Mission Partnerships in UK Defence: How to make them work

Introduction: Defence as an engine for growth

The government’s Defence Industrial Strategy 2025 (DIS25) is clear that “business as usual” in procurement is no longer an option. Defence has been placed at the heart of the UK’s modern industrial strategy, identified as one of eight priority sectors to drive economic growth and resilience.

The strategy is frank in its diagnosis of the current system’s weaknesses. Defence investment and economic strategy remain misaligned. Procurement processes have failed to adapt to an era where emerging technologies are reshaping warfare faster than at any point in living memory. Structural inefficiencies – from misaligned incentives to poor competition and weak exports – have left the UK industrial base struggling to deliver at the pace and scale required.

DIS25 calls for something different: procurement that reduces waste, accelerates innovation, empowers SMEs, and crowds in private capital. It seeks to create a vibrant defence technology ecosystem, one where delivery is faster, risk is shared more equitably, and capability can spiral forward through rapid increments. The ambition is to transform the relationship between government and industry, so that defence becomes not just a consumer of technology but a driver of economic productivity.

This context sets the stage for the idea of “mission partnership.” The term is gaining currency across defence, but its meaning remains contested. At its best, it represents a practical shift in how programmes are delivered: a relationship structure where incentives, accountability and behaviours are aligned to outcomes. At its worst, it risks becoming a hollow buzzword, a softer synonym for “contractor” that re-badges old models without changing the fundamentals.

The question this paper explores is whether mission partnerships can provide the practical vehicle through which the ambitions of DIS25 are realised. It argues that they can, but only if approached seriously: as a means of reshaping delivery behaviours, not simply as a new label for old practices.

Why the system struggles today

The weaknesses identified in DIS25 are not new. They are the product of decades of choices and cultural habits that have left the system ill-suited to today’s demands.

Policy pressure for pace, but institutional drag. Ministers have repeatedly signalled the need for faster delivery. The Integrated Procurement Model (IPM) commits Defence to deliver major equipment programmes within five years and digital programmes within three – targets that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Yet the approvals and governance cycles underpinning procurement remain rooted in Cold War-era timelines.

Churn widens the knowledge gap. High turnover across MOD, particularly in technical and engineering roles, erodes institutional memory. Programmes lose continuity, forcing new teams to relearn the same lessons and repeat the same mistakes. This constant rotation undermines trust between customer and supplier, creating a public–private knowledge gap that grows wider with every cycle.

Outsourcing legacies and switching costs. Two decades of outsourcing have left Defence dependent on a limited set of suppliers. Relationships have become brittle, with high switching costs that make even obvious changes operationally risky. Far from creating a competitive marketplace, outsourcing has often entrenched incumbents, leaving government hostage to long-term contract dependencies.

Blurry boundaries and accountability. Too many programmes begin with contract mechanics rather than mission outcomes. Assurance is treated as paperwork to be satisfied, not as a shared responsibility for safety and performance. The result is a culture where suppliers do what the contract says, not what the mission requires.

The combined effect is predictable: while policy demands agility and tempo, the system continues to generate delay.

A shifting moment in defence innovation

The environment, however, is shifting. Three external forces are now reshaping the context in which DIS25 must succeed:

Defence and national security are attracting more private investment than at any point in the last two decades. From dual-use technologies to dedicated defence funds, investors are beginning to see the sector not as a pariah but as a growth opportunity. This aligns with DIS25’s ambition to “crowd in” private capital as part of a modern industrial strategy.
Risk appetite. New entrants — from venture-backed scale-ups to founder-led SMEs — are willing to spend their own money and move at speeds that primes rarely can. This is not without risk; some will over-promise and fail. But their presence forces incumbents and government alike to confront the reality that delivery can happen faster.
Engineers and entrepreneurs from adjacent sectors such as software, advanced manufacturing, and data infrastructure are now entering defence. They bring fresh practices, expectations and cultural norms. Where primes may see long cycles and serial governance as inevitable, these new entrants view them as avoidable inefficiencies.

These forces do not remove the structural challenges of procurement. They do not eliminate the realities of safety, assurance, or sovereign control. But they do change the context. New entrants are not the solution in themselves, yet they can be a catalyst — the external pressure that can force change where internal reform has repeatedly stalled.

Geography matters

It is important to be clear that while the drivers of reform are international, the practice of mission partnership is national. Each country’s legal frameworks, procurement doctrines and political appetite for risk differ.

In the United States, “Other Transaction Authorities” (OTAs) have become a vehicle for rapid contracting. They provide legal flexibilities that enable faster acquisition, but they are specific to US law and market scale. In Europe, different legal constraints and cultural attitudes towards defence investment shape a different environment altogether.

In the UK, mission partnerships must be rooted in our own frameworks: the Integrated Procurement Model, the Procurement Act 2023, and the Defence Industrial Strategy 2025. There is no global template. Approaches may rhyme across allies, but the hard constraints — law, sovereignty of standards, procurement doctrine — remain national. If mission partnerships are to endure here, they must be codified within UK doctrine, not borrowed wholesale from elsewhere.

What mission partnership means in practice

If mission partnership is to be more than rhetoric, it must be defined by practice. At its heart, a mission partnership is a funded, outcome-led relationship between a customer and an accountable integrator, with suppliers arrayed behind them, where:

Incentives are aligned to outcomes, not effort. Fixed capacity with scope flexibility ensures that delivery stays focused on mission need, not contract negotiation.
Financial and reputational skin-in-the-game is explicit. Gainshare or at-risk fees create alignment and mutual accountability.
Users are first-order actors. Soldiers, operators and end-users engage directly with engineers and product owners, compressing the “find–fix” loop.
Assurance is joint. Rather than treating assurance as a serial paperwork exercise, customer and supplier engineers co-develop safety cases and approvals, guided by risk appetite.
Open standards are default. Integration must survive supplier changes. Closed interfaces are antithetical to mission partnership.

