the sensitive data that the commanders need access to to make an informed decision is a nightmare because the government is siloed and there are hundreds of different teams generating different data sometimes overlapping sometimes non-overlapping. They go into their own systems. They go to different security levels. Where we are in the battle space and have to make life or death decisions we need all of this stuff into the commanders’ availability.”
So first up, Lymberopoulos said, is figuring out to integrate the data so military commanders can see it all very clearly. Secondly, he said, the technology giants need to figure out how to handle the sheer volume of data they come across. He said there are currently tens of thousands of satellites—with plans for about 100,000 satellites by 2030—conducting worldwide surveillance generating hundreds of thousands of images every hour. Combined with signals and human intelligence, Lymberopoulos said that no military on earth can currently make sense of all this data quickly enough to matter—so this is where he said Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help reduce the percent of information that needs to be analyzed by humans by 98 to 99 percent. This all can help commanders in the world’s militaries develop targets and then figure out how to deploy munitions effectively.
WATCH: FULL PANEL ON THE FUTURE OF WAR:
Several top European leaders from European Union countries at this event discussed working outside the normal chains of bureaucracy around Brussels to help further western defenses. For instance, Petkov—the former prime minister of Bulgaria—told the story about how when he was in office when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine he provided much of the munitions that Ukrainians needed in the opening months of the war. His country repurposed shipments that were made originally for Afghanistan to instead help the Ukrainians.
“They said ‘no, we won’t be dead, we’ll keep on fighting,’” Petkov said of the Ukrainians. “So the first brave decision was on their side and I thought sitting as the prime minister, I said if these guys are willing to fight on the front line we have to support them with everything we can. So the next thing we did was Bulgaria provided 5 billion worth of munitions in the first few months which represented 45 percent of the munitions in Ukraine. And the second part which we’re proud of is we actually proposed the freezing of the Russian assets in the Euro bonds.”
Even the former Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans argued that Europe needs to be more united in the face of global threats
“I honestly believe that if we do not get our act together better and get rid of this one thing that has defined us and weakened us over the last 20 years whether it’s in a financial crisis or a climate crisis or other crisis, this element of moral hazard—it’s an element that comes from the banking world but the fact that we don’t trust each other enough to see that the differences between us are smaller than the commonalities we need to face the threats we’re facing,” Timmermans said in a panel alongside this journalist from Breitbart News. “If we don’t do that, then there will always be the same bland reaction from Brussels. ‘The European Union notes this development with great concern and will follow it closely.’ It’s hopeless, but that’s what we’re saying every day on everything that happens.”
WATCH: FULL PANEL ON THE U.S. AND EUROPE:
Other top European officials like Greek Deputy Foreign Minister Alexandra Papadopoulou discussed how the Greek government in particular views its partnership with the U.S. as “equally important” as its membership in the European Union.
“For Greece, the transatlantic relationship and membership in the European Union are the two main pillars of our foreign policy and we don’t choose the one against the other,” Papadopoulou said in an interview with Endy Zemenides of the Hellenic American Leadership Council during the event. “They’re equally important, and we’re not going to betray the one for the other. The U.S. is a strategic partner. This has been for quite some time. We the MDCA [Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement], then we have 2019 the first act of Congress, then 2021 if I’m not mistaken the second Greece-U.S. partnership, and now there is another piece of legislation that maybe you are going to refer to later that is in the pipeline that builds upon the two previous pieces of legislation. This is part of the strategic content of our relationship.”
Papadopoulou added that too that the U.S.-Greece relationship has bipartisan support in the United States and has the support of almost every political party in Greece as well—transcending typical partisanship in both countries.
WATCH: FULL INTERVIEW BETWEEN ZEMENIDES AND PAPADOPOULOU:
The big takeaway from this event as a whole is that the vision for bolstered national defense and the embrace of future technology—all of which is being pushed by Trump from the White House—is receiving a warm welcome worldwide, in Europe especially.
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