The Ministry of Defence has outlined a broad package of new battlefield capabilities being accelerated into service through Task Force Rapstone, an Army initiative intended to speed up the delivery of new equipment and technology.
In a written answer to Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, Defence Minister Luke Pollard said the programme is focused on rapidly fielding systems designed to improve the Army’s ability to fight in a more contested environment, with particular emphasis on drones, counter-drone measures, electronic warfare and improved digital command-and-control tools.
Pollard described Rapstone as an effort to accelerate the introduction of capabilities already being delivered, or in the process of being fielded, to front line units. The response reflects the wider push across Defence to adapt faster to lessons emerging from Ukraine, where the proliferation of drones, loitering munitions, electronic warfare and dispersed sensor networks has reshaped tactical operations and driven demand for faster procurement and integration cycles.
The minister said the Army is accelerating the fielding of a range of systems, including tactical drones, counter-UAS equipment, loitering munitions and uncrewed ground resupply vehicles, alongside upgrades to communications and fire control tools.
“RAPSTONE is an Army initiative to accelerate the fielding of new capabilities into the British Army,” Pollard said.
He added that these include:
- “Tactical uncrewed airborne systems (UAS) – short and medium range tactical drones.”
- “Systems to detect, track and counter UAS at the tactical level.”
- “Medium range loitering munitions.”
- “Uncrewed ground vehicles for last-mile resupply of tactical units.”
- “Electronic warfare (EW) systems for specialist and generalist users.”
- “Dispersed digital sensor systems to enhance the intelligence capability of tactical units.”
- “Enhanced counter UAS protection for vehicles.”
- “Utility vehicles for tactical units (4×4 pick-ups and vans).”
- “Hybrid power supplies for tactical headquarters and deployed teams.”
- “Personal individual power packs.”
- “Digital tools for tactical logistic planning and enhanced deployed maintenance.”
- “Enhanced digital tools for fire control.”
- “Increased satellite communications capabilities for mobile tactical units.”
- “Develop dried blood plasma technology into a deployable medical capability.”
The list highlights an effort on improving battlefield survivability and responsiveness, particularly through increased drone usage, greater electronic warfare resilience, and more robust tactical logistics and communications.
However, Pollard said the government would not provide further detail on the specific systems being delivered. “I am unable to provide greater detail on the individual capabilities listed due to Operational sensitivities,” he said.
Let’s hope it’s as good as it sounds. But what does “rapidly” mean in this context? If it means the same as “at pace,” i fear we’re looking at capabilities to be deployed in the mid 2030s…
Why would we develop our own dried plasma when the french armed forces have a perfectly good French Lyophilized Plasma that they developed over 70 years ago and have deployed with ever since.. even the U.S. army uses French freeze dried plasma, because they are the very best at this technology.
On X was a photo of a loitering munition being used by 11 Brigade. Forget it’s name.
Maybe that’s one component of its “Light Strike” Brigade designation.
Bought without fanfare or announcement.
Also, it’s occurred to me before. When we have posters who, rightly in my view, ask where is the drone kit for our own forces, and we have replies along the lines of..”no need, can all be rapidly scaled by industry if neeed.”
Well, here we are, that is not always the norm, it seems thousands of FPV types are being fielded in Army units.
I think this is how it should be done. You need sufficient stocks to allow front line units to fight for however long it takes to ramp up production to wartime levels & for that production to make it to the front line, (plus training useage & a comfortable margin).
Anything more than that & you run the risk of being stuck with stocks of obsolescent gear, as the technology changes so rapidly once the fighting actually starts and as each side tries to find an advantage
Manufacturing also needs to be able to adapt to new variants, upgrades and updates almost overnight
Here are the three main reasons we care to develop our own dried plasma.
Supply chain independence, during major conflicts, every country wants its own supply. Relying on a neighbour for life-saving blood products is a strategic risk if their own demand spikes.
Regulatory hurdles, using foreign medical products involves complex licensing; like the emergency use authorisations. The US and UK have used to import French plasma. A UK-approved version simplifies the legal side for the NHS and the Army.
Next-gen packaging, the original French product traditionally comes in glass bottles which can break. The UK’s initiative is looking at more rugged, lightweight packaging; plastic bags specifically designed for the high-kinetic environment of modern warfare.
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Australia is a world leader in deep-frozen blood products. The Australian Defence Force in partnership with Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, has developed one of the most sophisticated frozen blood supply chains in the world. They use a process to deep-freeze red cells, platelets, and plasma at -80°C. While liquid blood expires in weeks, Australia’s frozen red cells can last for 10 years, and platelets, usually the hardest to keep, can last for 2 years. In November 2025, the ADF successfully proved this capability in the field during Exercise Talisman Sabre, marking the first time frozen blood products were fully integrated into their land-based combat medical kits.
