Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 9
9
Accepted
Future conflicts necessitate a mixture of high-end equipment and affordable, high-mass capabilities.
Conclusion
The importance of allies, discussed in the previous section, is one of the lessons that the Department has learned from its support for Ukraine.16 The Department also highlighted several other lessons. First, for future conflicts armed forces will need a mixture of capabilities to be effective. For example, Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles have been of fundamental importance in the war in Ukraine, but they are a long-term, expensive capability at the cutting-edge of technology. However, a transformation during the war has been the importance of affordable high-mass equipment, such as drones. The Department now considers that it needs both high end equipment and affordable mass going forward.17
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the committee's observation and commits to fundamentally changing procurement processes by tailoring acquisition, engaging early with industry, adopting spiral acquisition, and has established UK Defence Innovation (UKDI) as of July 2025 to accelerate defence capability delivery.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
2.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: June 2026 2.2 As the report recognises, the government has identified and implemented numerous lessons learned from supplying Ukraine into how it is reforming the department’s procurement processes, and the department is committed to continuing to learn from this conflict. 2.3 The conflict in Ukraine has shown that the department must fundamentally change the way it procures. The rapidly changing threat and technology environment requires the department to increase the pace of military capability delivery, maximise the output from the defence budget, and ensure that the department can innovate at a wartime pace. 2.4 The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) recognised the complexity of the defence operating environment and the imperative to reflect national and industrial needs in the department’s procurement strategies. The department’s response to Ukraine has shown that the system can work in an agile and accelerated way, balancing risk to deliver capability at pace. The vision set out in the SDR is now being delivered through Defence Reform. 2.5 As such, the department is reforming its acquisition system to drive increased pace and agility in capability delivery. A new segmented approach to procurement will enable tailoring of acquisition processes to the type of capability, supplier and risk involved. The department will also engage with industry early, rewarding productivity and risk-taking and sharing risk with suppliers earlier in capability development to increase the speed of delivery whilst ensuring alignment. 2.6 The department will drive pace through approaches such as spiral acquisition to deliver a minimum deployable capability to the front line more rapidly and then iterate it to adapt quickly to a changing environment. 2.7 On 1 July 2025, the department stood up UK Defence Innovation (UKDI), a new organisation that draws on lessons learned from Ukraine, MOD’s own best practice and the experience of international partners. UKDI will ruthlessly prioritise to focus on the areas with most potential, with significant freedoms to contract with speed, simplicity, and flexibility, harnessing and bolstering the competitiveness of the UK’s tech sector, as well as further supporting UK SMEs.