Unlocking defence transformation to create the digital deterrent

In today’s digital age, the world of defence and national security is evolving rapidly. Just as digital is disrupting nearly all aspects of our personal lives, it is also impacting how nations reduce risk, manage threats, and deter adversaries.

This is putting a greater focus on digital deterrence. Referring to strategies that influence an adversary’s behaviour in cyberspace, digital deterrence offers a new and increasingly critical dimension as part of a nation’s cyber power strategy. In the context of defence, it means making use of modern digital capabilities and applying them to the military environment – i.e. taking a digitally transformed approach to defence.

This applies to both “digital pure” capabilities and using digital to enhance the effectiveness of more traditional defence capabilities, specifically humans and hardware. But the deterrent must also encompass capability that goes beyond the boundaries of the military and government partners, creating a sense of shared defence responsibility that stretches across industry.

There is a significant opportunity for the UK and its allies to harness the entire scale of digital capability – people, hardware, software and data – to create a credible defence strategy powered by technology. However, amidst the pace of technical innovation, this requires a fundamental shift in mind-set and a willingness to take inspiration from the commercial sector.

Unlocking ‘digital’

Establishing a digital-first culture first requires an understanding of what is meant by the ubiquitous term “digital”. This will mean slightly different things to different people, but can be accurately described as a set of organisational characteristics.

For example, a willingness to transform both with continuous improvement and significant pivots when required. An organisation that puts innovation at the heart of its culture, instead of allowing innovation to exist in pockets, and that is unashamedly data driven. This type of organisation recognises the power of data and uses it to make strategic decisions, implementing automation where appropriate and only focusing on data that adds value to the decision-making process.

Indeed, enabling rapid, evidence-based and transparent decision-making based on data is critical to building the digital deterrent across government and industry. Data must be valued as a vital asset and tracked to ensure the right data is getting to where it is needed, when it is needed – thereby providing decision advantage.

Other lessons that can be learned from digitally-driven private sector organisations include making use of simple open architectures for new capabilities, simplifying the number of standards applied, and delivering and maintaining capability through pipelines rather than programmes. Defence should be prepared to move from platform-centric thinking to services-centric thinking and, perhaps most importantly, build wider partnerships to share capability and make data available across boundaries (i.e. organisations, countries and the public/private sector) in a secure way.

There’s also the option of “open defence” inspired by the Open Banking approach. Modern digital defence strategies are dependent on creating a more modern and open architecture whereby data can be more readily accessed outside of its originating sensors and “systems”. Historically, the default answer in defence has been to add more standards. But what if we could create a light-weight API standard for simple data services interoperability across a diverse set of new and existing capabilities?

Open Banking has been particularly successful in disrupting the commercial banking sector in this way. It is proven to be secure while relying on a fairly simple API standard, which is something the defence sector could look to replicate.

Working as a collective

As I alluded to at the start of this blog, a key component of the digital deterrent is relationships. This all requires a collective approach, established through close dialogues and partnerships internally – i.e. across the military, government and private sector in the UK – and externally, such as between the UK and its allies.

By establishing and building these relationships, we as an industry can tap into the power of data for more effective decision making and leverage modern technologies in new ways. This, combined with adopting a digital mind-set to overcome traditional barriers such as standards and interoperability, will strengthen defence and resilience through digital deterrence – thereby giving us the tools to defeat our adversaries.