Now deep frozen is different.. because that is about extending the life of your blood product from 3 years at -25 degrees to 8 years at -80 degrees.. but the -80 is very specific and more restrictive because you tend to get issues with blood bag product failure.. so it’s not a clinical standard..
My issue with freeze dried plasma is it’s very niche and very very expensive . you only really need it where cold chain becomes problematic… so your only real need is life threatening hypovolemic shock in a situation where you cannot get to care that has cold chain.. and plasma is not really the primary go to anyway unless your looking at catastrophic blood loss and speed to definitive care is all in these cases anyway. we don’t like using blood products unless we must.. also you tend to use plasma 1-1 with packed red blood cells.. so say you have a major trauma with heading to arrest due to shock I believe average would be 4 units of plasma and 4 of packed red cells but at best 1 of plasma units would be given before your also giving a packed red blood cells.. ( which must have a cold chain)
The last audit I looked at about 3% of FFP was used in trauma cases.. there is a total of just over 300,000 units of FFP used in the UK .. so that’s 9,000 units in trauma calls.. if each trauma is using 4 units that’s say just over 1000 traumas a year that we could give out of hospital FFP to… it’s just not worth it because it would have to be a Dr ordering it and out of hospital that is essentially a BASICs response or air ambulance and an example only 60% of air ambulances carry a unit of fresh frozen plasma..
It’s also very expensive fresh frozen plasma is about £75 pounds a unit freeze dried plasma is about £1000 per unit.. if the nhs went to freeze dried plasma it would cost a fortune… 300 million a year vs 21 million..
Freeze dried plasma also has about 50-60% of the shelf life of FFP
So this project is very very niche.. we may as well just buy NATO supplies as everyone else does for their armies.. NHS is none existent and only some of the air ambulances may choose to keep it…
Jonathan, thanks for the reply.
A couple of other issues re the downside of frozen plasma. (FFP – Fresh Frozen Plasma) takes 30–45 minutes to thaw in a 37°C water bath in a Massive Transfusion Protocol” (MTP), this delay can be fatal. Consideration of the cold chain burden, FFP requires constant -80°C or at least -20°C for shorter terms storage, this creates a massive energy footprint and requires specialised “Ultra-Low Temperature” freezers that are difficult to maintain in “High-Kinetic” or tropical environments. Also due to fragility frozen bags become brittle; breakage rates during transport and thawing are significantly higher than liquid or dried alternatives.
However, despite the logistics, frozen plasma remains the gold standard for ‘clinical quality’. The biological integrity of deep-frozen plasma sees it retain virtually 100% of its clotting factors and anti-inflammatory mediators. Some dried processes, specifically older freeze-drying can cause a slight degradation in fibrinogen levels.
The cost and scale of Australian FFP is significantly cheaper with a market price around £390 – £416 compared to the high-tech processing of dried plasma.
The total cost of one Australian unit, ready for use is –
Fresh Frozen Plasma (FFP) £390 – £416
Dried Plasma (Single Donor) £442 – £572
Universally Pooled Dried Plasma £442 – £572*
*Note – The 2030/31 goal is for the universally pooled product to be priced similarly to the single donor version to ensure it remains sustainable for the Federal health budget.
Imported French (LyoPlaS) costs Australia about £350 – £450 per unit.
Regardless, Australia sees the need for sovereign derived dried plasma and have been pushing that aspiration. At this point, Australia’s frozen product is acquired from a single-donor, highly screened volunteer pool. While many international dried products use pooled plasma (multiple donors), which increased consistency, but, historically carried higher pathogen risks.
Crucially, Australia is now at the threshold of domestic produced dried plasma, with a 2028 introduction of single-donor volunteer pool, Lifeblood researchers in Sydney have already mastered the cryopreservation of platelets and red cells. Lyophilisation of the plasma is the next optimisation, and as of now they are currently refining the pathogen inactivation steps required for an all-Australian donor pool.
With the clinical feasibility proven; the remaining hurdles are TGA’s (Therapeutic Goods Administration) rules and regs and the industrialisation of the process within Lifeblood’s facilities to meet the demand of a national roll-out.
As mentioned above, the estimated costs of dried plasma are initially going to be higher at £442 – £572 per unit compared to FFP, due to the mandatory use of pathogen reduction technology, as the Universal Pooled model requires treatments like the Intercept System / Pathogen Reduction Technology (PRT) specifically the advanced “Prion-reduction” filters required for pooled blood to ensure safety across pooled donors. The costs are also pushed up by specialised, vacuum-sealed glass vials that can withstand the freeze-drying process and long-term storage rather than the FFP’s use of plastic bags, and obviously the manufacturing overheads and the cost of paying down the capital expenditure for Lifeblood’s new industrial lyophilisation (freeze-drying) factory/labs/plants.
