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.