Story by: Sae Schatz, Ph.D., Marshall Center professor and AIMS co-organizer

The University of the Bundeswehr Munich (UniBw Munich), the Marshall Center, and NATO School Oberammergau hosted the AI Meets Security (AIMS) Annual Retreat from July 15–17 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, bringing together more than 70 researchers, graduate students, and security professionals from nine nations to examine the growing role of artificial intelligence in security and defense.

“AIMS started as a way to bring our AI researchers into conversation with the security community, and this year showed how far that idea has grown,” said Dr. Philipp Rösch, research head for artificial intelligence, UniBw Munich, and AIMS co-organizer. “Watching graduate students defend their research in front of experienced practitioners, and then see those same practitioners genuinely reconsider a problem based on what they heard, that's the exchange we set out to create.”

Designed to connect AI research with operational and policy perspectives, AIMS featured four lectures, a fireside chat, collaborative discussions, and an interactive AI-coded wargame hosted by the NATO Defense College and facilitated by experts from BWI's wargaming division.

Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Renner, vice president for teaching and stakeholder relations, served as the senior UniBw Munich representative at the retreat.

He opened the event by welcoming participants on behalf of the university and emphasizing the growing importance of dual-use and emerging technologies, particularly AI. He highlighted UniBw Munich institutions such as the Research Institute Cyber Defence and Palladion, the university’s site within NATO's DIANA accelerator network, as evidence of the university’s deepening commitment to defense innovation.

Andrew Borene, J.D., a national security expert whose career spans military service, government, industry, and academia, delivered the first plenary lecture of AIMS. Borene argued that China-Russia-Iran-North Korea bloc are increasingly using AI to power hybrid threats and hybrid warfare, from AI-evasive malware to disinformation and drone attacks, warning that these are no longer distant or hypothetical risks but challenges already confronting Western governments and societies.

“Discussing hybrid, cyber, and AI security threats in one room is timely, but none of this gets accomplished without the men and women in uniform who carry it out. If we don’t defend as a cross-sector, cross-alliance effort, then we’ve already lost the plot,” Borene said. “Our open societies are our strength. If we can remember that our values matter more than our bureaucracies, and our people matter more than our processes, we’ll be okay. Our superior ‘product,’ at the end of the day, is our alliance built on shared values: human rights, rule of law, and the scientific method.”

Prof. Dr. Michael Schmitt, full professor of earth observation, UniBw Munich, delivered a keynote focused on remote sensing and geospatial intelligence. Schmitt walked through the five traditional areas of intelligence collection before focusing on his own specialty, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), a technology that can see through clouds, darkness, and other obstacles that defeat conventional optical imagery.

He demonstrated how AI filters can transform characteristically grainy SAR imagery, adding color, three-dimensional features, and sharpened detail to make the imagery far easier for an analyst to interpret.

The demonstration illustrated how AI-enabled analytical tools can assist analysts in extracting meaningful intelligence from available data even in non-permissive environments.

Prof. Dr. Rafaela Kraus, founder of the founders@unibw entrepreneurship center at UniBw Munich, the SpaceFounders accelerator, and BASED, Munich’s digital hub for security and defense, made the case for graduate students and early-career researchers to consider launching a company as a viable career path.

Kraus laid out the scale of the opportunity: European defense spending is surging under initiatives such as Readiness 2030, but projected annual demand for equipment is expected to reach roughly €335 billion by 2030 against only about €100 billion in current European production capacity, a gap she argued will be closed only by researchers willing to turn their work into deployed systems.

Drawing on Munich defense-industry success stories that began as student initiatives before their technologies were fielded by European armed forces, Kraus argued that deep technical expertise—not business polish—is the scarce resource in defense AI, and that today's AIMS researchers already possess most of what they need to become founders.

The retreat also coincided with German-American Friendship Day at the Marshall Center, a celebration of the incredible friendship between Germany and the U.S. In that spirit, the retreat featured a fireside chat that included U.S. Consul General in Munich James Miller, Ph.D., and Maj. Gen. Dr. Volker Pötzsch, chief of staff of the German Cyber and Information Domain Service Command. The panel, moderated by Dr. habil. May-Britt Stumbaum, Ph.D., Marshall Center professor and AIMS co-organizer, offered a transatlantic perspective on AI’s role in national security policy.

