UK MoD embracing need for technological and procurement change, says senior official

A UK Commando Force Ghost UAV surveilling the ground ahead of Royal Marines Armoured Support Group Viking vehicles as part of winter training in Norway in February 2025. (MoD/Crown Copyright)

The UK needs to draw on lessons from Ukraine and other theatres to create a new paradigm of warfare, a senior civil servant in the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said.

Speaking at SAE Media's Future Soldier Technology conference in London in March, Paul Lincoln, second permanent secretary at the MoD, said that “we need to revolutionise the way we fight through digitisation and modernisation”, as he laid out a vision of how the MoD was addressing this need.

Lincoln cited a feature of the army's Land Operating Concept (LOC), the integration of autonomous systems and the aim of pursuing the “20/40/40 capability split”. This refers to the idea that at the heart of land capability is high-quality armour and attack helicopters (AHs), but as these are expensive, take a long time to produce, and require considerable training, they should form only 20% of lethality, although currently they provide nearly all of it.

He said that the concept proposes that in future 40% of lethality should come from smaller, cheaper unmanned systems, which can engage targets at much greater range. The remaining 40% of lethality should come from disposable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and intelligent munitions, which are attritable, scalable, available, and can have an effect “over huge distances”.