The discussion reached places it rarely reaches in public: the real terms on which industry is financed, what is missing from procurement planning, and how much of what is announced as local production is genuinely production.

A director in the defence division of a major commercial bank set out what a bank requires from a defence company, and why a file without a signed contract goes nowhere. A representative of the agency that negotiates industrial cooperation showed how much of that local production is, in practice, installation and maintenance.

A state secretary and a former Chief of the Defence Staff sat in the same panel as entrepreneurs and discussed the absence of a procurement plan industry could plan against. Things usually said in private were said on stage, debated and explained, with the press in the room.