As the world continues to navigate rising tensions, shifting alliances and proliferating technological threats, the United Kingdom’s Strategic Defence Review 2025 (SDR)1 arrives with rhetorical conviction and structural ambition. Billed as a generational reset; “making Britain safer: secure at home, strong abroad”, the Review outlines a significant repositioning of British Defence strategy. But behind the confident language and funding uplift lies a more complex question:
Can Britain not just spend; but adapt, build, and lead?
At the centre of this recalibration is a strategic posture anchored by the phrase “NATO First”.
In its clearest articulation in decades, the UK commits to shaping its force structure, industrial base, and technological partnerships around the needs of the Alliance. This represents a conceptual return to collective Defence as a foundational organising principle – not just a contingency. It’s a necessary response to an increasingly volatile Euro-Atlantic security environment, where Russian conventional and hybrid threats, evolving nuclear doctrines, and a shifting US posture toward the Indo-Pacific have redrawn the map of strategic prioritisation.
Yet the SDR is more than a statement of alignment. It is an attempt to transition UK Defence from a posture of managed decline and occasional expeditionary engagement to one of enduring readiness, technological competitiveness, and whole-of-society resilience. “We are not currently optimised for warfare against a peer military state,” the Review concedes – a rare moment of institutional candour. “Business as usual is no longer an option.”
This inflection point is echoed across the Defence policy community, with analysts emphasising that the SDR must address not only strategic objectives but also the cultural adaptability of Defence institutions.
To that end, the SDR proposes a fundamental rethinking of how deterrence is generated. Traditional force metrics (numbers of troops, tanks, ships etc.) are replaced by a vision of an Integrated Force, digitally networked and AI-enabled, capable of delivering precision at scale and responding at speed. Lethality is increasingly defined not by mass, but by the pace and agility of decision-making across domains: land, sea, air, cyber, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum.
This transformation is not theoretical. It leans heavily on operational lessons from Ukraine, where adaptive use of low-cost drone swarms, commercial ISR platforms, and asymmetric command structures has challenged decades of orthodoxy. The Review’s proposed “digital targeting web,” due in 2027, is emblematic of this thinking: a system to fuse sensors, decision-makers, and effectors into a unified digital kill chain. It’s also a quiet nod to NATO’s own efforts to push data-centric warfighting to the forefront of its concept of Multi-Domain Operations.
However, the challenge is not just technical. As Professor Malcolm Chalmers notes, the UK must address the risk of becoming a “hollow force” – a military superficially capable but lacking endurance, stockpiles, industrial resilience, and mobilisation depth.2 The SDR’s Defence Investment Plan, which replaces the troubled Equipment Plan, will aim to address this by reprioritising munitions, infrastructure, and support capabilities. There is also talk of restoring stockpile depth and accelerating munitions production capacity under a new ‘always on’ manufacturing model.
This raises deeper questions about the structure of the UK's Defence-industrial ecosystem. As Sir Julian Brazier, RUSI Fellow and Karve contributor, has argued, meaningful reform must reach beyond timeline restructuring and focus instead on outcome-led problem-solving, modular platform design, and stronger demand-side signals.3 The review calls for a “new partnership with industry” under the leadership of a revitalised National Armaments Director4, one that moves away from Cold War-era procurement cycles and embraces market agility. Importantly, it also proposes segmenting procurement into three timelines: two-year modular platforms, one-year iterative upgrades, and three-month rapid commercial acquisitions. For innovators, particularly in dual-use domains, this is potentially transformative.
Still, how this will play out in practice remains uncertain. Rapid acquisition models will demand not just administrative reform but a more porous boundary between Defence and innovation ecosystems. The SDR hints at this in its references to outcome-based problem sharing, agile experimentation, and regional tech clusters. There is mention of new university partnerships, of digital twin environments and simulation platforms, and of anchoring research in a new UK Defence Innovation structure with a £400m budget ringfenced annually.
What’s left unsaid, but quietly critical, is that the UK’s competitive edge may lie not in platforms or procurement, but in how effectively it can connect early-stage innovation to operational end-users and strategic buyers – both domestic and allied. The Review’s endorsement of international capability partnerships such as AUKUS5 and GCAP6, and its call to mainstream exportability into procurement processes from the outset, underscores this shift. These aren’t just industrial strategies – they are instruments of deterrence.
This is a space where nimble actors – those able to bridge Defence requirements, alliance frameworks, and tech communities – can shape the market and the mission. Not through grandstanding, but through quiet convening power, sharp insight, and delivery. Much of this work is happening behind the scenes: mapping sovereign industrial capacity to alliance gaps; validating user needs within complex multilateral programmes; interpreting where venture-backed technologies can play in grey-zone operations and hard deterrence alike.
There are also broader implications for alliance dynamics. NATO’s own Defence Innovation Accelerator (DIANA)7 and Innovation Fund8 reflect a growing recognition: that the next wave of military advantage will not come from steel alone. Instead, it will come from ecosystems that combine state demand with private capital, technical validation with trusted networks, and speed with credibility. As Defence strategist Wojciech Strupczewski explores, supranational mechanisms like the EU’s Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) could play a pivotal role in enabling this kind of ecosystem across dual-use and Defence-critical technologies.9 The UK’s opportunity is not just to invest in innovation, but to shape the frameworks that pull it through to deployment and interoperability – across both NATO and EU-aligned architectures.
Yet as Karve has consistently argued, technological transformation alone will not deliver advantage if it is not matched by institutional reform. The SDR rightly outlines bold ambitions – from digitally enabled forces to sovereign resilience capabilities – but without cultural change inside Defence, procurement risks remaining reactive, and strategy merely aspirational. This is the real test: whether the system can evolve fast enough to enable delivery at the speed and scale required.
If the SDR is to succeed, the UK must treat transformation as more than a series of announcements. It must embed NATO-aligned, tech-enabled warfighting capability not just in doctrine, but in training, logistics, and procurement culture. It must accelerate connections between frontline requirements and non-traditional suppliers. And it must do so while maintaining alliance coherence and export competitiveness.
Whether this effort succeeds will not be measured in white papers or defence budget percentages. It will be measured in the credibility of deterrence, the adaptability of institutions, and the ability to field relevant capability when it matters most.
The tools are emerging. The framework is being set.
What remains is delivery – and the quiet, complex choreography behind it.
References
[1] Ministry of Defence. The Strategic Defence Review 2025 - Making Britain Safer: secure at home, strong abroad. GOV.UK. Published June 2, 2025. Source »
[2] UK Defence Spending Decisions Can’t Wait for the Strategic Defence Review. Rusi.org. Published 2024. Source »
[3] Inefficiency to Advantage: Principles for Transforming UK Defence Procurement» Karve. Karveinternational.com. Published 2025. Source »
[4] Ministry of Defence. Major defence reforms launched, with new National Armaments Director to tackle waste and boost industry. GOV.UK. Published October 25, 2024. Source »
[5] Tobin J. AUKUS security partnership. House of Lords Library. Published February 19, 2024. Source »
[6] Petrie L. What is the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP)? House of Commons Library. Published June 3, 2025. Source »
[7] DIANA | Home. Nato.int. Published 2025. Source »
[8] The Nato Innovation Fund | NIF. Nato Innovation Fund. Published October 10, 2024. Source »
[9] Arm, Move, Strike: Bolstering European Hard Power through EU Executive Action» Karve. Karveinternational.com. Published 2025. Source »
