A Simple Model for Military Transformations

 ”Those with a better understanding of war can and often do defeat those who are better-trained, better-prepared, but less-informed.” Oliviero, Charles S. Strategia, 2022

Strategic Context for Military Transformations

In 2024, my blog article viewed different approaches to contemporary military strategies. It defined the function of national security strategy as the art and science of developing and using the political, economic, and psychological powers of a nation, together with its armed forces, during peace and war, to secure national objectives, or in short, how to keep the peace. (Rovner, 2025)  

Under national security is the national defence strategy, which defines how to coordinate military, diplomatic, economic, and civil defence instruments of national power, and how to build national robustness to produce durable national security. Liddle-Hart (Liddle-Hart, 1991) included some parts of this in the Grand Strategy, and the Nordic countries call it the Total Defence Strategy. 

Military strategy is positioned under the national defence strategy to define the art and science of employing a nation's armed forces to secure the objectives of national policy through the application of force, or the threat of force, or, in short, how to win the next war. Military strategy is typically divided into means-oriented strategy (capability portfolio) and how the military will operate (operational strategy) with these forces during escalating confrontations (Schmitt, 2026). 

This paper focuses on capability generation, or means-oriented strategy, within the national military strategy, as illustrated in Figure 1. The capability generation strategy observes the current state, seeks foresight into the adversary’s potential future capability development, and launches transformation and force-generation plans to meet future threats. 

Figure 1: A Strategic framework for military transformation

Western militaries are currently reawakening to the possibility of an extended armed conflict rather than a quick deployment, or as Freeman puts it:

”Once military planners accept that any major contemporary war might not end quickly, they are required to adopt a different mindset. Short wars are fought with whatever resources are available at the time; long wars require the development of capabilities that are geared to changing operational imperatives, as demonstrated by the continual transformation of drone warfare in Ukraine.” (Freedman, 2025)

Therefore, sustaining capabilities and generating forces with continuously evolving tactics and techniques on the battlefield demand that militaries rethink their strategic agility. A more systems approach needs to include features of continuous transformation and the integration of force generation into the military enterprise's structure, while supported by logistics and development. (O'Brien, 2025)

Assuming that transformation is at the core of the military strategic framework and leaving out the entirety of environment and adversarial analysis, the following outlines a simple model for the governance of transformations within a military enterprise. 

Changing the Mindset

Given the gravity of national defence, the governance of military transformation needs to consider both the short- and long-game of potential adversaries within the national security environment.  Simon Sinek popularised this in the Infinite Game book. (Sinek, 2019) He applied James P. Carse’s original work on infinite and finite games. (Carse, 1986) Carse stated that a finite game is played according to rules, within recognised boundaries, between parties, and within an assumed timeline for the purpose of winning. On the contrary, an infinite game is played through any interaction, recognising evolving rules and involving participants for the purpose of continuing the play.

Sinek’s approach to applying an infinite mindset in business and politics emphasises the evolving nature of the rules, boundaries and parties in games that were previously defined as finite. The same can be applied in modern warfare, where the adversary is not necessarily playing the same game as you generated your troops for, parties are included and excluded from the value chain and campaign as the situation emerges, and despite the willingness of some parties, the war keeps going. (Freedman, 2025)

One way of modelling the more volatile game of future war is to use Porter’s five competitive forces. (Porter, 2008) The concept recognises: 1. competitive rivals, i.e., potential adversaries; 2. potential new entrants, i.e., partner or adversarial proxies; 3. Supplier power, i.e., supply chain and value stream changes, 4. Customer power, i.e., citizens of the defended nation, and 5. Threat of substitutes, i.e., new means and ways of power projection. My February 2026 article on the analysis of competitive forces in contemporary military affairs in Europe elaborates further on this.

A method of opening the thinking of rules and boundaries of finite games is scenario playing with intuitive logic (Metz & Sadler-Smith, 2026) that helps generate a variety of foresights into future possibilities for each of the above force vectors. These scenarios may introduce drivers, actors, relationships, characteristics, spaces and technology convergences sufficiently to fathom the nature of future wars (UK MoD, 2026).  A shorter game may be waged using wartime stocks and serviceable platforms, but a longer game may require an adaptive approach to both supply chain arrangements and tactics/techniques/procedures in the theatre. (Freedman, 2025)

With a broader recognition of the foundational features of modern and future warfare, we may proceed to the details of the sub-strategy for generating military capabilities.

