UK defence must move beyond steel-era procurement, MPs told

UK defence strategy remains anchored to an outdated model of heavy industrial procurement that is ill-suited to the pace of modern warfare, MPs were told, with witnesses warning that future conflicts will be shaped by rapid prototyping, software-driven iteration and industrial agility rather than decade-long equipment programmes.

Giving evidence to the Defence Committee during its session on the future of warfare, Air Marshal (Retd) Edward Stringer argued that the UK is still designing forces around Cold War-era assumptions centred on large platforms and prolonged specification cycles.

“We are so orientated around designing things that require cutting big amounts of steel,” he said, “agreeing a specification, and then having lawyers argue about it for 20 years.”

Stringer said this approach is fundamentally incompatible with the speed at which modern conflict evolves, particularly in areas such as drones, autonomy and digital systems. Instead, he urged the UK to adopt a model drawn from the software sector. “We need to work out what prototype warfare looks like,” he told MPs. “Create a minimum viable product, get it out to the frontline, get clever young troops working with it, and then send the results back to industry.”

He warned that attempting to define precise requirements a decade in advance was increasingly unrealistic. “You’re trying to work out exactly what you need and then find a way of building it over the next ten years,” Stringer said. “That’s not going to work.”

Pointing to the Strategic Defence Review, he argued that even official policy now recognises the problem. “You cannot define over a ten-year timeframe exactly what you’re going to get,” he said. “You need a system that can build capability possibly only minutes before you actually need it, given the speed design is getting.”

Stringer also challenged the way defence industrial strategy is often framed, arguing that government should stop attempting to pick winners and instead focus on enabling conditions. “The defence industrial strategy is not about picking winners,” he said. “It’s about creating the financial conditions for industry: energy supply, energy costs, compute power. Government needs to set the conditions and then get out of the way.”

Jesse Norman MP suggested that current defence and security strategies were structurally misaligned with the realities described by witnesses, a view Stringer explicitly endorsed.

Sir Hew Strachan, Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, reinforced the argument with historical context, noting that rapid iteration between frontline experience and industrial response has been the norm in major wars. “In wartime, procurement cycles are measured in months,” he said. “There’s continuous feedback from front to rear, design and adaptation, and we’ve lost sight of that entirely.”

Strachan also warned that industrial dependence on allies carries strategic risk, particularly in scenarios where major partners are engaged elsewhere.

“Even the United States does not address its own lack of capacity for the threats it says it faces,” he told MPs. “If it were engaged in a major war with China, it simply would not have the capacity to supply others in the way it does now.”

The discussion also touched on sovereignty and foreign ownership in emerging defence sectors, including drones. Asked whether domestically based subsidiaries of foreign firms should be considered sovereign capability, Stringer said the answer depended on control rather than geography. “It could be either,” he said. “Who owns it? Who owns the output? If you generate the intellectual property and it goes overseas, that’s the real question.”