Electronic enclosures continue to increase in importance for the military. As changes in policy and in the nature of modern warfare change, the shift towards mechanization, automation and digitization of the way America defends itself is increasing in speed. This means that the demand for the components that make that change possible is very high, and the list of products in demand for that transition includes electronic enclosures.

The United States military has changed dramatically over the course of the last decade as it has adapted to changes in policy and to the realities of limited resources like manpower and political will. This means that increasingly, the use of unmanned or remotely controlled tools like drones are becoming more and more important to the military’s strategy. This means that the support technology used to keep these tools in operation is just as important as the tools themselves. This includes the software that manages the equipment, the hardware on which the software runs and the enclosures used to house and protect the hardware. The enclosures are, in a way, defense for our defense. They protect the hardware that runs our automated defense systems from accidental impact, contamination by dust and other particulates (which, in the dusty, dry theaters in which our military has been engaged recently, are in abundance) and they even can be designed to protect hardware from electromagnetic interference. It’s likely that in the future these enclosures will also be designed with safeguards to prevent unauthorized parties from exploiting vulnerabilities like EMI sensitivity.

Electronic enclosures might not seem like the most important safeguards for our emerging military technologies, but it’s easy to demonstrate that they play an essential role in keeping our defense equipment safe and running when we need it.