Bart Steukers

Bart Steukers's public thinking centers on a single conviction: speed of innovation now determines both military and economic survival, and Belgium risks being too slow to notice. His clearest illustration is Ukraine, where he repeatedly points out that "de gemiddelde tijd die er nu tussen gaat voor dingen die in Oekraïne gebruikt worden is 8 weken" ²³, down from three to five years a decade ago. For Steukers this isn't a niche military statistic but a structural shock to how economies organize themselves, because it exposes how cheaply disruption can now be bought: "je kan eigenlijk met een drone die niet zo geweldig veel geld hoeft te kosten, kan je vliegtuigen uitschakelen die miljoenen kosten. Dus ook heel het economisch model achter defensie is aan het veranderen" ²³. He treats this as a live case study in what happens when innovation cycles compress, and argues Belgium and Europe more broadly have to internalize that lesson well beyond the battlefield.

On Belgium's defense-tech ecosystem specifically, he is bullish but precise. He maps it as three concentric circles, from roughly 80 classic defense firms up through 500 companies touching cyber, AI and drones, to some 16,000 jobs once knowledge institutions are included, and he is willing to put a number on the upside: "wij schatten dat die sector eigenlijk zou kunnen verdubbelen tegen roughly 2033" ²³. That optimism is conditional, though. He flags that until only two or three months before his remarks, Belgian companies with even modest defense activity were being refused bank financing on ESG grounds, pushed toward less desirable funding sources, a policy failure only now being corrected ²³. He also situates the current openness around defense collaboration against the shadow of the Agusta bribery scandal of the late 1980s, arguing that decades of enforced separation between Belgian defense and industry were less healthy than today's transparent cooperation ²³.

Steukers is equally clear-eyed about Belgium's structural limits. Because only 4% of Belgian industrial companies have more than 250 employees, he insists Belgian firms cannot realistically build standalone national defense value chains; instead they need to secure positions inside the supply chains of large consortia like Rheinmetall ²³. He extends this into a broader European argument: if every country makes its own procurement and innovation choices independently, Europe wastes enormous resources duplicating supplier development that should instead be coordinated so Belgian, German, Italian and Spanish companies interlock. Uncertainty, in his view, is the real enemy of business decision-making, a point he makes bluntly: "als er één ding is wat bedrijven niet willen, dan is het echt onzekerheid. Dat is echt het aller allerslechtste" ³.

His deepest personal worry, though, is not industrial but civic: that Belgium won't mobilize broadly enough around these questions. "Dat is mijn grootste vrees voor België is dat we niet allemaal en masse met dat onderwerp bezig zijn eigenlijk" ³. This concern threads through his labor-market analysis too. Drawing on Agoria's yearly studies, he notes that so far "tot nu toe voor elke job die verdwijnt zijn er steeds drie nieuwe bijgekomen. Het zijn niet dezelfde, hè" ², and treats that caveat as the crux: the net job creation is real, but only reskilling makes it usable for actual workers. He assigns clear responsibilities here, employers must map future skill needs and employees must act on them, and identifies Belgium's specific weak spot not as a shortage of digital specialists, where the country remains comparatively strong, but as shallow AI literacy across the general population, citing China teaching AI in primary school as, in his framing, entirely justified ²³.

Talent and innovation function in his thinking as the two forces that anchor companies geographically. He states this almost as a formula: "als talent en innovatie aanwezig zijn, dan gaat ons bedrijf over het algemeen drie keer nadenken al voor het zijn bedrijf te verplaatsen naar een ander deel van de wereld" ²³. He sees this dynamic already forming around Ostend's maritime security cluster, where firms, security companies and academic institutions are clustering together, and he frames it with a self-reinforcing logic: "talent trekt talent aan, innovatie trekt talent aan" ²³, predicting this could become one of Belgium's genuine strengths in the near term.

If there is a single refrain that ties his positions together, it's the near-chant he repeats when asked what matters most: "innovatie, innovatie, innovatie, innovatie" ²³. Paired with his pragmatic dismissal of dwelling on past policy failures, "het verleden kan je niet corrigeren. Op de toekomst kan je wel werken" ², this gives his overall stance a forward-looking, unsentimental character. He is not interested in relitigating why Belgium was slow on defense financing or industrial collaboration; he wants attention pointed at compressing timelines, fitting into European supply chains, and building the broad-based skills and AI literacy that let displaced jobs turn into new ones rather than into stagnation.