Adaptive Strategy for Transformation of Military Affairs

The August 2024 post introduced the realm of military strategy. This publication focuses on force-generation strategy, or the development of means, or military capabilities strategy. The foundation of the force generation strategy is the means and approach chosen in the national defence strategy. Gattorna defines a quadchart depending on the risk-appetite and a posture for activity: a low-risk Evolutionary or Proactive approach, or a higher-risk Operational or Pathfinder approach (Gattorna, 2010). 

The new approach to the strategy includes two transformation engines: Linear or induced process and Agile or autonomous process, following Burgelman’s findings in the semiconductor industry (Burgelman, 2002). 

• A linear or induced process creates a strategy from the top and implements it towards the bottom, typically with an Ends-Ways-Means (Lykke, 1998) structure, where Ends define the required capabilities in the future, Means define the required resources, and Ways define the actions needed for acquisition and generation of components of the capability. The Ends-Ways-Means linear process ”carries out the strategic intent of the organisation, seeks to reduce variation, produce stability, produce continuity, perpetuate the Forces' identity, and exploit.” (Burgelman, 2002) The implementation of a linear process usually follows the operational lines of the DOTMILPFII (Wikipedia, 2025)or TEPIDOIL (Berry, 2022) frameworks, and courses of action are selected from these lines of operation as applicable to each new or updated capability. When the security environment evolves steadily and is foreseeable, the linear process may take the major brunt of the transformation.
• Agile, autonomous or mutating process builds from bottom innovations up towards the strategic capability portfolio. The agile transformation process integrates continuous improvement to long-life system architecture and operational dominance to radical experimentation. The agile transformation process ”is a variation increasing, produces a degree of instability, changes the identity of the company, and explores new opportunities.” (Burgelman, 2002) Agility enables the development of trial-and-error, failure-fast cultures within military institutions and may also accelerate the integration of emerging technology and improve the internal dynamics of military organisations. (Schmitt, 2026) When the strategic landscape evolves swiftly, and all five forces are subject to change, an agile process may play a major role in the transformation. (Barno & Bensahel, 2020)

These two transformation engines are hosted within a military capability portfolio. The portfolio provides essential information on current, in-transit, and future capabilities that are required for the future security environment. The capability portfolio comprises, for example: 

• capability taxonomy
• roadmap for CONOPSs to Doctrines to Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs)
• roadmap for Enterprise Architecture evolution: AS-IS and TO-BE
• capability phasing or life cycle
• capability dependencies
• capabilities mapping to operational activities
• capabilities mapping to Force Plans.

Figure 2: A model for governance of military transformation

The implementation of transformation needs to have a systems approach to military affairs, e.g., force utilisation, generation, and sustainment as illustrated in Figure 2. Linear command-and-control under centralised authority is slow and misses too many details to sense the dynamics between entities and to act when their relationship starts to fail during the transformation. The transformation of military affairs should be approached from the viewpoint of open socio-technical systems. 

”Considering enterprises as ‘open socio‐technical systems’ helps to provide a more realistic picture of how they are both influenced by and able to act back on their environment.” (Jackson, 2019)

For options in transformation management, see the September 2024 article titled "Nine approaches to transformations."

Analysing the European Defence and Military Strategies

 Perceived situation

The European militaries are facing change both in the security environment and within military affairs. The threat of Russian hybrid means has infected the European security environment, and the projection of its conventional forces has been the new reality for over twelve years. Military affairs are transitioning to address the near-peer adversary, and are also on the brink of deploying large numbers of unmanned platforms.  

An Approach for Strategy Analysis

Burgelman’s strategic dynamics model (Burgelman, Snihur, & Thomas, 2023) provides a tool for analysing the strategic situation of the European Armed Forces. The strategic Dynamics Quadrant combines the volatility of the security environment and military affairs in Figure 1 with the following sectors: 

1. Rule-abiding evolution happens when the Armed Forces are stable, and the security environment evolves according to foreseeable scenarios.
2. Revolution of the security environment happens when the Armed Forces follow a linear path of evolution, but the security environment is more volatile and unforeseeable.
3. Revolution of military affairs happens when the Armed Forces aim for transformation and gain a strategic advantage when the security environment takes foreseeable paths.
4. Uncertainty happens when both the security environment and military affairs are facing pressure to change, but the future seems to be complex.

