Brussels, 1 February 2023 - General André Erich Denk takes up his duties at EDA on 1 February 2023. As deputy to Chief Executive Jiří Šedivý, General Denk will support EDA in its mission to improve European defence capabilities, stimulate research and technology, act as a military interface for EU policies and help develop European security and defence policy.
General Denk was most recently Director Logistics of the EU Military Staff and was previously commander of the Join School of Logistics in Germany, as well as the Joint Logistics Support Group Coordination and Training Centre, Germany’s core facility for training, exercises and certification of national and international joint logistics. During his long career, he also worked as desk officer and deputy branch head for planning issues at Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defence.
General Denk has undertaken many international deployments under European Union, United Nations and NATO mandates, most recently as chief of staff of the EU Training Mission in Mali. His extensive international expertise means he brings logistics and operational knowledge with him, as well as capability planning and armaments development expertise.
General Denk said: “I am delighted to join EDA at this decisive point in European defence collaboration. I am committed to supporting Member States develop their defence capabilities together, as well as building up the European Union’s defence capacity and strengthening the European pillar in NATO.”
Born in Rotthalmünster, Germany, in 1967, General Denk joined the German armed forces in 1986. He holds a diploma in mechanical engineering and in addition, graduated from the German Command and General Staff College as well as from the French General Staff College. In addition to German, he is a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian and speaks fluent English and French. He is married and has two children.
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Today, the European Defence Agency (EDA) has launched a new project to establish a safe-communication extension for NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture (NGVA) in terms of functional safety. The project which will run over 24 months with a €3,5 million budget, is the first step in a series of Safe NGVA projects that eventually aim to develop and test physical demonstrators in relevant environments in the second and third phases.
Generic architectures are open systems to other entities and give access to data that are usually hidden in proprietary systems. As these systems are becoming more common and widely used in military vehicles, safety is one part of the NGVA that is not defined to an implementable depth.
The Safe NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture (SafeNGVA) project proposes to solve the issue by providing separate safe, but closed, sub-systems or infrastructure that is accessible by other participants in the architecture by one-way-gateways.
Led by Germany, the first phase of SafeNGVA also includes France. It will be carried out by a consortium led by Germany’s Rheinmetall and involves MBDA DE, also of Germany, and Safran, Thales and Nexter of France.
PROJECT PHASES TOWARDS PHYSICAL DEMONSTRATORSSafeNGVA in its first phase will seek to define the requirements and design a system architecture for safe communication using the NGVA. The architecture will be validated by different techniques such as performance to robustness tests, to ensure the architecture is conceptually capable of covering all necessary needs for function safety in military vehicles, and a demonstrator and simulation environment for some elements of the NGVA, to provide an implementation close to a real use case. As one of the main goals of the NGVA is to improve interoperability, a demonstration for interoperability between the member states will be performed.
In the second and third phases, the results of SafeNGVA will be used to improve the architecture and validate it further by developing demonstrators for steering a tactical vehicle and by creating a weapon system demonstrator using safety critical hardware and software solutions.
As a project managed by EDA, the initiative can be co-funded by Member States and additional participants can opt in.
The European Defence Agency
The European Defence Agency (EDA) supports its 26 Member States in improving their defence capabilities through European cooperation. Acting as an enabler and facilitator for Ministries of Defence willing to engage in collaborative capability projects, the Agency has become the ‘hub’ for European defence cooperation with expertise and networks allowing it to the whole spectrum of defence capabilities. Member States use EDA as an intergovernmental expert platform where their collaborative projects are supported, facilitated, and implemented. What we do (europa.eu)