General Martin Herem, the former commander of the Estonian Defence Forces, is to join the team of Milrem Robotics, the world’s leading robotics and autonomous systems developer.
General (ret) Herem will join the team as a Military Strategy Advisor starting in August.
His role will be to bridge the gap between end-user requirements and product development, specifically leading the process of assessing lessons learned in Ukraine and converting them into use cases for land robotics in the future. Herem will also advise the company’s management, business development and capability development units in decision-making from a military user perspective.
“Milrem Robotics is deploying ground robotic systems on a larger scale in different countries, and it’s very important that this new capability will match and augment existing defence capabilities,” said Kuldar Väärsi, CEO of Milrem Robotics.
“General Herem has extensive knowledge of how to build deployable military capabilities in efficient and smart ways. He will support Milrem in providing even better and more matching system-level solutions based on ground robotics,” Väärsi added.
“The war in Ukraine and the usage of Milrem Robotics’ THeMIS and other ground robots on the battlefield has demonstrated the importance of these systems and the growing need to develop them further so that they can better fulfil their mission – keeping soldiers as far from danger as possible,” said Herem. “My goal will be to ensure that what has been learned on the Ukrainian battlefield will be implemented in future robotic systems,” he added.
General Herem was the commander of the Estonian Defence Forces from December 2018 up to the end of June 2024. Herem entered service in 1992. From 2013 to 2016, he served as the Commandant of the Estonian National Defence College and from 2016 to 2018 Chief of Staff of the Headquarters of the Estonian Defence Forces. Herem was one of the re-founding members of the paramilitary Estonian Defence League in 1990.
Milrem Robotics is the world-leading robotics and autonomous systems developer and systems integrator, with offices in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, and the US. The company is known for its THeMIS and Multiscope UGVs, the Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle, and MIFIK intelligent autonomous functionalities for defence platforms.
The company is also renowned for successfully completing the European Defence Industrial Development Programme (EDIDP) project iMUGS, which focused on developing a modular and scalable architecture for hybrid manned-unmanned systems.