A principle set out by the team building Britain’s Digital Targeting Web fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of safeguards, according to a new report from the Royal United Services Institute, which warns that legal and ethical checks cannot speed up a targeting cycle any more than friction can speed up a moving object.
The paper, Modern Targeting in European Militaries, is written by Robert Tollast, Noah Sylvia and Matthew Savill, and is the first in a series examining the Digital Targeting Web. It draws on interviews with British policymakers, practitioners and industry experts.
Announced in May 2025 and detailed in the Strategic Defence Review, the Digital Targeting Web is an attempt to pull successive British digital integration efforts under one initiative, connecting sensors and decision-makers to weapons and non-lethal effectors across the joint force. Its stated battlefield vision is the ability to “sense, understand, decide, act and assess faster than they can”.
‘Accelerate tempo, not constrain it’
The report singles out one of the project’s strategic principles, which its core team lists as: “assurance, legalities, ethics and security must accelerate tempo, not constrain it.”
The authors write: “On its face, the statement fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of safeguards, which by their nature slow down processes. Technical assurance processes, legal reviews and security protocols are extra steps added into targeting procedures, thereby increasing the steps and time needed for a cycle to complete. Even if partially or wholly automated, safeguards cannot be expected to increase the speed of a targeting cycle any more than friction can be expected to increase the speed of a moving object.”
They note that the view is not confined to the project team. A number of practitioners interviewed expressed doubts about the need for rigorous legal and ethical safeguards, the report says, “since the UK’s/NATO’s enemies do not feel bound by such rules, the slowing of one’s own operations by these safeguards presents an unacceptable risk on the battlefield.”
Ministers will have to let go
The report’s most direct implication for Whitehall concerns who authorises strikes. It argues that the habits of the counter-terrorism era, where commanders, civil servants and ministers were closely involved in individual operations planned over weeks, cannot survive a war involving hundreds of strikes a day.
The authors write: “In the event of large-scale operations, the decision-making authority for most strikes, especially for targets of opportunity, will have to be devolved to mid-level or even junior commanders in the field. Commanders will inevitably take action that, whether intentional or not, causes significant civilian harm and/or escalation in enemy response. MoD officials and ministers must grow accustomed to these realities of modern operations, where they will bear the political consequences for actions outside their control.”
They conclude that the issue is “less about process and more about habit and culture: senior officials and ministers will have to become more comfortable with delegation and risk, or at least be more precise in the parameters they set out for targeting.”
Working against that is public scrutiny. One MOD official is quoted saying: “BDA is instantaneous on social media, leading to demands of accountability from ministers.” The report judges this likely to reduce the risk ministers find tolerable at exactly the moment the battlefield demands more delegation.
Scale and speed
The report opens with the American and Israeli strike campaign against Iran, which began on 28 February 2026. It records that the American Operation Epic Fury ran at a tempo not seen since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with some reports claiming nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours, followed by hundreds of daily strikes for five weeks.
That scale, the authors write, was possible only through collating decades of data points from a myriad of sources. They note that various countries including the UK have made targeting central to force modernisation, with one European general describing a desire to identify 3,000 targets per day.
On the civilian consequences, the report states that strikes on Iran hit thousands of sites and killed over 2,000 civilians, with damage in some cases intentional and in others, such as strikes on the Minab school that reportedly killed over 150 people, mainly children, attributed to human error.
It adds: “Advanced digitalised systems appear to enable the speed and scale of such actions, both intentional and accidental. It remains difficult to separate the civilian toll from the public decision by the US Department of War to cut civilian protection offices in the Pentagon in favour of prioritising ‘maximum lethality, not tepid legality’.”
The authors say this should concern the Ministry of Defence, which has recently highlighted vulnerabilities in its own civilian harm mitigation policies.
Allies out of step
On coalition operations, the report warns that gaps in interoperability could see allies categorise the same targets differently or strike them twice with limited, expensive weapons.
It says: “Targets which one force may identify as posing a collateral damage risk may be erroneously identified by an unconnected Allied targeting system as legitimate sites to strike.” British and French thinking is both moving towards striking the enemy at depth, which by definition involves targeting close to dual-use infrastructure.
The conclusion is that aligning targeting policy and procedure between allies is needed “now rather than later”, and that the training and doctrine implications “must be addressed before the onset of conflict.”
Does it change anything?
The report finds no consensus within British defence about how much the Digital Targeting Web actually changes. Many policymakers and some practitioners describe it as essentially implementing Network Enabled Capability concepts, with one senior policymaker saying modern targeting policy is “nothing fundamentally different” to that of recent decades, and targeting policy remaining grounded in traditional documents.
The authors end on the limits of the technology rather than its promise, arguing that prioritising quantifiable metrics such as a goal of a set number of targets in a set time “can enable greater lethality, but risks excising the human perceptions, judgements, reactions and ingenuity without which a war cannot be won.”
They note that the strike campaigns against Iran and in Gaza were historic in speed and scale, and that in neither case can the result yet be considered a strategic victory. The project was supported by Fujitsu, Leonardo, Systematic and Thales, with RUSI stating that it retains independence in its research outputs and that the views are the authors’ alone.
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