Articles & Reports

Discover How the UK Ministry of Defence is Powering the Future with AI

Unlock exclusive insights into how the UK Ministry of Defence is accelerating the integration of artificial intelligence across defence operations. This essential document spotlights three groundbreaking initiatives:

• Defence AI Centre (DAIC) – Leading the charge in AI strategy and capability development
• Project THEIA – Transforming decision-making through data-driven innovation
• Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) – Fueling cutting-edge AI solutions through collaboration with industry and academia

Together, these programmes showcase the MoD’s bold vision for a digitally enabled, data-driven force—one that’s faster, smarter, and more agile across all domains.

Download now to explore how the MoD is shaping the future of defence through AI.

The UK’s Strategic Defence Review sets out a vision for a faster, more integrated, and more lethal force, backed by digital advantage and a defence industry working at “wartime pace.”

At its heart are five transformative initiatives.

Together, these programmes define the roadmap for UK defence transformation through 2035, reshaping how capability owners, operators, and industry partners align investment, skills, and delivery. Download our latest infographic to learn more!

Advances in software, sensors and communications have made viable the greater use of UGVs and robotics on the battlefield. This market report:

• Details global expenditures on UGVs
• Identifies trends in the UGV domain
• Delves into the most significant UGV programmes worldwide
  

In today’s world, operational readiness for defence is more important than ever. Critical to this is supply chain, and how we use simulations to remain operationally but also strategically ready for every eventuality. To this end, Accenture’s Global Defence Lead Matt Gollings, speaker at this year’s Disruptive Technology conference, interviewed global senior Defence supply chain experts alongside Timo Levo (Accenture's European SAP Defence lead) and Paul Ott (AFS Defence Growth & Innovation Lead) to explore the best ways to increase Defence supply chain resilience.

Customers can interact with government services in-person or through a website. Federal employees collaborate either on-site or remotely. We rapidly move between these realities, often faster than we realize, but they are not seamlessly integrated. In fact, transitioning between them can be challenging, confusing, or downright impossible, in ways both large and small. But this is now changing. Emerging technologies are laying the foundation for a new reality—one in which the divide between the physical and digital worlds is narrowing. The next decade of federal innovation will be defined by how agencies successfully fuse these two realms together.

It’s certainly no longer “business as usual” for supply chains. A convergence of factors has placed significant pressure on organizations’ supply chains to address a wide range of new challenges and priorities that, in many cases, existing supply chain capabilities aren’t capable of handling. In particular, companies’ are hampered by a lack of visibility. It’s been well documented, for instance, that COVID-19 caused large-scale supply chain disruptions, risks, and uncertainty that nearly paralyzed companies for a time—largely due to a combination of unforeseen demand spikes and insufficient capabilities to respond to them—and these challenges are still wreaking havoc in companies today.

Accenture presents a Vision of Connectedness , a conceptual framework upon which to model the desired future state of the Defence Supply Chain (DSC) in the context of digital transformation.

In this second article, Accenture takes the first steps on the journey towards that vision by presenting game changing, next generation supply chain capabilities Supply Chain Control Tower (SCCT) and Digital Twins.

The UK has embarked on creating a Data-Driven Culture for its MoD. Off the back of a survey released earlier this year, we explore what this means for the MoD as an organisation. You cannot have a competitive Data-Driven Culture without digitalisation, as a result, we also explore the digitization of the War in Ukraine.

While governments try to incite innovation through a number of funding initiatives, it might be difficult to keep track of all the processes and criteria necessary to know what one has to do to access funding. To help with this endeavour Defence IQ has produced a cheat sheet for EU and UK Funding initiatives.

In this article Appian delves into the opportunities automation, and low-code can offer the defence domain and how they represent a viable alternative to modernising “complex and inflexible” legacy software. By adopting its “high-speed, low code” philosophy, Appian argues that there are substantial benefits for operations and logistics. 

Key NATO nations are focusing on disruptive innovation and allocate more resources for data collection, management and dissemination to transform ISR and C2 through AI, machine learning and cloud-like IT infrastructure for the Defence enterprise. Ahead of this year’s Disruptive Technology for Defence Transformation, Defence iQ compiled this report highlighting investment trends, priorities and current programmes in disruptive technologies for armed forces across NATO.

