Starting Now: a UK defence technology architecture fit for wartime pace.
Ten months after the Strategic Defence Review, the Defence Investment Plan is still unpublished and Project ASGARD remains a boutique exception. This briefing argues the direction of travel is right but the architecture being built to deliver it is wrong — and that the right one is tractable, affordable, and urgent.
The numbers that frame the choice.
Six figures Members can quote in any debate on UK procurement reform, drawn from the briefing's evidence base.
Build your own drone.
The architecture argued for in this briefing only matters if citizens, engineers, hobbyists and units can actually build the things. Droneforge is opening up an end-to-end guide — components, frames, flight controllers, autonomy stacks, regulatory notes, testing — written for the UK context.
This space is reserved. The full build guide will land here.
Open the build hub →Eight chapters, two annexes, one architectural choice.
The briefing diagnoses where the UK is, what Ukraine has actually built, the five principles that travel, the British obstacles to adoption, and a concrete First Hundred Days plan for both government and Parliament.
Executive Summary
The UK does not need more money or more reviews. It needs a different institutional architecture.
01The Position Today
What the Strategic Defence Review said, what has happened, and why the current architecture cannot deliver.
02What Ukraine Has Built
The four-layer stack — Trembita, Brave1, DELTA, DOT-Chain — and the Army of Drones bonus that integrates them.
03Five Architectural Principles
Federation over centralisation; end-user selection; marketplace procurement; integrated feedback loops; civilian seeding.
04UK-Specific Obstacles
Treasury risk culture, civil service incentives, prime-contractor dependencies, parliamentary oversight expectations.
05UK Implementation Architecture
Foundation, innovation cluster, battle management, procurement and fulfilment — composed from existing capacity.
06The First Hundred Days
What government should do in the first four weeks, second month, third month — and what Parliament can do in parallel.
07Risk Analysis
Honest treatment of the risks of the proposed architecture and the larger risks of not proceeding.
08Recommendations
Seven specific, costed, actionable recommendations for ministers — and the scrutiny role for Members.
A–CAnnexes
Comparative timeline, Ukrainian institutional reference, and suggested Parliamentary Questions for Members.
The composition requires political decision rather than additional resource.
The United Kingdom has the elements required to build a Ukrainian-pattern defence-technology architecture. It has not yet composed them. The political decision is available to be taken within the current Parliament. The window to take it credibly is narrower than it appears, and the cost of waiting is higher than it is usually described.