Defence Tech and the Strategic Defence Review
This afternoon, the Defence Secretary John Healey presented the 62 recommendations of the Strategic Defence Review - all of which the government accepts -, with the promise that the UK would be ‘a leading tech-enabled Defence power, with an Integrated Force that deters, fights and wins through constant innovation at wartime pace’ by 2035. The SDR enables the UK to ‘learn the lessons from Ukraine and seize the defence dividend’.
Following a string of announcements over the past six months, including Defence Reform’s management restructuring and new support for SMEs (the full context of today’s news here), this is an initial look at what the SDR means for techUK members and the UK’s digital and technology industries:
The Ministry of Defence will establish a Cyber and Electromagnetic Command sitting under UK Strategic Command. It will act as a ‘hub…integrating the full range of military operations and bringing coherence to how Defence understands, develops, and accesses capability with allies and industry’, including demand setting, ‘acting as a single Defence customer’ for the National Cyber Force.
Shifting to ‘warfighting readiness’, the MOD will implement an Integrated Force Model, putting ‘digital enablement at its core’. This means a ‘common digital foundation of data, synthetic environments, and networks’ bringing together people and platforms across all domains including allies.
Central to its delivery will be a Digital Targeting Web - with a budget of £1bn operational by 2027 - to exploit developments in Artificial Intelligence and software, to enabling greater integration across domains, platforms and weapons systems. Such a capability will require a Defence-wide Cloud service at SECRET, with MVP status expected next year. The MOD will report to the Defence Secretary by July next year on the assurance of critical data flows.
UK Defence Innovation, initially announced by the Chancellor in the Spring Statement, will be one of two new organisations sitting under the National Armaments Directorate with a ringfenced budget of £400mn. UKDI will be ‘the mechanism by which Defence quickly finds and then buys innovative commercial products and services…connecting external innovation with defence procurement’. It will sit alongside a Defence Research and Evaluation Office (focused on early-stage innovation), ‘as an evolution of the current Dstl and Defence Science and Technology teams’ reaching out to research institutes. Together they will work with the wider MOD and Chief Scientific Advisor to set targets on technological pull-through and scaling, reporting quarterly to the Defence Secretary.
On acquisition reform, the SDR confirms the plans announced in the Spring Statement for the MOD’s ‘segmented’ 3-tier approach to procurement, with each their own timelines:
- Strategic Long-Term Programmes (Major Platforms & Equipment) within two years
- Pace-setting upgrades from three years to one year (including communications and sensors)
- Rapid commercial innovation (such as software) to contract in three-month cycles
techUK has long argued that beyond the policy, fundamental to rapid adoption is mindset. The SDR argues the MOD should embed a culture of ‘constant innovation’, targeting an annual 10 percent shift in budget from current to next-generation capabilities within enterprise digital platforms and services.
Recognising the practical challenges experienced by techUK members of working in defence, by next year the MOD should set out a dedicated financial services strategy including establishing a Defence Investors Advisory Group to attract new funding to the sector.
The SDR will now be followed by a Defence Investment Plan due in the Autumn (replacing the previous Defence Equipment Plans that typically followed a review), to set out how the MOD will deliver the SDR’s vision in practice.
Defence will also feature heavily in the Spending Review due on Wednesday 11 June followed by the Government’s Industrial Strategy expected a day later.
To find out more about techUK's Defence Programme, please contact Programme Manager Jeremy Wimble.
Jeremy Wimble
Jeremy manages techUK's defence programme, helping the UK's defence technology sector align itself with the Ministry of Defence - including Defence Digital, DE&S, innovation units and Frontline Commands - through a broad range of activities including private briefings and early market engagement events. It also supports the MOD as it procures new digital technologies.