How are sampled European Defence or Military Strategies Approaching the Volatility?

Assuming that the era of a rule-based security environment and linearly evolving military capabilities in Europe is over, and that a more unpredictable security situation and faster-evolving military affairs are the new normal. European militaries are facing the remaining three strategic options in Figure 1:

1. The situation remains stable, and military affairs evolve in a linear manner. Some Western and Southern European nations do not perceive Russian threats or are willing to accelerate the transformation of their militaries. 
2. While recognising the revolution of the security environment, nations are preparing resiliency against the unknown Russian threats. Meanwhile, nations are building the readiness, volume, and capabilities of their contemporary forces at a faster pace. It seems that most of the Eastern and Northern European nations have taken this path. 
3. The Russian playbook has been played for the past four years. They project their hybrid powers and conventional forces with volume and ability to sustain losses.  While unable to build on the same strengths, European military affairs need to transform quickly to achieve a strategic advantage in both deterrence and kill ratio without sacrificing live soldiers (Revolution of Affairs). At least the US and UK militaries are experimenting with new systems and building more connected System-of-systems. Many Forces are discussing the topic, but their strategies do not seem to prioritise revolutionary capabilities. Nevertheless, the European defence industry sees an opportunity to sell higher-priced systems integration and autonomy rather than the 155 mm ballistic artillery grenade. 
4. Uncertainty: NATO coherence has been questioned. Russia and the coalition behind it are unpredictable. The European military has been too slow to adapt to a rapidly evolving security environment, and the Russo-Ukrainian theatre of war shows signs of a major revolution in the deployment of unmanned platforms. None of the sampled European defence strategies or military development plans fit into this approach.

Figure 1: A tool to analyse strategic postures in military affairs, adjusted from Burgelman's original approach to strategic dynamics

Analysis of Competitive Forces in Contemporary Military Affairs in Europe

Competitive Forces in European Military Affairs

Contemporary European militaries are facing pressure to transform from various approaches. One model for studying these pressures is Porter’s Five Competitive Forces. (Porter, 2008) When these five forces are applied in military confrontation, as seen in Figure 1, the competitive forces in the European Theatre may look like:

1. Competitive Rivals, adversaries with operational advantage of conventional forces, for example:

The Russian Red Army has transferred to an attrition-generating force with volume and robustness, no other than Ukrainian force can withstand. (Gavalas, 2026) 

Iran's showcase of using massed waves of ballistic or cruise missiles, drones, and electronic warfare in the 12-Day war, no other than Israeli Iron Dome can withstand. (Croft, 2025)

 2. Potential for New Entrants, i.e. unconventional operations like:

Hybrid operations or full-spectrum influence activities below the threshold of conventional war, as observed in Finland through the 2000s. (Saari, 2026)

Information, or cognitive or influence operations, Russia and Iran have used over the past four years (Papadaki, 2024) (Bugayova, 2025)

CyberElectromagnetic operations or Network Warfare capabilities that the Chinese PLA has been generating and mobilising. (Green, 2025)

3. Supplier Power, the defence industry, dual-use technology, and society's ability to sustain military force over an extended time, for example:

Nationally defined, downgraded over the past 30 years, platform-centric, and US-driven weapons development cannot provide armament to European armed forces at the pace at which threat scenarios are developing. (Cohen, 2025) (EDA, 2025)

Adapting to the pace of arm-counter-arm evolution as seen in the Russo-Ukrainian theatre

Sustaining forces in either high manoeuvre or trench warfare is challenging, as seen in the Russia-Ukraine war. (Sanford, 2025)

The past four years' transformation of Russian economic and industrial sectors to support its Armed Forces is a strategic advantage over European Forces. (Conolly, 2025)

4. Customer Power, citizens of European societies and national critical infrastructure may appear fragile when facing the Russian effect:

European nations are not volunteering for the Armed Forces in numbers, and their willingness to take arms to defend their nations does not meet the current Russian ability to source and consume live force. (Dalberg, 2025)

The European home front's inability to accept losses or sustain through hardships, as seen in Ukraine. (Jones, 2026)

Vulnerability of digitised infrastructure in Europe. (Slakaityte & Surwillo, 2024)

5. Threat of Substitutes, conventional sensor and effector platforms being replaced by lethal autonomous weapon systems, like the following:

Remotely controlled (First Person View, FPV) UAS/UGV/USS have become the most used and lethal effectors in the Russo-Ukraine battlefield. (Ahrirova, 2025) (Defence Ukraine, 2025)

The emergence of lethal autonomous weapon systems will change the tactical level of warfighting. (Hwang, 2025)

Figure 1: A view of the power fields that contemporary European military is facing following Porter’s five forces of competitive strategy

How are European Militaries Addressing the Competition in their Public Strategies?

