By Alex Cresswell, Chief Executive & Chairman, Thales UK

The front line of Ukraine is flooded with drones – a reality that would have been inconceivable in the time before Russia’s invasion. Now, modified off-the-shelf First Person View (FPV) drones are filled with 2kg of explosives and sent deep behind enemy lines while their remote operators find, target, and neutralise threats with a new-found degree of visibility and precision.

There are many lessons to be learned from this small snapshot: the unpredictable, mercurial nature of the modern battlespace; the need for adaptation and innovation to meet it; and the demand for technological experimentation and rapid integration at the edge. They’re lessons that the UK armed forces must draw from in order to fight future wars. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff, speaking at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference 2024, said:

In the past year we’ve seen Ukraine – a country which barely has a Navy – bring the Russian Black Sea Fleet to heel through a combination of drones and long-range missiles. I want a British Army that can follow suit. [...] To become an army that serves as a disruptor in NATO. Challenging the Alliance to push the boundaries of technology and lethality.

For obvious reasons, lethality decides battles and wins wars. For Chief of the General Staff Sir Roland Walker, it’s “the only real measurement of an army.” His accompanying challenge to the British Army – to “double lethality in three years and treble it by the end of the decade” – depends on advancing technology integration at the edge: the front line where data is collected, decisions are made, actions are taken, and lethality is delivered.

Understanding the Edge

Ukraine has shown just how noisy and foggy this edge can be. Frontline personnel have to contend with congested spectrums and contested communications, ubiquitous sensing and connected systems, each collecting and generating data. Sifting through and making sense of this data is one thing – making it useful to the operators on the edge is quite another.

The challenge lies in managing the flow of information at the edge to support those frontline soldiers making rapid decisions. Having worked across all domains and at the edge for decades, it’s a challenge that Thales is continually aiming to solve by developing and deploying technologies in the critical decision chain such as sensors, C2, effectors, and enablers such as communications and data security infrastructure. 

Such technologies are just one part of a much wider picture that must be considered when aiming to create an advantage at the edge. There are three key areas of focus that will allow the UK’s armed forces to keep up and stay ahead of adversaries: data security and trust; AI integration; and agile procurement models.

Data, Digital Identity, Security, and Trust

The battlefield is inundated with sensor data. This creates the challenge of 'sense-making', or how to process and act on this vast amount of information, where decisions about local versus remote data processing and decision-making present a battlefield trade-off. For example, a highly connected tactical battle must balance the need for decisive distributed command structures with the security risks of communication.

The solution lies in building a data-centric framework that integrates trusted identities for both people and machines. This framework must be secure by design, allowing for authenticated interactions that can operate at speed. In so doing, we can ensure that critical information is both protected and accessible by different units, who can act and make decisions at the edge, based on the best information available to them. By integrating advanced AI-enabled systems we can enhance this capability even further.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI has enormous potential to enhance and speed-up decision-making at the edge.  Yet, despite this promise and potential – and despite the technical knowledge and expertise that exists within industry – the commercial model to fund, develop, procure and rapidly evolve AI-enabled systems needs further development.

By leveraging AI investments from commercial markets and combining them with decades of defence domain knowledge, industry can play a key role in helping the UK MoD scale up AI-powered solutions. This knowledgebase is crucial for enabling real time, AI-powered data processing at the edge, that is so often hampered by technical and operational challenges: the limitations of sensor technology that hinders the algorithm’s ability to learn from the data it produces; the frugality of hardware; the processing, weight and power requirements.

Procurement Models and Capability Development

CGS’ challenge – to double fighting power within three years and triple it by the end of the decade – will need to start by examining, recalibrating and ultimately transforming current procurement processes, such that continuous mission-driven innovation can be developed by industry, delivered from the MoD, and deployed through Front Line Commands.

A new procurement model is needed; one that embeds meaningful partnerships between industry and the MoD, and enables the joint exploration of mission problems, so the defence enterprise can integrate the latest, most relevant and most reliable technologies quickly and cost-effectively. This model should onshore critical military capabilities, moves away from stop-start procurement to joint planning, prioritise export and encourage standardisation.

Get his right and MoD stands to unlock the full potential of advanced technologies, including AI and sensors – technologies that are so often held back due to accumulated technical debt that could have been addressed through better software support.

To this end, any new procurement model could – and should – allow for spiral capability development, where software and hardware can evolve independently while providing ongoing enhancements to existing systems. We’re already seeing the benefits of this manifest at the edge, where tactical ground-based air defence is deployed almost ubiquitously. Digitising fire control software and using AI for target identification in such defence systems have significantly improved effectiveness, range, and reaction times, without the need for new hardware.

Maximising – and Mastering – the Edge

Like all technologies, the value of the drones in Ukraine lies in what they enable users to do, faster, more efficiently, and with more lethality than before. Imagine now these same drones bestowed with trusted, secure identities, integrated with advanced AI systems, and procured and updated rapidly to meet the demands of an evolving adversary and fast-moving front line. Armed with this sort of capability, we force multiply the fighting power of those at the edge to create an enduring advantage. 

The value of technology in this regard can rarely be realised in isolation. By combining, fusing, and integrating technologies we start to get something truly greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, by combining the skills, experience, and expertise of industry – its primes, start-ups and SMEs – we can create an advantage at the industrial edge as much as the operational one. We can help UK MoD to outsmart, outmanoeuvre, and out-innovate adversaries.