Digital Engineering: How are we shaping the future of defence?

Emerging technologies have always been a defence priority. In operational environments, the competitive advantages they deliver determine success or failure. Current environments have also demonstrated the importance of both Technology adoption, and the logistics support to back it up.

Now is no exception, as the defence industry is called to focus its efforts on the long-term sustainment of our Armed Forces’ capability. A key component of Through Life Support, our Digital Engineering ecosystem creates an end-to-end digital representation of your capability that allows you to maintain a comprehensive understanding of your project, from development through to deployment and beyond.

It facilitates cost and time savings from project inception, then provides for extended equipment lifecycles through integrating real-time condition monitoring – tracking physical state, predicting maintenance needs, and monitoring fuel and ammunition stores levels to prioritise supply efforts and maximise operational advantage.

Earlier this year, the Strategic Defence Review prioritised the integration of cutting-edge technologies into our Armed Forces:

“The Army must accelerate the development and deployment of its new ‘Recce-Strike’ approach — combining existing capabilities and technologies, such as armoured platforms, with constantly evolving technology — as part of its efforts to modernise the SRC. It should be bolder in its ambition, seeking to increase lethality ten-fold.”

Lessons from Ukraine confirm that strategic data exploitation has become a foundational capability for modern operations. With engagement outcomes determined by multi-domain integration of land, cyber, and information capabilities, our Armed Forces must have access to this capability, to enable fast, effective decision making across all operational levels.  

The drive for operational efficiency is evident in the defence-supporting industries, shaped by the government’s commitment to spending wisely and aligning capabilities precisely with strategic requirements. The key to achieving this is Digital Engineering. Through intensive modelling, simulation, and data analysis, you can be sure that your project will reach the desired benefit, in a cost-effective manner before you even leave the design phase, saving you from costly errors down the line.

Beyond the initial stages, Digital Engineering uses a ‘single source of truth’, containing all of the up-to-date information about the project to ensure all teams remain aware of progress as you move towards your technology achieving operational capability.

It also provides an end-to-end view of your capability's lifecycle, ensuring implementation logistics account for everything frontline users need in the field, delivering operational technology on time and on budget, with ongoing support to match. Implementing a solution that does not meet the requirement can result in wasted time and money, as well as negatively impacting the reputation of your work. Digital Engineering helps you ensure that you are producing the best solution for the job and accounts for any issues that could arise, before they derail your project.

Digital Engineering itself is constantly improving through the implementation of new technology. In the first episode of our podcast, The Briefing Room, we explored the potential of AI in Digital Engineering and how it could be used in defence. Given the high stakes of defence, it was key for our discussion to explore how to safely use an emerging technology that is still changing rapidly, and the importance of ensuring your tools are the appropriate ones to accomplish your task.

AI holds significant potential in Digital Engineering: it handles large data sets with ease, like those Digital Engineering relies on, and it can save a lot of time and money in data processing requirements, as it can spot errors, identify trends, and highlight issues much faster than a human would be able to.

As with most emerging technologies, AI raises concerns – particularly in government and defence contexts. While its ability to process vast amounts of data is undeniable, it often falls short in delivering consistently reliable and accurate analyses. It could also incur a large upfront cost, as security concerns may restrict the use of open-source AI models, forcing use of private ones, which are costly and time-consuming to build.

Digital Engineering also relies on people being able to trust their data. If you cannot verify your system and the data it uses, the less benefit you get from it. This doesn't mean that AI is unusable. Instead, if your project will benefit from AI, it’s about finding ways to manage these concerns, such as implementing human ‘sanity checks’ to aid accuracy, or working with a smaller model that uses a data set that you have fine control over. This way, AI will become one tool among many, that works only when you need it to meet specific requirements. The same is true for most technology, including Digital Engineering. All of it offers many benefits, but implementing technology for the sake of it, rather than to consciously meet a need, can dilute those benefits and leave you stuck in an inefficient workflow.

In defence, ensuring efficient practices is critical to your business success. It shows that you not only know how the Ministry of Defence thinks, but that you appreciate why they do things that way. As government spending increasingly shifts towards a new mindset, you will need to meet these expectations to connect and thrive.

Speak with our team to see if Digital Engineering can optimise your outcomes today.