One can see the ongoing dynamics in all five viewpoints, so the Commanders of European Armed Forces are not facing a simple situation. The following short sample of National Defence or Military strategies provides a glimpse of current approaches. The military is mainly focusing on updating and increasing conventional forces, leaving gaps for Russian strategists to exploit. 

Table 1: A Sample of Current Defence or Military Strategies in Europe

Nation and year	Approach	Resource focus	Observations
Finland, 2024 (Ministry of Defence Finland, 2024)	Deterrence with high Readiness and repelling attacks in the worst case	Air Force platforms 64xF-35A Navy platforms 4xPohjanmaa Corvettes Renewed Land Force mobility and fires platforms	Conscription is believed to provide manpower enough manpower to meet the Russian strengths. NATO membership is believed to strengthen the defence in both deterrence and repelling.
Sweden, 2024 (Försvarsdepartmentet, 2024)	Total national defence and contribution to NATO forces.	4xBrigades 2xCorvett Divisions 6x Fighter-Attacker Divisions 2xGBAD battalions	Force includes cyber defence and EW units. Civil defence addresses societal fragility. Contribution to the NATO IAMD program. Digitalisation and integration of sensors and effectors.
Poland, 2024 (MilMag, 2024)	Accelerated modernisation and buildup of the Forces will provide deterrence against Russian ambitions.	Over 208,000 active forces, with 42,000 territorial defence forces, East Shield fortifications, together with the Baltic states.	The growth of the armed forces, technical modernisation, the construction of the Eastern Shield, and the reinforcement of Poland’s position within NATO.
Germany, 2024 OPLAN DEU (Bundeswehr, 2024) (Defense Advancement, 2024)	Bring together the key military elements of national and collective defence with the necessary civilian support services to ensure mutual whole-of-government support at various levels of escalation – in peacetime, hybrid threat situations, crises, and war.	The Bundeswehr aims to have 203,000 active military personnel. 94xTyphoon, 87x Tornado. In an emergency, up to 800,000 allied troops and 200,000 vehicles must be able to pass through Germany within six months and receive host-nation support.	Updating the conventional platforms while increasing the strength and number of active units. Recognises the sustainment and manoeuvring challenge, and includes the improvement of the defence industry.

It seems that the potential Russian Frontier nations rely on NATO coalition deterrence and are preparing to utilise conventional forces, and are planning to receive support from other coalition members in the worst case.

A Simple Model for Management

 And why do we continue getting management wrong

Wikipedia defines management as a ”process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organisations.” [Wikipedia] But management can also be understood as "the transformation of resources into utility" [Fredmund Malik] or as "to forecast and to plan, to organise, to command, to co-ordinate and to control" [Henri Fayol] or as ”the coordination and administration of tasks to achieve a goal.” Quite generic and somewhat controversial definitions. The article aims to describe management through a single model that includes most aspects of resources, transformation, tasks, utilities, and goals.

Creating a Simple Model

The simple model merges the above into one system view, as illustrated in Figure 1, composed of:

• Inputs are the resources or efforts, like personnel, time, money, material, information, and immaterial components.
• Actions are tasks that the organisation is doing to produce outputs.
• Outputs are the products, services, artefacts, information, or performances that the organisation produces, delivers, or creates using inputs and actions.
• Outcomes are the impacts, effects, or value that the outputs have on targeted systems of systems like businesses, consumer market, audience, valuation, or the theatre for conflict.
• Feedback is the information management collects from outcomes, outputs, actions and inputs in an attempt to steer the process through foreseeing, planning, coordinating, and appraising. This may be called data-driven decision-making  or a learning organisation.  

Figure 1: A Simple Model for Management

Using the Simple Model to Analyse Management Mistakes

The simple Management Model helps analyse, at a high level, the existing management operation models and guides possible remediation in Table 1.