Download the report now >>

Key benefits of downloading the report:

• Know top acquisition and upgrade priorities from countries that will be present at Disruptive Technology for Defence Transformation
• Develop business strategies by meeting the right people from countries having active programmes and key requirements at Disruptive Technology for Defence Transformation
• Gain insights into investment trends from your peers

Download the report to learn more about programmes and strategies from countries and organizations that will attend Disruptive Technology for Defence Transformation such as:

Australia - The Royal Australian Air Force is currently working with Boeing Australia to build a self-piloted warplane designed to fly alongside manned aircraft

Canada - Release of the Canadian Data Strategy in September 2019 which aims to enhance decision-making, improve agility of capabilities and increase effectiveness and efficiency of defence programmes through the use of data

France – Contract awarded by the DGA to Thales and Dassault Aviation to equip the French Army’s future strategic intelligence aircraft Falcon X with the CUGE universal EW capability

Germany - Army’s Armoured Infantry Brigade 37 is undergoing training on off-the-shelf software to get ready for its digitalization

Italy - A new bill put forward to the Italian parliament in January 2020 is calling for the creation of Italy’s own version of DARPA

NATO – creation of NATO’s emerging disruptive technology road map by Allied Command Transformation

United Kingdom – A look into the Defence Technology Framework and Defence Innovation Priorities (DIP) approach, the Integrated Review of foreign policy, defence, security and international development, and the UK MOD’s Digital and Information Technologies (D&IT) strategy; investment of an initial £1 million into DASA’s Intelligent Ship – The Next Generation; MSubs awarded a £1 million contract for a testbed for an extra-large unmanned underwater vehicle

The U.S. – A look into DOD’s acquisition and sustainment efforts; objective of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to build an information environment for intelligence, known as the Machine-assisted Analytic Rapid-repository System; update on the Air Force’s three “vanguard” programmes, Skyborg, Golden Horde and NTS-3

The 2020 Conference will continue the discussion on how the application of Digital Age technology transforms the delivery of ‘full spectrum effects’. To download the agenda of the conference, click here.

This exclusive article dives into the strategies of the UK and the US to leverage disruptive technologies and retain a tactical edge against potential adversaries. Created ahead of this year’s Disruptive Technology for Defence Transformation, it looks at how both countries are leveraging new technologies to retain a competitive advantage against potential adversaries in future conflicts. 

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United Kingdom: Modernising defence

While the UK defence will receive an additional £1.8 billion investment, the Modernising Defence Programme report, released in December 2018, sets out three broads aims:

- To invest in enhancing readiness and availability of a range of existing platforms 

- To modernise and embrace new technologies to keep NATO’s technological edge over potential adversaries

- To change the way the MoD does business and runs defence

United States: Head in the cloud

The US on the other hand is focusing on cloud computing and its utilisation of big data and AI as laid out in its Cloud Strategy, as it is seen as a transformative technology and a crucial component of the DoD’s future global infrastructure. It is in this effort that the DoD is looking for an extensible and secure cloud environment that will replace today’s disjointed and stove-piped information systems. 

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United Kingdom

The release of the MDP coincided with the launch of the new Defence Transformation Fund (DTF), with £160 million budget earmarked for its first year, and likely to increase in the future. In March 2019, it was announced that £66 million of the fund had been committed to…

United States

In recent years, US defence priorities have shifted focus to concentrate on long-term, strategic competition between nations including “near-peer” competitors. These, as the 2018 US National Defense Strategy (NDS) lays out, are what the US considers…

This article provides a snapshot of the US Army’s Robotic and Autonomous System's (RAS) Strategy and how it will come into play in the short, medium and long term in order to assist forces in defeating enemy organisations, controlling terrain and consolidating gains. 

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The US Army Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) Strategy demonstrates how the integration of new technologies will help ensure victory over increasingly capable enemies, aiming to commit time, talent, and resources now to position the US Army for victory in future conflicts.To overcome future challenges, the Army must seize technological opportunities for RAS development; execution will require leaders to be open to new ideas and encourage bottom-up learning from Soldiers and units in experimentation and warfighting assessment.