Britain must overhaul defence at speed to face a harsher world

At Davos 2026, Mark Carney observed the “Old World Order - the Pax Americana - is over.” The global landscape has shifted. New alliances, emerging technologies (from cyber to hypersonic systems), new threat vectors and new theatres of conflict such as the warming Arctic are transforming the strategic environment.

The security umbrella of that order has broken down, our military must adapt to navigate a new multipolar world - defence, security, readiness and resilience rests on our own shoulders.

We cannot rely on legacy expectations. Readiness now means preparing for a more contested environment across combined military, industrial, digital, and civilian domains.

Economically, defence and its objective is unique: Large sums must be spent to build military capabilities and resilience to achieve deterrence – but so that these very capabilities that have been built never have to be deployed.

This is a complex balance for the Government to strike - spend enough to achieve the objective but without deploying taxpayer money unnecessarily. What is necessary or unnecessary is at the heart of the political debate - defence is now our nation’s unavoidable priority, and the Government must live up to its first duty and immediately heighten the national conversation as a political and policy imperative.

Why? We need UK defence transformation of an unprecedented scale and complexity delivered at pace – a market reset, bold and decisive policy to cut through the complexities, effective sustainable solutions and frameworks to enable staggeringly high levels of funding to flow into the defence ecosystem.

The challenge is both funding and execution. To deliver credible and timely capability, the Government must solve together, not one at a time, a gridlock of interlinking priorities: defining future battlefield needs, pace of procurement, scaling industrial capacity, mobilising all forms of capital and workforce, creating supply chain resilience and driving innovation.

Without transformation, however large the budget, slow procurement, fragmented supply chains and limited industrial scaling will continue.

With the ambition underpinned by political and policy will, progress can be made quickly. Success will depend on Government, industry, innovators, and capital providers adapting their risk appetites and working together: learning from ongoing innovation in live conflicts, acting on clear demand signals from front-line military forces, accessing growth capital, incentivising primes to source from innovators and invest their own capital in R&D, rapid experimentation and new approaches to replace stockpiling for constantly changing technologies.

This must be driven by Government alongside the enduring need to secure and scale supply chains for existing platforms.

The catalysts to turn ambition into delivery are clear. First, the Government must adopt faster, flexible procurement models that distinguishes between urgent capability needs and long-term programmes.

No one size fits all, instead speed is critical for readiness and deterrence.

Second, delivering a scalable resilient industrial base that can respond to conflict means supporting domestic production capacity, improving surge readiness and helping key suppliers expand output quickly.

Third, close collaboration between Government, primes, SMEs, investors, and technology partners combining public demand signals with private capital and innovation.

Fourth, build sovereign capability for critical materials and systems, reduce dependence on foreign-controlled supply chains.

Fifth, upgrade legacy platforms for effective operational capability.

Defence investment will bring economic and strategic value to the UK economy. This transformation challenge will endure for decades and drive skilled jobs, regional manufacturing, advanced engineering and enhance associated specialisms such as AI, cyber, autonomy, and materials science.

Protecting our citizens will depend on transforming the fundamental frameworks that shape investment, innovation and collaboration, allowing us to buy faster, build efficiently, deploy private capital, secure supply chains and invest in people and innovation.

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Juliet Reingold is a partner at global law firm Simmons & Simmons who heads the firm’s defence team.

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