Last week the National Armaments Director, Rupert Pearce, told the defence industry that the UK and its allies have “until the end of 2030, at best, to deter and be ready to fight”. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Richard Knighton, put it more simply: “Fundamentally this is a race. We have to be faster and better than our adversaries.”
They are right. But a race is not just won by announcing it, but by an institution built to run it.
In April a $500 Ukrainian drone destroyed a $4.5mn Russian tank. The image is now familiar, but its meaning is still underappreciated. Advantage in modern war no longer belongs to whoever owns the most exquisite platform. It belongs to whoever can innovate fastest, scale quickest and deliver at the lowest cost and keep doing so against an enemy that is adapting too. Russian tactics, electronic warfare and armour have all changed since 2022. Ukraine’s edge at any moment is a measure of how much faster it is adapting than Russia.
That is a theory of winning. It is also a theory of deterrence. A state that can demonstrably out-innovate, out-scale and out-price its rivals deters not because of what it owns today, but because of what it can be trusted to field tomorrow, and the day after, faster than its opponent can respond. A Kremlin planner weighing a gamble in 2029 has to believe that whatever Russia fields will be countered, cheaply and quickly. That belief is what holds an adversary back and it has to be built before a crisis.
Mr Pearce understands this. He wants “an innovation engine which horizon scans for new technologies and capabilities, advances them and matures them”, and core capabilities built so they can be “infused with future innovation”. The Strategic Defence Review called for “a model of constant innovation of the Integrated Force at wartime pace”. The ambition is correct.
The problem is where innovation sits. Today’s initiatives are a fund here, a programme there and an office somewhere else, including UK Defence Innovation and its £400mn budget, the pledge to put 10 per cent of the equipment budget into novel capabilities, and Commercial X and the Defence Tech Scaler. All of them sit inside an acquisition system that is answerable to its own governance and judged by its own metrics: money disbursed, competitions run, memoranda signed. None of them is chartered, as Land, Maritime and Air are, with a sponsor, a protected budget and a readiness line. That is activity, not capability. A system designed for decade-long platform cycles will always reassert its own logic over a fund with no institutional power to resist it.
Israel and Ukraine show the alternative. Israel’s defence research directorate, MAFAT, sits alongside the owners of the established military functions. Ukraine’s Brave1 is jointly chartered across several government bodies. Both treat innovation as something the force does and is held to account for, not something the bureaucracy administers.
The UK should do the same and make innovation a warfighting function, delivered through five permanent capabilities: sensing, experimentation, scaling, absorption and talent. Reclassification needs no vast new spending. Much of the money already exists but is fragmented. It needs three things.
First, a named sponsor with the same standing as the heads of Land, Maritime, Air, Cyber and Space, accountable for readiness and given a seat at the same investment tables. Second, a ring-fenced, multi-year budget in the Defence Investment Plan, protected from the annual raids that always hit discretionary pots. Third, measurement by operational results. The test should be how quickly the force can identify a problem in the field, build a fix and deploy it, not how many contracts were signed.
Absorption deserves special attention. The hardest part of innovation is rarely the prototype. It is getting the training, doctrine and support in place so a new capability actually changes how a unit fights. Today that is left to individual units. It should be funded from the start.
DSEI 2027 will bring together 65,000 visitors and up to 1,700 companies. It will be a showcase of what industry can build. The harder question is whether the UK has the institution to buy, field and adapt it at the pace Mr Pearce and Sir Richard are asking for. Industry will not be the constraint. The UK’s structures will.
If we wait for 2030 to find out, we will have left it too late. Reclassifying innovation is a decision for this defence investment plan, not the next war.
Blythe Crawford CBE is a former Commandant of the Air and Space Warfare Centre and co-chair of the Digital Policy Alliance working group on Defence, Security and National Resilience. Johan Vaernholt is director of strategy at Ideon in Lund, Sweden, a tech accelerator focused on defence and resilience.
