An Outsider Takes the Helm: Rupert Pearce Named UK Armaments Director

Issue 45: The UK MoD appoints its NAD, looking back at the Strategic Defence Review, our sit-down interview with Mykhailo Fedorov, interviews with Tiberius Aerospace and Lodestar, and more

Oct 23, 2025

General Sir Richard Barrons, Grace Cassy, and Shashank Joshi on stage at Resilience Conference 2025

Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media

Late last week, the UK Ministry of Defence announced the appointment of its much-needed National Armaments Director (NAD). Rupert Pearce is replacing the temporary NAD, Andy Start, and sources tell us that he has immediately immersed himself in the role. We also heard that Pearce was the MoD’s fourth choice for the position, which signals just how difficult this role was to fill. There are a lot of reasons for that, and reasons to be hopeful, which we delve into in Ingrid Lunden’s piece excerpted below in our Dispatches from London section.

“If that [interview] was on Newsnight, it would have been half of the front page of the Times.” This was whispered to us in September following the Resilience Conference panel “The UK Strategic Defence Review, Four Months On” — which brought together General Sir Richard Barrons and Grace Cassy, two architects of the SDR, in conversation with The Economist Defence Editor, Shashank Joshi. The pair had a clear-eyed — and rather impatient — look back on the process of writing the SDR and the progress to implement the committee’s recommendations since it was published in May 2025. One of Sir Richard and Grace’s main points of frustration was the lack of a NAD appointment. Now that box is ticked, hopefully we will see movement within the UK MoD to realise more SDR recommendations. Read our writeup and watch the panel here.

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The recent Strategic Defence Review by the UK MoD pointed clearly to the need for considerable improvement in defence innovation, and last week, the Ministry of Defence announced a long-expected appointment to support this.

Rupert Pearce was named as the new National Armaments Director. The appointment puts him in a key position to lead how the UK conceives of and procures its next generation of defence, matching priorities to what is needed, as well as how and from whom to get it.

The role of the NAD was discussed on our stage earlier this month during Resilience Conference in a panel that looked at the Strategic Defence Review four months after it was released. (You can see that panel and read about it here.)

Pearce, pictured below, is an interesting pick for NAD, not least because he is not from a strictly defence background but one in the commercial realms of telecoms and technology. His most prominent past role was CEO of the satellite provider Inmarsat; he’s also been a partner with a private investment firm in the US.

One takeaway from this is that Pearce is not an insider, and if anything, more an outsider. Will that give him the chance to shake up the MoD in a good way and bring new thinking to the role? Or will it spell challenges ahead as he grapples with a huge department and a lot of entrenchment? The reality is likely a blend of the two.

UK National Armaments Director, Rupert Pearce (image via Ministry of Defence)

High flyer

Pearce trained as a lawyer and has spent a large part of his career in the corporate world. His most high-profile job on that front was working for 16 years at Inmarsat, starting as general counsel and working up to spend the last nine years as its CEO until leaving in 2021.

His past experience also includes leading energy storage company Highview Power for a year and two part-time positions as chairman of broadband service providers.

Leading a satellite company could be a good fit for someone working on procurement on behalf of a defence ministry. Inmarsat counts government as one of its target verticals, and space and satellite have become a key component of “resilience tech.” Militaries are building out communications and computing infrastructure high above the earth, and space exploration represents an important (if still largely unproven) target for finding and mining rare materials used in the building of weapons and other hardware.

Based on interviews Pearce gave during his time at the helm, however, defence and related resilience may not have been top of mind in the years when he led the company. Instead, the focus was more on how satellite could improve connectivity in areas like underdeveloped geographies, natural disasters, and smart cities; and in commercial deals with transportation providers operating in areas terrestrial fixed and mobile providers cannot reach.

“Whether to the cockpit or the cabin, [connectivity] is seen as mission critical by airlines, and I include passenger Wi-Fi now in that attribute,” he said in an interview in 2023 with Satellite Today. “Airlines know that if they don’t install passenger Wi-Fi, their passengers will go elsewhere. Aviation is also a global market, where wide area coverage matters… I think aviation is going to be one of the core competencies of Inmarsat going forward.”

Nonetheless, Pearce would be familiar with how satellite fits into current defence priorities, as well as with the suppliers’ position in any procurement conversation: that conversation in 2023 noted government and military among two growth areas for the satellite provider.

The MoD also touts Pearce’s experience as an investor. Since July 2021, he has been a partner at US-based Columbia Capital, a role that still appears to be active based on his LinkedIn bio. As with Inmarsat, the experience is potentially more adjacent rather than direct: Columbia appears to invest in privately-held companies in telecoms and tech, but not necessarily the kinds of defence and resilience startups that the MoD might want to work more closely with going forward.

Read on here.

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