Dr Sidharth Kaushal
Introduction
This report is based on the discussions which occurred during a one-day workshop held in September 2023 at RUSI’s headquarters in London, attended by a range of representatives from defence companies and the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). None of the comments in this report are attributable. The purpose of the workshop was to identify early opportunities to set the conditions for integration across the joint force. The workshop examined where and how the MoD, the armed services and, especially, UK Strategic Command (StratCom) and its new Integration Design Authority (IDA) can achieve immediate results to galvanise the broader effort to deliver the stated aspiration of providing ‘integration as a service’.
The workshop focused on the questions of how different actors, both past and present, have approached the challenge of data integration, and sought to examine which transferable lessons might be drawn from precedents from both the world of defence and beyond it, in areas such as the financial sector. This report, based on the workshop and subsequent secondary literature review, examines the immediate steps that the MoD can take to set the conditions for a broader effort to achieve multi-domain integration.
A key deduction from the day’s discussions was that if, as is likely to be the case, software-driven evolution will play an important role in determining how the joint force fights, perhaps to an even greater degree than hardware adaptation, then it will be of considerable importance that frontline commands (FLCs) are able to cohere capability at all stages, even as the software is continually adapted.
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