The SDR, Four Months On
The Strategic Defence Review published in June broke new ground for how UK thinks about its future on the front lines. Two of its authors walk through a frank wash-up of how it's played out
The Strategic Defence Review was launched earlier this year with a splash: nearly 150 pages painstakingly and deeply identifying how the UK approaches defence today and what it needs to do differently to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Just one problem, however: turning its findings into action items, and then executing on them, has proven to be a major challenge in a department massively constrained by its budget.
At a panel at Resilience Conference earlier this month, two of the primary authors of the SDR, General Sir Richard Barrons and Grace Cassy, described their outlook on SDR implementation in fairly bleak terms.
On a scale of 1 to 10, they said they would give it a 3 “on a good day.” Their verdict: without any commitment to a more specific plan of action, nothing was happening. Cassy singled out the lack of a permanent National Armaments Director at the Ministry of Defence as a prime example of the problem.
Just two weeks later, some change is afoot. After a long vacancy, Rupert Pearce has been appointed as the new NAD (read our story here). Yet other problems have still to be addressed.
Moderator Shashank Joshi of the Economist noted that the mood these days within the MoD is “grim”, given funding constraints, and that it’s not much brighter among startups serving the defence industry.
A new idea of “novel”
While the SDR recommended some 10% of new investment get allocated to “novel technologies” many of the smaller companies making those technologies hadn’t seen any spend to date, and that it could take two years or more to see those funds materialise. For startups with limited runway, that’s a dire timeframe.
Sir Richard was unequivocal about how the ministry needs to take any steps in building investment plans, even for smaller overhauls.
“We were promised the investment plan in September and it’s going to be late,” he said. “But that’s the magic spreadsheet that connects money to programs, to which industry can attach, and it provides a degree of certainty,” he said. “Could they please stop trying to boil the ocean and get the early bits out now so that we can get on with things?”
Cassy acknowledged that there could have been more prescriptive descriptions in the SDR, even as it was instructed to be high-level.
“I probably focused too much on winning the principle of the 10% ring fence for novel technology and definitely not enough time on defining what I meant by novel technology, and making sure that it couldn’t be hypothecated to F-35s or, you know, new submarines and so on because it’s very easy to say there’s lots of novel technology,” she said. “Everything is novel.”
Digital targeting web
The conversation also turned to the Digital Targeting Web. This is a concept, specified in the SDR and influenced by how Ukraine has built its defence against Russia, that involves developing technology that unifies and integrates disparate digital systems and data that the UK uses today for intelligence, reconnaissance, and fighting.
It’s a complex concept organises new technology in into three key areas of “sensors” (data gathering); “deciders” (AI and other command-centre technology for analytics and decision making; and “effectors” (a new class of weapons and technology like lasers to do the work of more costly weapons). The government started work on the DTW in September with the publishing of a case study.
The SDR put an actual date on building a DTW: it recommended having a minimal viable product in the space by April 2027. Sir Richard noted that this was not outside the scope of the MoD if they want to do it.
“They have the advantage of how things are being done in Ukraine, which the UK has had a hand in developing and what they see coming from very different settings like Gaza. So it’s not as if you got to make it up,” he said. “You’ve just got to stitch together the things that you already have.” He noted that faster adoption of cloud and AI needed to be a part of that.
“But they [already] have sensors and they have an array of weapons,” he continued. That’s not necessarily a net positive, though. “Unfortunately, many of these weapons when they were built were built so that they couldn’t be connected to other things. That’s ancient madness never to be repeated. So I get there [are] some challenges, but start by stitching together what you’ve got.”
Interestingly, while a lot of the conversation around resilience has centred on sovereignty and building systems that are not predicated on implied cooperation or relationships with other countries, Sir Richard had a different view of how to build the DTW.
“When they do that, could they please not just look at a British solution? They must by design have this conversation with the members of the Joint Expeditionary Force, because that’s going to be much more valuable. None of this is difficult. They just need to make it happen.”
The US and the rest of the “Five Eyes” intelligence group is another example of how sovereignty is a nuanced discussion, he added.
Secret cloud
Discussion then turned to how the UK is working on getting up to speed in rebuilding its defences in light of adversaries like Russia and how fast they are developing.
One gating factor in how the UK has worked up to now has been that data has been designed — or has just simply evolved — to be siloed, and that means very little can be built on top of it, and little can be introduced in the way of new services.
Cassy said the award of the “secret cloud” contact — the £400 million deal that the MoD signed with Google in September to build a sovereign cloud that will become a way to provide extra controls and security around a cloud environment while also building a way to develop and integrate more modern cloud and AI services — was evidence of things moving in the right direction.
That contract took a very long time to put together, she said, and that had been holding back “an awful lot of innovation.” She added: “Increasingly I feel that we can’t just expect [the MoD] to fix [innovation] on its own because it is still incentivised by an oversight system that fundamentally prioritises value for money rather than pace and appropriate level of risk taking.”
Watch more of the conversation here.