Table 1: Samples for analysing and remediation of current management using  the Simple Model for Management

Component	Typical Misconduct	Possible Remediation
INPUTS	Management focuses on efforts and resources, such as hours/money/ material consumed, or manning /machines/contracts activated. This may lead to management by cost centres.	Follow resource consumption relative to outputs, and focus on core resources, such as competencies[1] (Pareto: 20% of inputs deliver 80% of outputs[2]).
ACTIONS	Management focuses on transactions, utilisation of service points, and performance of subsections. This may lead to suboptimisation and a stovepiped operation model.	Measure throughput and quality of the entire value stream rather than subcomponents, and then focus on eliminating ”muda” or wastefulness in LEAN process thinking.[3]
OUTPUTS	Management focuses mainly on manufactured products, delivered utilities, or what can be quantified, while neglecting everything else[4]. This may lead to burning resources or missing the strategic purpose.	Outputs are not linear causes of outcomes, so a Balanced Scorecard-type approach needs to identify the relationships among inputs, actions, outputs, and outcomes.
OUTCOMES	Management focuses on ends or goals but measures them using key performance indicators without an overarching context, such as benchmarking, market share, share valuation, and new user acquisition. This may lead to Machiavelli’s view[5] that the ends justify any means, like in Russian operational thinking.[6]	Effects or impacts are essential to identify and measure to keep the system/business on track towards its objectives.  Management may use a results-based approach to make progress toward the destination statement (Ends).[7] Military planning or design uses Lines of Operation and Courses of Action to deliver impact on Centres of Gravity.[8]
FEEDBACK	Management may focus on collecting feedback or data from a few components and on either lagging or leading indicators. This may lead to a stagnant organisation/system that lacks agility or flexibility, which will be replaced by competitors or destroyed by adversaries.	Management must create a balanced mix of leading and lagging indicators to improve reaction and prediction.[9] Leading Indicators are early signals that predict future trends (e.g., employee engagement predicting retention rates). Lagging Indicators are confirming past performance but don’t allow for proactive adjustments (e.g., revenue after a quarter ends).

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_competency

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

[5] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_end_justifies_the_means

[6] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ends-justifies-means-logic-led-russia-war-and-repression

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard

[8] https://www.coemed.org/files/stanags/01_AJP/AJP-5_EDA_V2_E_2526.pdf

[9] https://metricsexplained.com/resource/balancing-leading-and-lagging-indicators-a-strategic-approach

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Improving the Model

When the model in Figure 1 is compared against a sample of other management models, one may find that:

• The model aligns with Boyd’s OODA loop in decision-making while including several feedback loops to learn and adjust the system. Nevertheless, it does not illustrate the cognitive processes of sense-making and decision-making.  
• The model facilitates Deming’s PDCA circle for iterative improvement, but does not illustrate the management functions of planning and checking.
• The model aligns with parts of the ISO37000 governance framework by reflecting the organisational purpose, oversight, strategy, and interfaces with beneficiaries and sources. 
• Porter’s five forces may be applied to the model in a specific environment or market. 
• One can also understand Hamel’s and Prahalad’s value chain for core competencies (inputs), products (outputs), and business (outcomes), but the model does not explain the utilisation of core competencies, particularly.
• The model misses some of the stakeholders and the strategic dynamics of Kaplan’s & Norton’s 3rd generation Balanced Scorecard. 
• The model lacks the functionally layered structure of Beer’s Viable System Model , but it may fulfil the viability definition by responding to environmental changes and achieving its purpose.
• The model fails to support Hamel’s Humanocracy viewpoint because the action component lacks the details of structure, bureaucracy, and human relationships. Therefore, it fails to illustrate the evolutionary tension between hierarchies and networks of competency. 
• Furthermore, the model in Figure 1 does not describe the environment or the theatre/market where the outcome takes place, as defined in EFQM  and studied in Introduction to Environmental Systems and Processes. 

While trying not to increase the complexity of the model, but address some of its essential gaps, the improvement presented in Figure 2 adds:

1. relationship between the system and its environment for adapting to environmental changes, 
2. sources for the inputs residing outside of the system for supply chain management,
3. relationships between actioning elements to recognise human relationships and lines of communication, and 
4. elaboration of the target systems (e.g., BtoB, BtoC, audience, theatre of war) of outcomes with the Cynefin Framework of four domains based on situational awareness.

