The Ministry of Defence’s National Armaments Director (NAD) Rupert Pearce said Monday that a long-awaited delivery plan for the £298 billion Defence Investment Plan (DIP) is set to land “within the next few weeks” – and MOD will be working more closely than ever with investors and partners to open up commercial opportunities.
Pearce, in a 30-minute speech at the Thales Tech Summit in London on September 14, placed software iteration, private capital integration, and autonomous capabilities at the core of defence strategy – saying that to build affordable mass and lethality, MOD is advancing a “20-40-40” mix. i.e. Forces will aim for a benchmark of 20% crewed platforms, 40% ‘attritable’ systems, and 40% consumable assets.
Pearce, a former M&A lawyer and later CEO of Inmarsat, who joined MOD in October 2025, acknowledged drily that “the default setting for the Ministry of Defense through the last 40, 50 years, has been slow, and sometimes that was far too quick.”
The UK Defence Board member added that supply chain management is also being elevated from an administrative function to a primary warfighting capability.
MOD is deploying real-time digital twins and directly war-gaming supply chain bottlenecks with industry, NAD’s chief said: “We're focusing on sweeping away some of the critical minerals bottlenecks,” Pearce revealed – adding “we've just done a very exciting deal for tungsten to support, in fact, to support Thales directly in that way.”
Flagging the need for Modular Open System Architectures (MOSA) Pearce suggested that defence suppliers need to pivot from delivering static hardware to enabling continuous capability upgrades at warfighting pace: “We actually have to build our core platforms so they can be agile and so they can accept innovation rapidly onto the battlefield. There's no point innovating but not being able to get it to the battlefield for years… It has to be instantaneous,” he told an audience of ~200.
“That means designing MOSA standards and open architectures… then constantly learning and iterating and infusing our capabilities all the time with the power of innovation. Into that platform, we need to develop a UK defense innovation engine…”
“We have to create win-win outcomes, and we have to be open to new ideas.
“We have to focus on what government can bring to you, and to help our supply chains reach your and their full potential. We need to be easier and cheaper to do business with… [That] means ensuring funding is available to you at scale, especially the scale-up phase when you might need to take a check of £100 million or more.”
To bridge the traditional transition gap between prototype development and high-volume production, MOD is increasingly positioning itself as both an anchor customer and an equity catalyst, he suggested. Through a newly established Defence Investment Unit and initiative structures like "Dragon’s Den" style capital-matching sessions (which recently brought 150 venture capital firms into the room with scaling defence tech companies; “we turned away another 100”) the department is actively working to crowd private growth capital into UK defence supply chains, he said.
Pearce concluded: “We have to focus on our supply chain strength, resilience, and agility, especially the ability to move at warfighting pace, which in some areas is going to involve 10xing your productive capacity in only a few weeks' notice. So we're going to need new business models, new contracts to allow that to work. It means shared risk and reward, not a game of hide the risk… we have to create win-win outcomes.”
Amid ongoing frustration that MOD remains hard to do business with, he insisted that it was “developing new commercial pathways. We are trying to drive simplicity and pace through the whole business of procurement, and we've got hard metrics of success internally to see whether we're going to achieve that… We're looking to create working groups focused very much on outcomes to help us be better as a procurement agency, be better as a customer, to give you more assuredness to be able to move a pace… We're using Commercial X much more assiduously.”
Thales meanwhile used the summit to launch its new UK technology strategy. It set out six principles for how Thales delivers tech in the UK: "Partner focused (open, modular and reusable); sovereign and sustainable; digital and data first; secure, safe and resilient by design; built for integration and interoperability; and designed for system enhancement and rapid capability insertion."
Thales' CTO Mike Sewart said in a canned statement: “Our customers have asked industry for technology that is integrated, interoperable and delivered faster. This strategy is our answer. It commits us to connecting what the UK already owns, working openly with partners, and building sovereign capability that is secure and resilient by design."
