Border Profiteers

The Austrian Institute of Technology, headquartered in Vienna, is the successor organisation to the Austrian Study Society for Atomic Energy. On Wikipedia, AIT is described as one of the largest non-university research institutions in Austria, giving the impression that it is a public institution. In its web presence, however, AIT presents itself as a company and in fact it is a limited liability company with several "subsidiaries", only 50.46% are owned by the state. The rest of the shares are held by the "Association for the Promotion of Research and Innovation" of the Federation of Austrian Industries.

Carl Zeiss AG is a company in the precision mechanics and optics industry. As a company with a long tradition and world market leader in optical systems, the company was and is extensively involved in equipping military, police and border protection authorities. This ranges from classic binoculars to complex surveillance systems for coasts and land borders to sensor technology used in air and drone defence.

Civipol is a consulting company, 40% of which belongs to the French state and was founded primarily to support the French Ministry of the Interior. It also provides technical services for the Ministry, which in many other countries are carried out by the intelligence services. Accordingly, the largest shareholders, Airbus, Thales and Idemia, are mainly large defence and technology companies.

Dassault Aviation is a French aircraft manufacturer and, among other things, producer of the "Rafale" fighter jet.

The German Aerospace Center is one of the largest research institutions in Germany with over 30 locations.

The "Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung" is organized as a private association, but its nearly 80 institutes receive their basic funding from the federal and federal state governments. A large proportion of its contract research is also financed by public funds, the vast majority of the rest by industry. The explicit goal is application-oriented research for industry. However, it is also established practice for scientists to apply for patents and found companies themselves based on their research at the Fraunhofer Institutes in order to commercialize new technologies.

The nearly 80 institutes work on a wide range of topics. However, …

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in the Adlershof Technology Park in Berlin, IQ Wireless offers on its homepage the installation and support of directional radio networks, as well as terrestrial early fire detection and satellite communication solutions. For a company with (according to its own information) about 30-35 employees, IQ Wireless was and is involved in relatively high-profile research projects.

The NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO), with its headquarter in Brussels, is NATO's central institution for technology monitoring and development. It states that it employs 6,000 scientists and is part of a “network” of 200,000 experts in the member and partner countries. It has separate working groups for vehicle technology, information systems and sensors, among others. The STO has a strong focus on maritime armaments and underwater systems, and related activities are coordinated from its "Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation" in La Spezia, Italy.

The Naval Group is a defense company largely owned by the French state. The remaining shares are held (up to 2.5%) by the armaments company Thales. While Thales focusses on the aerospace industry, the Naval Group specializes primarily on equipping naval forces and coastguards. Besides the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, the Naval Group produces various frigates, i.e. for the French and Italian navies, as well as nuclear-capable submarines and torpedoes. Besides armament in the narrower sense, the Naval Group is also involved in the planning and construction of power plants, including nuclear power plants.

The PIAP (Przemysłowy Instytut Automatyki i Pomiarów), Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements) is categorized by the EU Commission as a "research organization", but it also manufactures products serially, especially robotics and market them globally. Under the URL "antiterrorism.eu" used solely by PIAP, it praises its products for the police and military and lists Pakistan, Belarus, China and other as customers.

Safran is one of the largest manufacturers in Europe in the aerospace sector. The company is a supplier to Airbus and is involved in many of the major armaments projects, especially in Germany and France, including the Tiger combat helicopter, the A400M military transporter and the French multirole combat aircraft Rafale (together with Thales and Dassault).