Is Fresh Frozen Plasma niche or will it remain the steady workhorse for specific hospital-based treatments, maybe its role will become more specialised, one might call that niche.
Essentially FFP is a complete clotting cocktail regarding 1:1:1 ratios
1 Unit of Red Cells (for oxygen)
1 Unit of Platelets (for the “bricks” of a clot)
1 Unit of FFP (the “mortar” or glue)
By mixing these three together, doctors essentially “rebuild” whole blood inside the patient’s body, while other products might only have one or two proteins, FFP contains all the coagulation factors, including fibrinogen, the primary protein used to build a clot. Factors V, VII, IX, and X the chemical triggers that tell the blood to solidify, and albumin, to keep the blood pressure stable.
Doctors will still reach for the frozen bag because of its protein integrity “Labile” Factors, the process of freeze-drying and pooling involves chemicals like solvents and heat as they spray-dry or vacuums for lyophilisation. The processes can slightly degrade fragile proteins, like Factor VIII, as they become more labile. For patients with specific, rare clotting disorders or complex liver failure, doctors may prefer FFP because it is the “purest” form of the donor’s original clotting factors, completely unchanged by the drying process.
Cost and waste management issues are important, and as FFP is significantly cheaper to produce around £30–£75 for the ‘raw’ unit, it means that in massive metropolitan hospitals where they perform ten heart surgeries a day, they have the infrastructure to keep freezers running and thaw plasma on a ‘conveyor belt’ system, in these high-volume environments, using the more expensive dried plasma would be a waste of budget. FFP remains the economical choice for planned surgeries, considering the UK uses about 7,000 – 8,000 units per day.
Customisation vs standardisation, universally pooled blood is designed to be the same for everyone (Group AB equivalent). Some patients have extremely complex immune systems or specific antibodies. For these “one-in-a-million” cases, a doctor might want a single-donor FFP unit that exactly matches that patient’s unique blood profile, rather than a pooled product that contains a mix from 11+ different people.
All in all though, if the project remains on track, an all-Australian universal pooled dried plasma product will be on the market in 2030/2031. Fingers crossed for a win here.
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Re universally pooled blood v single donor, during the 90’s I lived back on the farm I grew up on in Oxfordshire; thus on my return to Australia I was banned from donating blood until 2022. If the exact same “Mad Cow” scenario occurred in, say, 2032, I would almost certainly be allowed to donate, as the shift from Single Donor blood to Universally Pooled blood changes the math of safety entirely. Even if they are worried about a new “Mad Cow” variant, the pooling process allows for industrial-strength filtration and chemical “scrubbing” that can remove or neutralise pathogens before the blood ever reaches a patient.
Dilution is a safety feature, in a “Universal Pool,” the donation is mixed with dozens of others. If a new disease emerges, the pooling process dilutes the concentration of any potential “bad” particles. In the 90s, this was the big scare; in say, 2032, with modern filtration, this dilution makes it much easier for specialised filters to “catch” and remove the threat. That’s my understanding.
Those crazy scientists, god love em’ … not the evil ones!
FFP, god love it, I used to spend ages looking at its management and how we could reduce waste, it used to be a lot more expensive. 1999 was a right pain in the arse, when mad cow’s disease forces us to use imports.. if memory serves we were paying around £150 a unit and that was in 2000 ( which is about £325 in todays money.. so we were paying about 4 times more per FFP unit.. because of our farmers feeding cows ground up bones- over the 20 years we did that we paid an extra in todays money £250 a unit for about 6 million units…. That’s 5 type 31s.
Re 20-30 mins.. in a water bath.. yep but as it’s now only £75 a unit and considering you can always give your ED fair warning.. even with a water bath you can have that FFP ready.. ( yes you may throw some out but at £75 a unit that is not a big issue and out of hospital assessment of hypovalemic shock is not a big issue)
Now you can actually do rapid defrosting of FFP.. if you Jack up the water bath temperature.. you can take it down to 10-15 minutes ( you just need to be keeping a close eye so you don’t denature )..
There are even some wizard microwave defrosters like the WesLabs Plasma Defroster, these can get your FFP oven ready ( forgive the pun) in 6-7 minutes.
Now when you consider it would take your average clinicians 6-10 minutes to reconstitute freeze dried frozen plasma there is really no difference time wise between a good fast defroster and freeze dried.. the NHS is just to cheap to buy the fast defrosters.
There are other areas as well, outside if plasma there is Prothrombin Complex Concentrate, which is far better in many cases.. this is probably looking like the better first transfusion option.. you would need to move to Plasma and packed blood when in definitive care.. but PPC is looking very very good.. although is very expensive individual dose wise some studies have show overall reduction in the cost of treating anticoagulants… vs FFP.
