Defence and Security Challenge 2025

The New Year – 2025 – is going to be a challenging year in the defence and security domain. 

The Strategic Defence Review is long overdue and runs the risk of being by-passed by rapidly evolving events as political and industry concerns are prioritised over national security itself.

There is a self evident need in our view for the UK to spend a larger percentage of its GDP on defence, national resilience and security. However, in our view it is also apparent that the existing procurement and capability management systems in defence and security deliver poor value for money. Process is often applied lacking proportionality, dragging decisions out to the point where strategic procurements have been by-passed by external events. 

There is still too much risk in the equipment programme at a time when the UK cannot sustain existing capability because it lacks the basic SQEP manpower and the materiel to sustain our commitment to Ukraine, to build up our own expeditionary ‘all arms’ ability to support our allies in Eastern Europe.

Any UK Defence Strategy must prioritise the defence of the UK Sovereign base. Bluntly, the running sores of Iraq and Afghanistan have left the UK badly protected against sophisticated threats from military powers such as Russia. Not only is an integrated air defence solution a priority but the UK must now harden its critical national infrastructure against cyber-attacks, covert operations and sabotage.

Tychonics believes that the UK should be wary of allocating more of its GDP to defence whilst defence procurement is so inefficient.  Increased investment should be matched with a dramatic improvement in process and a greater openness to dealing directly with emerging innovative suppliers.

In order to do this as a country we must reduce our dependence on a small handful of tier 1 prime contractors and foster a wider supplier base of innovative SMEs. The MOD must rely less on primes to manage commercial risk and accept that speed and momentum have a relentless capability advantage that perpetual procurement delay undermines. Nationally, we are good at supporting innovative startups but lack the courage of our convictions when larger contracts are at stake.  This stifles growth and  introduces cost and delay.

Tychonics is championing innovative UK sovereign SMEs who have unique offerings in the wider civil resilience domain. Let’s hope our political and defence leaders recognise that  the UK is at a moment of inflection where we must radically improve how we flex the total capability of the UK economy to deliver capabilities that make the UK safer and more resilient to what are now clear and overt threat vectors.

Happy New Year. Look Up and Drive On (LUDO)

Peter and Alasdair