A British Army soldier from 1 Royal Gurkha Rifles seen using an L3Harris AN/PRC-167 Multi-channel Manpack radio during the Brunei Jungle Warfare Skills Meet Patrolling Competition on 20 November 2024. (MoD/Crown Copyright)
The British Army is hoping to change its procurement processes in the digital space in the wake of problems with the Morpheus programme in order to take advantage of rapid technological developments that offer easily incorporated capability improvements.
Speaking at the SAE Media Group's Mobile Deployable Communications conference held in London in late January, Brigadier Jez Sharpe, head of the tactical system service executive, Defence Digital, said that the Digital Strategy for Defence had identified that the delivery of digital capability needs to be different. He noted the recent statement by the chief of the general staff of the need for an “any-to-any network” and highlighted the assumption that “data centricity is no longer an enabler but is the ‘vital ground'”.
Brig Sharpe explained that the new service executive model (SEM) for procurement represented a shift of mindset, with constant reiteration through the life of a programme to maintain and improve capability. He said that the aim “is to leverage the technology environment in the digital space … so that capability is in the soldier's hands earlier, and you keep iterating on that capability so it improves over time”. He contrasted that with the project approach, where capability tends to degrade from the moment of launch, and said that the aspiration is to achieve better capability over the life of equipment for equal budget and effort.
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