Miller pointed to recent U.S. executive orders directing the government to integrate AI with security, actively scan for AI-related cybersecurity risks, and engage allies and partners on AI-enabled threats. He also emphasized that government and industry must move together rapidly to scale AI responsibly. Drawing on Texas A&M’s experience recovering from a loss of research to foreign interference, which led the university to build an innovation-protection institute that has since grown into a broader consortium, Miller made the case that research security and innovation are mutually reinforcing rather than in tension.

Dr. Pötzsch offered a Bundeswehr perspective on the same challenge, echoing NATO Military Committee Chair Admiral Rob Bauer’s warning that modern warfare is “just as much about bits and bots as it is about mud and blood,” and describing a “fog of data” as the modern equivalent of the fog of gun smoke that once obscured old battlefields. He argued that without full digitization, and ultimately a truly digitized kill chain, militaries cannot expect to prevail in future conflicts. He closed by emphasizing the need for safe spaces where government, industry, and academia can coordinate across sectors, pointing to Hacking for Defense, UniBw Munich’s newly launched program applying startup-style problem-solving to real defense challenges, as one such example already underway.

Retreat activities included three poster sessions in which nearly 30 graduate students and junior researchers presented their original research for review by faculty and security professionals. The top two research posters from each session received an award.

The AIMS 2026 best poster recipients were:

• Arthur Lawrenz, UniBw Hamburg: SONAR: An Outlook on How AI Can Identify Ships Based on Their Sound
• Dr. Dominic Karnehm, UniBw Munich: Cyber-Physical Safety for Battery-Powered Platforms Using Neural Operators
• Stefan Klug, UniBw Munich: Enabling Secure and Data-Sovereign AI through Distributed (Quantum) Machine Learning
• Simon Rulle, UniBw Munich: Reconnaissance as Inference: Active-Inference Drone Swarms for Wildfire Detection and Response
• Johannes Schmidt, UniBw Hamburg: AI-Assisted Course-of-Action Development and Wargaming
• Larissa Zott, UniBw Munich: Application of Topological Data Analysis to Biomedical Data

Of these six, the overall AIMS 2026 Best Poster award was presented to Arthur Lawrenz for his work on applied research in identifying ships based on their distinct acoustic signatures. As such, he will be invited to publish a commentary in the special issue “Security Reimagined: AI and Other Emerging and Disruptive Technologies” of Connections: The Quarterly Journal.

In addition to the research posters, participants took part in fishbowl discussion syndicates, small-group conversations on topics ranging from AI in military decision-making to cognitive warfare and the defense innovation ecosystem. The retreat’s other major interactive session was a wargame demonstration led by Dr. Gokhan Ozkan of the NATO Defense College, with support from Jonas Thiessen and the BWI GmbH Wargaming Team. 

Ozkan built the wargame, called Multi-Dimension Deterrence Strategy, using the rapid-prototyping platform Replit. He showed participants both how the wargame was built and then provided a chance to play it.

In the game, two teams competed across five dimensions of national power: joint, economic, cognitive, space, and cyber.

After play concluded, Ozkan showed participants how the platform could analyze the results, generating AI-assisted pattern analysis across sessions and letting users test hypotheses using standard statistical methods formatted for research in a professional writing style, illustrating how AI tools can accelerate both wargame design and the analysis of what they reveal.

Held in conjunction with the cybersecurity module of the Marshall Center's Hybrid Threats and Cybersecurity course, the AIMS retreat was further strengthened by approximately 80 resident course participants from 30 nations who joined key events, expanding opportunities for exchange between researchers and security practitioners.

“When Philipp Rösch and I first imagined the AIMS community, back in 2024 when we organized the first retreat, we wanted to bring our two worlds together: AI and security,” Stumbaum said. “We wanted to ‘burst the bubbles’ between younger researchers and more experienced practitioners, and between technologists and military leaders. Today, AIMS has become a regular series of events, and our community continues to grow both in size and in professional diversity.”

Planning is underway for the next AIMS gathering, a half-day “AIMS Salon” in November.