This is not about lowering standards or cutting governance corners. It is about meeting the UK’s own tempo commitments without unforced delay.

DDS as a test case

The Army’s Dismounted Data System (DDS) provides a practical example of mission partnership in action. Delivered to 4 Brigade in Estonia under operational pressure and without exemptions, DDS was fielded to brigade scale in less than a year. The capability itself was significant — a tactical recce-strike system connecting soldiers, sensors, uncrewed systems and headquarters nodes. But more important than the technology was the way it was delivered.

DDS worked because pragmatism drove design. Rather than starting from scratch or insisting on a monolithic build, the programme leveraged existing components wherever possible. Some came from earlier MOD projects, others from the commercial market, and some were developed privately by industry. Their provenance mattered less than their utility and the ability to integrate them quickly into a coherent whole.

By modelling the system in this way — combining what already existed, adding only what was missing, and treating iteration as normal — the programme built confidence step by step. Each increment delivered something tangible into the hands of soldiers, who could test it, critique it and shape improvements in real time. That iterative progress did more to build trust between users, MOD sponsors and the mission partner than any paperwork or contractual rhetoric could have achieved.

The lesson from DDS is that mission partnership is as much about pragmatism as principle. It is about using what has already been paid for, making it work together, and introducing new elements only when they genuinely add value. Done this way, capability arrives faster, resources are conserved, and confidence grows through delivery rather than promises.

Risks and opportunities of adopting the approach

Scaling mission partnership requires honesty about risks, and realism about opportunities.

New entrants. Their advantage lies in speed, capital and willingness to take risk. But this must be matched by professional systems engineering. Heroics cannot scale. This new cohort must also demonstrate openness — being prepared to recommend a competitor’s component if it is right for the mission.

Primes. Incumbents must shorten cycles, expose cost drivers, and abandon the false dichotomy that safety and pace are mutually exclusive. If governance processes prevent delivery within the timelines mandated by IPM, then it is governance that must change.

MOD. The department must design competitions that test behaviours, not just paper compliance. Trust, transparency, adaptability, supply-chain maturity and assurance mindset cannot be scored on bid documents alone. They must be tested through sprint-based evaluations, live integration and real-world injects.

Common failure modes. There are clear pitfalls to avoid:

Re-badging time-and-materials contracts as “partnerships.”
One-way transparency, where government demands openness but does not reciprocate.
Paper-heavy “agile” that reproduces old habits under new labels.
Closed interfaces that promise speed today but create lock-in tomorrow.

Aligning mission partnership with DIS25

When considered in this light, mission partnerships are not a bolt-on to the Defence Industrial Strategy. They are a delivery model that directly supports its objectives.

Reducing waste: fixed-capacity, outcome-based contracts cut down on endless change negotiations.
Accelerating delivery: joint assurance and user-centred design compress timelines without cutting safety.
Empowering SMEs: partnerships create room for new entrants who are willing to take risk and bring fresh talent.
Crowding in private capital: by rewarding openness and faster cycles, partnerships create a credible pathway for investors.
Driving exports and resilience: open architectures and repeatable integration models create capabilities that can be adapted for allies and partners.

Conclusion

Mission partnership is not a catchphrase. It is a practical delivery relationship that, when coupled with the right competition design, contracting and assurance, can help the UK meet its own tempo aspirations. It rewards openness, user-centred engineering and shared risk. It demands more from everyone involved: primes must adapt, new entrants must mature, and MOD must design competitions that surface behaviours, not bias to known companies and relationships.

The Defence Industrial Strategy 2025 has opened the door to reform and Mission Partnerships may be the way we finally walk through it.

DDS has shown that the model is not theoretical. It can work under operational pressure, without exemptions, and deliver meaningful capability at a pace the system rarely achieves. The challenge now is to scale it, codify it in doctrine, and embed it in governance so that it endures beyond the goodwill of individuals.

The risk is that “mission partnership” becomes just another piece of jargon, deployed in speeches but absent in practice. The opportunity is that it becomes the vehicle through which the UK defence system finally aligns political ambition, industrial capacity, and operational need. In a world where threats are accelerating and resources are constrained, that is an opportunity the UK cannot afford to miss.

Mission partnerships are not waiting on new legislation or fresh authorities. They are legally allowable today and immediately achievable within the framework of the Procurement Act, IPM, and the Defence Industrial Strategy. The harder challenge is not law but execution. It is always striking how passionately change will be resisted, and how cleverly it will be blocked, if doing so makes life easier for those invested in the status quo. That is a tale as old as time. The real test is whether the humans in the system — civil servants, primes, new entrants, and ministers alike — can buy into a change that demands more of them in the short-term but promises far greater rewards in the long run.

“When you are finished changing, you are finished.” — Benjamin Franklin

“There are two kinds of companies: those that change, and those that disappear.” — Andy Grove

“There is no silver bullet. There are only lead bullets.” — Ben Horowitz

Robbie Hicks

Lt Col Robbie Hicks is the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Portfolio Lead in the Futures Directorate of the UK Army Headquarters. He has worked in Army Reform, led the investment of the Secretary of States’ £250M Transformation Fund, managed the Army’s £1.3Bn Infrastructure Plan, and currently leads the Human Machine Teaming Project and the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Programme.

Peter Williams

Lt Col Pete Williams (Ret) is General Manager of Edge Systems at Rowden Technologies. A former Royal Marine, he led the UK Ministry of Defence’s innovation hub, jHub, before joining Rowden to drive Mission Systems Engineering delivery for the UK Armed Forces, including the Army's Human Machine Teaming project.