MBDA is a European missile maker resulting from several fusions of national companies in 2010 and before. It not only designs missiles but also the systems which run them on the operational theater.

This operational theater is slowly but surely more and more digitized and several systems, formerly running in isolation, are bound for being interconnected, from ground to satellites. The development of e.g. Collaborative Combat and Swarms of Remote Carriers raises new challenges in terms of secure and resilient communications and, in term of military effect optimization.

MBDA aims to be a European leader and a world global actor in missile systems. In this respect, it constantly investigates and assesses new technologies, potentially disruptive, one of which being recent Quantum Applications. This investigation is led with defence in mind, which means we not only seek how to enhance MBDA's effectors with such technologies, but also how to defeat them, as they could be used against us.

New Quantum Applications, whether it be computers, sensors or communication devices, are anyway disruptive from the Engineer's point of view, as most of us were little or no taught Quantum Physics during study time. Therefore, the first MBDA's move in 2020 had been to create a transverse Quantum Community in order to upskill engineers, learn by practicing and engage the Quantum Eco-System.

MBDA's use cases for Quantum Communications are quite numerous as all communication systems could in theory be quantized. However, what would be the gained advantage ? and is it worth the development and embedding cost implied ?

Quantum Secured Networks (QSN) are being developed fast (Hübel et al., 2023), if several national cybersecurity institutions (Renner & Wolf, 2023) discouraged for some time the use of Quantum Key Distribution, NATO (Reding et al., 2023) never stopped to promote it. Then, Quantum Key Distribution may sooner or later come as a requirement for interoperabilities between allies.

Quantum Internet (QI) brings the ability to quantumly connect quantum devices between themselves, whether them be computers or sensors. This opens up several applications and questions, not MBDA specific, among which the Quantum Advantage that a a Distributed Network of Quantum Sensors could bring (Zang et al., 2024). However, transfering a quantum state, held by e.g. a cold atom in a sensor, to a qubit register is still an active research area, as well as mastering entanglement.

In this talk, we will be pleased to give more insights on MBDA's use cases for Quantum Communications, for today (QSN) and tomorrow (QI), in light of most recent achievements.