The universal pool products is against an issue.. it’s why freeze dried I think will alway be a niche… before becoming an overseer of all things safety ( including transfusions services ) my clinal practice was first in haematology where we used a ton of FFP and every unit was brought from the big central london bank due to most of our patients having profoundly problematic compatibility.. some of my patients were those people where we had maybe 2-3 units in the country that could be transfused. The second part of my active clinical career was in a reasonable sized city ED and I saw a lot of trauma.. but only 3 times I ever transfuse a patient with FFP.. the first was a child with DIC from massive sepsis ( that was 6 units, but Cryoprecipitate for obvious reasons), the second was a child with a catastrophic knife wound to a major thoracic artery.. and the third was a person we decided we Simply could not get to definitive care alive ( theatre ) and the surgeon removed the spleen in the resus room ( I was NOT keen)… that’s it 3 times over a decade… and all some of the most memorable and difficult cases… in case one.. the cryo was ready well before were were ready to give it ( we were focused on airway and and antibiotics first), the second case we had the FFP ready as the casualty hit the table and the third was a major trauma so we had the airway and breathing to manage before we got to circulation and the spleen to the FFP was ready in good time.
So I suppose my clinical career makes me more pragmatic about it.. the NHS simply does not need it, yes maybe the air ambulances could use it.. because one of the main purposes of the air ambulances is about deriving a trauma team that can do surgery on site.. but there are 21 air ambulance charities..and only 60% of them use plasma.. and so actually defrosting 2 a units costing £150 when they have a call is really a tiny operating expenditure..and they have to have the cold chain set up anyway because they have packed red cells at a 1-1 ratio… and it’s very likely they would only use a handful of freeze dried plasma across the country in a day..so the only real mass usage is for the military in war.. and remember these things expire and get thrown away every 18 months.. it just seems better to source from a central NATO pot to be honest.. and focus on very good cold chain and rapid defrosters.. and the RAF and army are very very very good at cold chain.. better than the NHS ( I’ve studied both systems and the military do it better..because they have a smaller service to focus on).
I think it’s important that the UK and Australia each have sovereign control over their own blood/plasma supplies.
Don’t know about the UK’s situation, but, Australia ‘seems’ to be on top of it, especialy on the FFP chain and now the Australian Dried Plasma (ADP) project. This scheme is a collaborative effort between …
– The Australian Defence Force (ADF) are the primary customer and driver of the project.
– Australian Red Cross Lifeblood; who lead the research, collection and have developed the specific “lyophilisation” protocols for Australian donor plasma.
– The National Blood Authority, the gov. body that manages the contracts and funding to ensure the product can eventually be rolled out to civilian “life-flight” helicopters and rural hospitals.
Being isolated and at the mercy of shipping choke points, we need to control the supply chain. COVID-19 was a massive wake-up call for Australia, exposing how vulnerable the just-in-time global supply chain really was, especially for critical medical items like liquid-form medications and blood products. To fix this, the Australian gov. and private sector have launched several sovereign capability projects to ensure we never have to rely solely on the ‘end of the tail’ for critical imports again.
Look up ‘Project Aurora Sovereign Capability.’ Two initiatives, one in defense propulsion technology and another in medical (RNA) manufacturing.
We have only just become self sufficient in FFP.. because essentially we could not use British FFP or plasma products for 21 years.l the who lot was empties down the bin… all plasma products had to come from abroad because essentially because we became the CJD capital of the world ( 3 quarters of all cases over the last 30 years have been in the UK) and CJD can be spreed via plasma produces.
But we are now completely independent for all plasma products.. other than freeze dried plasma which the NHS simply ignores anyway and is only used by a handful of the UK air ambulances ( which are all charities).. the only reason the NHS blood and transplant got involved was because the military wanted it and only the NHS could run the trials and provide the donor plasma.
To be honest in Australia I could see freeze dried plasma being a lot more use.. your population is very spread out.. in the UK there is always a district general hospital with a blood bank close by.
Excellent news, let’s hope it has momentum.
Ive got a feeling they are going to over complicate things… at pace😒
“Rapidly” means until they present a price tag to the Treasury and are then told to forth in short jerky movements. Bit like the Navy plans that just got “absorbed”.
It’s not really about presenting the bill to the Treasury, it doesn’t work quite that way. HMG decides how much it can give to the defence budget. It is then up to the MOD to allocate that money between the top level budget holders (TLBs). Each is responsible for their procurement spend. There is an MOD battalion of accountants and bean counters who then endeavour to keep track of the spend and nudge the project team if things are going off budget.
The Treasury is only involved if there are requests for additional cash or if the politicos suddenly decide halfway through the financial year that departmental budgets have to be cut.
This to say only that we tend to blame the Treasury when the money management is meant to be controlled by each department, in this case the MOD.
mbri