By Blythe Crawford CBE

In modern warfare, speed, innovation and industrial capacity are the new frontlines of defence writes Blythe Crawford.

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Defence contractors in Kyiv have been welcoming a new class of visitor since war erupted in the Middle East: delegations from Gulf states desperate to acquire counter-drone technology.

Their countries are struggling to defend key infrastructure with conventional weapons and they are now scrambling to buy combat-proven systems wherever they can.

Britain could soon find itself joining the queue. British ships, bases and citizens are potential targets in the widening conflict in the Middle East. It’s not hard to imagine scenarios in which Britain, already active in defence operations, gets sucked into an all-out conflagration.

Are we prepared for that? The 2025 Strategic Defence Review concluded that Britain does not have a fighting force, or a procurement system, fit for 21st century deterrence.

If Britain were drawn into a major conflict tomorrow, our challenge would not simply be access to technology, but the ability to adapt and scale defence manufacturing faster than our adversaries. That requires a fundamentally different procurement model – one built for speed, competition and industrial mobilisation.

Virtual defence marketplaces such as Brave One in Ukraine, and Grail for Nato allies, which connect government directly with a broad network of manufacturers and innovators, show how this can be done.

For most of the Cold War, deterrence rested on two pillars: large standing armies, and later, exquisite capability - small numbers of highly advanced platforms that took years and billions of pounds to develop. Today, neither is decisive. What matters is which side can innovate and scale the fastest and do so at the lowest possible cost.

Ukraine shows what this looks like in practice. On the battlefield, innovation cycles succeed each other with lightning speed. New drones, electronic warfare techniques and targeting methods appear, are countered, and are then re-engineered in roughly four to six-week loops.

The Ministry of Defence, by contrast, takes 6.5 years on average to award contracts above £20 million in value. To become a serious deterrent power, our procurement must move at the pace of innovation. We should be aiming to award contracts in days, not years.

Britain needs to move from “Defence 2.0” - a reliance on exquisite and expensive platforms - to “Defence 3.0”, where the real source of deterrence lies in innovation and industrial strength.

To achieve this, we need to broaden the defence industry beyond the handful of primes that supply our Armed Forces.

These primes are not villains; they have simply done what the system rewarded them for, building bureaucracies that “dock into” the MOD’s own labyrinth. This symbiotic structure is not built for speed or resilience.

In its stead, we should be creating a real-time defence marketplace, where the government posts detailed problem statements, and hundreds of manufacturers and SMEs from adjacent sectors (automotive, aerospace, robotics, advanced materials) collaborate and compete to solve them.

Think GitHub and Amazon marketplace, not a single, sealed tender.

Second, the mix of what we invest in must change. There will always be a case for a handful of high-end systems – Eurofighters, nuclear subs, and precision weaponry. But they should be surrounded by swarms of cheap, disposable, rapidly iterated systems that soak up enemy fire, confuse sensors and impose costs.

That is because in the economics of modern warfare, the cost-benefit equation has been inverted. On today’s battlefields, an incoming £500 drone can force the firing of a missile that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds more.

This is what we are witnessing in the Gulf, where America’s allies are rapidly running out of missile interceptors to counter Iranian drone attacks.

In a Middle East crisis that is escalating by the hour, Britain needs more than statements of support for its allies and a handful of very expensive platforms at sea. It needs to signal, credibly, that its defence system can learn and adapt faster than the conflict can escalate.

This will not be achieved by another white paper, or by creating a new bureaucracy to fight the old one. It requires an explicit decision now: to treat procurement, innovation and industrial agility as Britain’s new frontline, and to reform accordingly before events in the Middle East or elsewhere teach us, the hard way, the futility of fighting yesterday’s wars.

Blythe Crawford served in the RAF for over 30 years, retiring as Commandant of the Air & Space Warfare Centre driving radical transformation of capability development in support of Ukraine.

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