Figure 2: Somewhat improved management model

With the above improvements, the model extends towards:

• Collecting data from the system’s environment supports capturing mega and microtrends and improving foresight.
• Understanding the short and long-term chances in sources for inputs improves predictions concerning supply chain changes, educational levels, labour market fluctuations, etc.
• A simple relationship graph of the organisational structure and a connection graph of the unofficial relationships help to know yourself, as Sun Tzu teaches.
• Understanding that not all markets, societies, and theatres of war are similar when it comes to making an impact. Collecting data points from a simple target area (i.e., known) requires sensing, categorising, and sense-making, which may use best practices. A more complicated target area (i.e., knowable) requires more effort in analysis (see Orientation in OODA-loop) before decision-making. In complex and chaotic situations (e.g., digital transformation, battlefield, or unknown unknowns), the target system needs probing or action to elicit a reaction that can be detected, identified, and analysed.

Improving the Agility of the Current Defence Industry and Forces Value Stream in Acquiring and Generating Capabilities

Is the current Defence Industry and Defence Forces Relationship agile enough to address the volatile arms–counterarms evolution emerging in the Russian-Ukrainian war? 

Is the current Defence supply chain capable of delivering continuous integration of a software-defined military system of systems? Will the Defence Industry meet the European Defence Forces' expectations for 4th industrial cyber-physical products and services? Is Europe coherent enough to engage the Russian 2/3rd industrial force in an attrition war with inevitable human casualties? Questions that military strategists are pondering nowadays.

Figure 1: A high-level illustration of the value stream for legacy defence capabilities life cycle

With its war budget and legislation, Russia is building up its second industrial generation capabilities to produce armoured platforms, artillery, missiles, and ammunition, in addition to sourcing them from China and North Korea. Meanwhile, they are learning to use dual-use cyber-physical products sourced from China and Iran, such as Unmanned Aerial Systems, to deliver precision attacks and maintain 24/7 surveillance over the battlefield.  

Meanwhile, Ukraine relies heavily on conventional armaments, which are primarily supplied by NATO countries, albeit sporadically and subject to political constraints. While NATO countries are struggling to rebuild their Second Industrial generation manufacturing capabilities, Ukraine is building its 4th industrial capability  to provide dual-use cyber-physical platforms for both sensing and effect.  Partially, because the Western legacy weapon systems do not survive on the Ukrainian battlefield. 

Where does the European Defence Industry migrate from its current 3rd industrial capability to manufacture expensive platforms and precision missiles? How are the European Defence Forces utilising their strengths differently for transformation under the Russian hybrid operations? Will the European industrial and military value stream transform through:

1. Improving gradually the current processes and the operation model,
2. Accelerating towards 4th industrial software-defined armament utilisation, or
3. Fast-lining to acquire mass-produced, dual-use, cyber-physical platforms and adjust/configure/integrate them for military use.

First, the paper analyses the common bottlenecks along the current life cycle of armament from innovation to force utilisation. Secondly, the paper proposes three different lines of operation to improve agility, accelerate the life cycle updates and configuration, or connect the defence value chain more efficiently to meet the evident Russian threat.

Legacy Armament Life Cycle Model

The contemporary European ecosystem between the Defence Industry and Defence Forces is optimised for 2/3 generation industrial armament manufacturing and utilisation, optimising the long lifespan of platforms (main battle tanks, fighters, frigates) and complying with legislation for commercial procurement with a flavour for national security interests. The management of platform-centric life cycles suffers from three bottlenecks, though the value stream from innovation to battlefield and creating a strategic advantage in National Defence:

1. Valley of Death lies between ideation and experimentation, and manufacturers' intentions to create a viable product. Ideas, demonstrations, and proof of concepts often struggle to transition to pre-production and secure investments, ultimately becoming workable products with potential markets and profits. 
2. Valley of Death resides between vendors marketing/sales and the Defence Forces procurement. Commercial or armament-specific procurement regulation defines the behaviour between vendors and procurers in the market.  Requirements-based acquisition may inflate expectations beyond what any product in the market can deliver.  While minimising the ambiguity, both the military and industry tend to produce generations of similar fighting platforms. 
3. Valley of Death resides between the Defence Forces' force generation and force utilisation. Whilst integration and training may be successful, the platform appears not to be feasible in the battlefield or type of operation, or an element does not meet the requirements of the entire system of systems. For example, maintaining the Leopard 2 main battle tanks in the Ukrainian theatre .

