Design is important, but adaptability will win the war
The Ministry of Defence has rightly established criteria for how its systems must be designed and built, with concepts such as Secure by Design, Interoperable by Design, and Integrated by Design present in a range of policy and strategy documents. These concepts provide a strong technological foundation for warfighting capabilities, but as the war in Ukraine is demonstrating, the winner is not the military with the best designed capabilities, but rather the military with the quickest iteration cycle to change their capabilities to adapt to the dynamic operational environment.
The most visible adaptations on the battlefield are the constantly evolving drones. As Forbes describes it, it is a high speed arms race and both sides adapt their munitions, electronic warfare systems, cameras, communications gear, and tactics in innovation cycles measured in weeks and months. Below the air war, radical adaptations are also occurring with command and control systems, intelligence systems, and communication systems, as data is driving efficiency and effectiveness and AI models are being tested in battle. A recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies lays out many of the examples, but more importantly, emphasizes three critical factors for Ukraine’s rapid adoption; integration of civil society, close connection of engineers to soldiers, and of course, an existential crisis. For the UK and other Western Allies, the key is to emulate Ukraine’s innovation capability before the current crisis becomes existential for us as well.
Matching Ukraine’s speed of adaptation requires coders
It is hard to imagine the UK MOD, the US DOD, or most other NATO nations adopting new technologies at the speed of Ukraine, but this is what the alliance should aspire to, and the starting point must be organic military software development. As the Palantir CTO said, “Ukraine is learning what happens when you conscript 300,000 of the world’s most capable software engineers, product managers and technologists and send them into battle.”
Out of necessity, thousands of software engineers were drafted into the Ukrainian armed forces, and the unplanned result was the growth of an ecosystem where solider began to code solutions to the problems they faced every day, their friends in the civil sector self-organized to build new capabilities, and a larger number of soldiers, either while serving or after leaving service, formed new companies to build better combat systems. The Ukrainian government recognized this emerging capability, and rather than try to establish policies to limit grassroots innovation, they created a structure to connect and reinforce this ecosystem, called Brave1.
This ecosystem of coders and engineers, some military, some private, and some commercial, all supported through government funding and policies, ensures a feedback loop with the front lines to drive rapid changes, without the need for elaborate requirements documents or Requests for Proposals that traditional Western military processes are accustomed to. The MOD should follow this model to recruit, train, and then unleash the engineering potential within its own ranks to ensure that the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have access to kit that is not only secure by design or interoperable by design, but adaptable by design. This can only be done with an ecosystem of military coders that have the authority to work with industry and civil society to solve their own problems.
We are now in an era of Software Defined Warfare. We need a military that is prepared to fight, adapt, and win with software, and that requires coders.
