The Ministry of Defence plans to award a contract worth up to GBP 17.5 million to Janes Group UK Limited for access to defence intelligence databases and analytical tools.
Defence Digital intends to establish a three-year Enterprise Agreement Lite with Janes covering software licences that provide access to the company’s open-source intelligence (OSINT) databases, taxonomies and analysis tools. The agreement will act as a mechanism through which licences can be purchased over the life of the contract.
According to the procurement notice, the contract is expected to run from March 2026 to March 2029 and will support defence users who rely on detailed open-source analysis of global military capabilities and equipment across air, land, sea and space domains.
The contract is being awarded through a direct award procedure. The Ministry of Defence said the decision was justified on the basis that Janes owns the intellectual property and proprietary databases underpinning the service and that there are no reasonable alternative suppliers providing equivalent coverage.
The notice stated that Janes provides what they described as the only comprehensive unclassified dataset of technical intelligence on global military equipment, alongside associated methodologies and classification systems used to organise and analyse defence data. Janes, headquartered in Croydon, publishes defence intelligence, analysis and databases used by governments, militaries and industry around the world.
There was a time when Janes would be asking the MoD for intel updates now it seems we will be paying Janes for the same updates, what a strange world we are living in!!!!
OSINT is a separate world these days, as so much can be found out without specialist assets. The number of people who collect information on their phones alone dwarfs the number of specialist resources MOD can afford to pay for except in tightly focused situations. Add to that commercial satellite feeds and ID tracking; OSINT soon grows to have a picture than rivals military intelligence in geographic coverage. It makes a lot of sense for MOD to seek out an up to date source that it can amalgamate with UK classified intel, five-eyes, etc. Also, OSINT is available to anyone, so it pays to understand the baseline of what an enemy might know about us.
The UK has been paying Janes for OSINT for over a century. The book Jane’s Fighting Ships has been used by the Royal Navy since it first came out in 1898 and quickly became the go-to reference for spotting foreign fleets. When they started publishing air force and army equivalents, we also started buying them in bulk.
We’ve also had subscriptions with Janes since they digitised everything. What’s changed is the new deal is really just centralising access. Instead of each branch having its own subscriptions, the whole MOD can now tap into Janes’ OSINT databases and tools under one framework.
Analysts still do the intelligence work themselves; this just gives them a shared, structured reference library that would be impossible to build in-house at this scale. The US, NATO and most big Western militaries use Janes for OSINT.
Well, well, well.
£17.5M for a 3 year contract, approx £6M a year, so £500,000 a month, which is approx £16k a day. That is a lot of info 😃😃
Whatever happened to the OSINT Bunker? I miss that.
No doubt connected, within the Pathfinder Building, alongside the DIC, DIFC, NCGI ( all types of intelligence centres, including those with 5 eyes partners co located, including the US, who one poster was telling me we no longer share intell with, despite being embedded…) is another little known organisation called Defence Open Source Intelligence Centre.
I read the job description for it a few months ago, which is how I know of it’s existence.
As Jon says above, when utilised next to existing in house classified feeds, it all adds up.