Figure 2: Model for legacy value stream for military capabilities generation

The linear value stream requires both strategic support and a feedback loop to maintain the track towards integration and sustainment of armament. 

• Strategic direction is required through the life cycle of innovation, particularly in mitigating the bottlenecks in the chain of Ideating, Acquisition, and Utilisation. Whether this support and guidance is provided through governance, market regulation, or a hybrid manner is a question. Often, the ministerial strategic guidance is perceived as contradicting the legislation of the open market.

• A feedback loop is required to translate the lessons captured in operation, training and manufacturing to mid-life updates of platforms. Successful communication via the loop is based on trust, transparency, confidentiality, a shared knowledge base, and measurement for impact. As usual, communication fails to have a lasting effect on adjusting products and processes to meet military demand.

The legacy life-cycle value stream may work with platforms that have a lifespan of over 30 years and are loosely integrated, with operations mostly manual. The legacy model is not sufficient when the Russian defence industry has already gained a few years' advantage over the European defence industry.  The following sections study three ways to improve the agility of the legacy acquisition and life cycle management process.

 

Ways to Improve the Agility of Contemporary Acquisition Processes and Operation Model

When choosing to evolve the current 3rd industrial acquisition value stream gradually, both Defence Forces and Industry may enhance the performance and agility of the value stream in the following ways:

Strategic guidance

• National Defence Science and Technology strategies that guide resources, potential technology focuses and research awards
• Government-driven strategic direction through innovation incubators, governance of military industries, and 5-year military investment plans
• Market-driven direction with long-term military acquisition lists and capability requirements, calling manufacturers and products to Defence Exhibitions for information sharing
• Examples: US National Defense Science & Technology Strategy 2023 

Creating and maturing ideas:

• Seeding the ideation and R&D with incubators or innovation hubs, 
• Bringing potential competencies together in hackathons or competitions, 
• Incubating and maturing potential ideas towards Proof of Concepts (PoC)
• Expressing a long-term commitment to the most viable PoCs.
• Examples: US DARPA , NATO Science and Technology Organisation, NATO innovation accelerator (DIANA)  and Multinational Experience (MNE) , UAE Innovation Incubators, FIN eAlliance , FIN DEFINE 

Acquisition:

• Capability portfolio management to coordinate the development of new capabilities and decommissioning the legacy while meeting the evolving capabilities of potential adversaries with a 30-year horizon.
• Guiding the Defence Industry to invest in new technologies and manufacturing methods in preparation for new products with strategic partnerships
• Target Enterprise Architecture to guide the integration and system of systems performance
• Create Defence Industry clusters or partnerships to eliminate parallel product lines, increase specialisation, and the ability to integrate system of military systems. 
• Examples: UAE IDEX , KSA World Defense Show , KSA GAMI/SAMI ,  Nordic Patria-Nammo-Kongsberg partnership 

Utilisation:

• Multi-geared Force planning to develop, integrate, train and deploy troops at a pace and quality that addresses the operational requirements and crisis escalation
• Blue and Red Force exercises to find vulnerabilities for mitigation.
• Force sustainment to maintain, repair and restore troops and capabilities in operation
• Examples: NATO Combined Endeavour 

Feedback loop

• Annual cooperation and lessons identified sessions between the military and industry
• Having key account managers visiting exercises
• Manufacturers' user groups
• Examples: US Project Convergence, NATO Multi-national Experience, Systematic user group for Sitaware Battle management system development, US Space Command integration of operations and R&D 

The above improvement enhances the legacy process but does not meet the contemporary requirements of the theatre. The next section studies a software-defined value stream for military defence capabilities.

 

Generating Software-Defined or Driven Military Capabilities

The software-defined capabilities have been evolving for the past 15-20 years in civilian systems and are gradually being adopted in military-grade platforms and systems.  Software-defined radios (SDR), antennas (SDA) ,  networks (SDN) and virtual computers/infrastructure (SDI)  are widely used in military C5ISTAR systems. Later fourth-generation fighters  are fly-by-wire controlled and equipped with fire-and-forget missiles . Air Defence systems have been computer-controlled and are currently receiving over-the-air software updates while in mission.  The US DoD has a concept for a military Internet of Things composed of autonomous systems and a combination of weapon systems networked together.  

