Depending on who you talk to, you’ll likely get a different answer about the level of connection between the ‘business space’ and the ‘battlespace’. Either they are disjointed, or they sit on a spectrum with a continuum between the two.
I favour the latter. The two are connected, at least most of the time, and whilst we are seeing a rise in the demand for digital processing at the edge, the need for reliable connectivity – either from a task group at sea to the Maritime Operations Centre, or from troops deployed forward back to their main operating base – demonstrates that an enduring reliance on reach-back is still vital in being able to connect sensors to decision makers and effectors.
This is important in the digital, data and applications world. We need to be able to respond at speed to the changing threat, tackling the ever shifting tactics and capabilities of the enemy in a way that protects our military and civilian staff and maintains the competitive edge. The battlespace is hostile, and anyone familiar with military campaigning will recognise the type of words used to describe the commander’s end state: that the aggressor is defeated, destroyed, deterred, denied or disrupted.
The business space is also hostile, in a different way, and is also subject to “D” words: defer, de-scope and delete will be familiar to many. These decisions are not taken lightly, and so in terms of putting battle-winning capabilities into the hands of the operational user, we need to help ensure that decisions taken in the business space allow us to deliver the nation’s military tasks – maintaining security, stability and prosperity for us and for our allies.
Defining innovation
Let’s start by looking at the different views of what innovation actually is within the context of Defence. In the UK Government’s 2023 UK Innovation Strategy, it is defined as “the creation and application of new knowledge to improve the world”.
Narrowing down to Defence Digital, a quote from the Director Commercial’s Shop Window to Innovation says: “Defence Digital’s ambition is to acquire and operate tomorrow’s technology today, seeking to do this by welcoming digital and technology innovation and insights across traditional and non-traditional sectors into the defence enterprise.
“By doing this we will drive greater pace and agility into how we acquire digital and technology capabilities. We will openly share our pipeline with the market and clearly communicate our needs, including the priority challenges we are seeking to address. This will allow us to position ourselves to design and deliver effective digital and information technology for the military and business front line.”
But we must remember that innovation is not just about what you provide; it is also about how you provide it, and the underpinning processes. That’s why, in digital requirements put forward by government, we’re increasingly seeing references to the four key pillars of innovation: Data, People, Process, and Technology.
Innovation for Defence
The Defence Doctrine and Concepts Centre (DCDC) is the MOD’s think tank. What does DCDC tell us about the future character of conflict or, to be doctrinally pure and up to date, the Future Operating Environment?
DCDC refer to the ‘5Cs’: congested, cluttered, contested, connected and constrained. Future Operating Environment 35 asks us not only to prepare for the ‘5Cs’, but also to consider where they might not all apply together at the same time and how technology, and thereby innovation, might help us to gain the competitive edge.
Take cluttered: new technologies may provide us with the opportunity to de-clutter the operating environment, perhaps by finding patterns in a mass of information.
And take connected: the potential for operating environments to be deliberately disconnected or simply poorly connected will remain. The military talks about C2D2E: Command and Control Denied and Degraded Environments. This is about fighting without reach back; without SatCom; without comms. How does innovation allow us to disconnect and re-connect, whilst retaining a potent digital power on the disconnected frontline?
Fit for purpose military capability demands a capacity for digital innovation. Particularly because the battlespace brings other dangers, not least risk to life. So IEDs are now tackled by remotely piloted disarming and detonation devices. Subsea mines are tackled by the Royal Navy’s Sandown Class vessels, which come equipped with two underwater remote-controlled mine-disposal vehicles. And the RAF uses uncrewed medium-altitude, long endurance aircraft designed for Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) and attack missions.
All are examples of innovation, designed very much to avoid putting our people in harm’s way and thereby to prevent the loss to life that we know was a reality before these technologies were available. And, if we read the UK’s Defence Drone Strategy, some key themes emerge: digitally controlled, technologically advanced, intelligence gathering capabilities, spirally developed. All phrases that stretch across the business-space and the battlespace.
What’s needed for innovation to thrive?
There are many real-world examples of how to get innovation in Defence right. For example, BAE Systems Digital Intelligence has brought together skills from multiple disciplines – ranging from data engineers, dev ops engineers and security practitioners to delivery management, infrastructure experts and scrum masters – to help the Royal Navy transform how it gains insights from its data.
Then there’s ILAS; a software product specialised in automated detection, prioritisation and monitoring of threats in a complex multi-domain battlespace. Commanders and analysts seek to determine the adversary’s courses of action and the threats posed, but the variety, velocity and volume of data rapidly leads to cognitive overload. ILAS uses novel AI inference technology to detect, prioritise and monitor all current and emerging threats of interest in near-real time.
In terms of people, we are developing a Global Digital Academy, which will be an enterprise-wide approach to meet our digital skills needs. It will provide both initial apprentice and graduate digital skills training, but will also play a role in upskilling and reskilling the existing workforce.
These are examples of success because the cultural, organisational and behavioural fundamentals were present. I also believe it’s critical to have a diverse working environment; to kill off group think, to see things from different angles and to generate fresh ideas. For the battlespace, this means closer collaboration between the MOD and Industry.
We need intuitive processes and front doors that are easy to open. This should involve sharing best practice, adopting a different approach to risk to enable innovative commercial approaches, and providing alternative routes to market for SMEs. At the same time, organisations need a culture that allows learning from failure to drive growth, underpinning innovation and setting the conditions for resiliency.
Bring these things together, and we as an ecosystem will be empowered to stimulate innovation – across government and industry and back again – in a way that delivers an enduring competitive edge.