DSEI Day Three: Continued Themes

Published: 2021-09-17 13:02:09 ET QQ.L

DE&S Future Capabilities Group

An interesting start to the day at the Aerospace forum, with a briefing by the UK MOD DE&S Future Capability Group (FCG) on their mandate to explore and progress early exploitation of new capabilities. Sustainability and digitalisation appeared as a common theme of interest throughout from the Defence industry.

Their aim was clear: to achieve more clever ways of working and explore how we can use technology to communicate more efficiently. This linked onto how the use of digital tools and techniques can keep us up-to-date in the field of sustainability, practising methods such as digital twinning of certain components and the use of data in training the next generation of engineers, to reach our best advantage. Ultimately the introduction of new Centre of Expertise (CoE) in the Digital Battlespace and Counter-UAS arenas, provide a more efficiency in terms of cost, time and use, and allow us to continually push technical boundaries.

Interoperability is the key to tackling uncertainty of the future security environment

In a panel session run by Deloitte, Vice Admiral (ret) Darren Hawco, Major General Tom Copinger-Symes and Rear Admiral Benjamin . Reynolds discussed how Interoperability is the key to tackling uncertainty of the future security environment.

They began by stating that no single military can defeat threats on their own, and the information age has put different perspectives on these threats. There is a case for change in strategic thinking and shared values amongst partners has become ever more important. With training, testing, and learning, there is primarily a need for interoperability but this needs to be used in tandem with interchangeability for the perfect balance. Interoperability is a strategic advantage that we can't assume exists all the time and we have to look at how it exists, whether this be in acquisition, operations, resilience, cultural norms, intelligence enterprise and more. Interoperability is a modern take for modern challenges and it was noted that forces do not partner with industry enough.

Multi domain integration must exist in physical and digital settings, and this type of interoperability enables agility and allows for interoperable and secure supply chains. However, with interoperability comes the need for trust and this takes a long time to build. This is especially important as joint forces will be exposed to classified information. To combat this, there must be a modern and secure single digital backbone, allowing all data to flow and analytics tools to access that data. This backbone includes people, process, data, and tech but the human element of this is primarily where trust needs to exist when it comes to tackling uncertainty in future security environments.

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QinetiQ Group plc published this content on 17 September 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 17 September 2021 17:01:08 UTC.