Software-defined, virtualised, or cognitive  features are primarily coded in programs, and changing the program also changes the effect or features of the armament. This opens two opportunities for agile or adaptable military systems: 

1. Algorithm development and continuous integration (CI) of new software and configurations can respond more quickly to battlefield changes than contemporary mechanically defined platforms. After a software update, a MIMO phased-array surveillance  radar may operate on a different frequency band and modify its beamforming and RF features to avoid being identified as a military radar.
2. A variety of sensors and effectors can be connected to a software-defined network, which enables faster target acquisition and combined fires against the target. A cognitive network with edge processing capacity can accelerate the BLUE OODA-loop, making it quicker than RED, which will ultimately gain victory, at least in a long game. 

The acquisition and generation of software-defined military capabilities need a different value-creating chain than the legacy armament. Figure 3 illustrates the separation of software (SW) and hardware (HW) supply chains with specialised features for:

• Sourcing from open code or algorithm pools and using public development environments to engage smaller and more specialised developers.
• Using agile methods to create software-defined features in products. Typically, the development windows (sprints) vary from a few weeks to some months. Hence, the span from idea to implementation is remarkably shorter than in a legacy value stream.
• Continuous integration (CI) ensures essential coherence and quality before the feature is introduced in force generation.
• Shorter feedback loops from integration, generation and utilisation to collect lessons and improve/correct features in the following iterations.
• More standard, mass-produced hardware that is operated by software that makes the difference in sensitivity, range, manoeuvrability, or effect at the tactical level.
• The governance of the value stream should be based on strategic partnerships for software development and integration, which uses as much as possible open-source code. Naturally, the military hardware still needs conventional procurement from the market.

Figure 3: A view of the software-defined capabilities value stream

The software-defined military capability requires long-term software development partnerships or a remarkable investment in a military in-house software development cadre, while actively using the value produced in an open-source society.  Furthermore, the hardware (platforms, weapons, sensors) needs to be digitised, more standard, and support the virtualisation of features. Software portability from one hardware platform to another, or integration with open application programming interfaces (APIs), becomes a significant threshold for the cost efficiency of the value stream. Naturally, the current manufacturers of bespoke platforms with closed licenses are opposing the model. 

There are several ongoing initiatives in the Armed Forces to improve their capability and transfer the value stream, for example:

• US DoD runs Project Convergence  to experiment with artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, enhance network cognition, and build defence capabilities for their cyber and electromagnetic space.
• The Land Command of Finland has been developing their Model 18 C5ISTAR system since 2010 with software-defined features and bi-annual development cycles. 
• US DoD has ordered a “comprehensive transformation”  of the US Army, utilising emerging technologies, integrating separate organisations to develop new capabilities, and transitioning to agile funding to build or acquire emerging opportunities. 

Consumer market, dual-use, military-specific, cyber-physical product/elements acquisition and integration

A more flexible acquisition model that would recover faster from battlefield surprise would be to utilise multiple sources (Government of the Shelf, Military of the Shelf, Commercial of the Shelf, In-house developed, and Strategic partnerships) to experiment, develop/manufacture, integrate, and generate. The model introduces a dual-use product line that sources from global consumer markets, integrates feasible parts into the military system of systems, and trains troops before rolling out capabilities to the theatre, as illustrated in Figure 4:

• Armed Forces pushes their experimentation closer to ideation by hosting hackathons, competitions or challenges. The winning concepts, prototypes or models will be awarded a development contract and hosted either in the software, defence, or civilian industrial chain.
• Continuous integration extends to include dual-use products that have shorter lifespans but can be acquired in vast quantities from the global supply chains. 

Figure 4: A view of the multi-sourced capabilities value stream

The multi-sourced model can be adjusted to meet the special requirements of each theatre if the force generation is also specialised. The adaptive military capability acquisition and generation model should address the current requirements on the Ukrainian battlefield  while also embracing the 4th Industrial Revolution, where manufacturing is brought to the theatre, as permitted by the threat environment. 

Instead of aiming for full operational capabilities with lengthened storage life, this model produces minimum viable products  that may mature through the integration and generation phases, ultimately achieving sufficient maturity for the battlefield. Naturally, the digital twin of the military system of systems  helps test how new elements integrate into the defence entirety, identify potential vulnerabilities, and determine the consequences of failure.