UK Urged to Embrace Prototype Warfare
•February 10, 2026
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Why It Matters
Accelerating acquisition cycles is essential for the UK to field relevant capabilities against fast‑evolving threats and to maintain strategic autonomy.
Key Takeaways
- •UK defence acquisition seen as too slow, rigid
- •Proposal: adopt “minimum viable product” prototype model
- •Frontline troops to test and refine equipment quickly
- •Industrial strategy must enable rapid innovation, not select winners
- •Reliance on allies highlighted; US support not guaranteed
Pulse Analysis
The UK’s defence procurement system, built around decade‑long programmes and exhaustive specifications, is increasingly mismatched with the speed of technological change. By borrowing concepts from the software industry—such as minimum viable products and iterative development—military planners can field functional prototypes faster, gather battlefield data, and evolve systems in near‑real time. This approach reduces the lag between concept and combat readiness, allowing the armed forces to adapt to emerging threats without waiting for finalised, monolithic platforms.
A prototype‑centric model also demands a fundamental overhaul of industrial policy. Instead of awarding single, winner‑takes‑all contracts, the government would create an ecosystem that rewards modularity, open standards, and rapid scaling. Access to high‑performance computing, secure energy supplies, and predictable, short‑term investment windows becomes critical. Moreover, spreading bets across allied supply chains mitigates the risk of over‑reliance on any one nation, a concern amplified by the possibility that US industrial capacity could be diverted in a conflict with China.
Strategically, embracing prototype warfare could give the UK a decisive edge in future high‑intensity conflicts. Rapidly fielded, adaptable systems enable forces to respond minutes before a threat materialises, narrowing the traditional procurement‑to‑deployment gap. While this agility introduces challenges—such as ensuring safety, interoperability, and sustained logistics—it aligns defence spending with the pace of modern warfare, ensuring that British forces remain capable and resilient in an uncertain geopolitical landscape.
UK urged to embrace prototype warfare
Senior defence figures have warned MPs that the UK procurement system is too slow and rigid for the pace of modern conflict, calling for a shift toward prototype warfare and rapid frontline experimentation.
Giving evidence to the Defence Committee, Air Marshal (Retd) Edward Stringer said the UK remained locked into a model of defence acquisition built around large, long-term programmes, rather than quickly iterating new equipment and adapting based on battlefield feedback.
“We need to work out what prototype warfare looks like,” Stringer said, arguing that current processes were still oriented around lengthy specification writing, complex contracts and decades-long disputes over requirements.
He suggested defence should take lessons from the software sector by embracing the concept of a “minimum viable product”, rapidly deploying early versions of equipment to frontline units and using service personnel to refine and improve them in real time.
“Create a minimum viable product and get it out to the frontline,” he said, adding that “clever young troops” should be empowered to trial new systems and feed results back to industry.
Stringer said this approach required government to reshape its industrial strategy away from selecting “winners” and instead focus on enabling the conditions for innovation, including access to energy, computing power and predictable investment environments. He told MPs that existing strategies were built on the assumption that capability could be defined years in advance, but warned that the speed of technological change made that approach obsolete. “You are trying to define exactly what you need and then to find a way of building it over the next 10 years, and that is not going to work,” he said.
Stringer pointed to the Strategic Defence Review itself, saying it recognised the difficulty of predicting future requirements over a decade-long timeframe, and argued the UK needed systems capable of producing solutions almost immediately before they are needed. “You need to be building a system that can build it possibly only minutes before you actually need it,” he said.
Sir Hew Strachan supported the argument, noting that in wartime the procurement cycle historically compressed dramatically. “Even in the two world wars, the whole procurement process is months,” he said, describing a continuous feedback loop between the front line and industry which he argued had been lost in peacetime defence planning.
Strachan also warned that Britain could not rely on fully sovereign capability in every area and would need to “spread bets” across allies, while recognising that US support could not be guaranteed in a major conflict with China. “We still will not get it if the US is engaged in a major war with China,” he said, arguing that American industrial capacity would be prioritised for US requirements.
Pressed on whether foreign-owned drone firms establishing production in the UK strengthened sovereignty or created vulnerability, Strachan said: “It could be either.”
The post UK urged to embrace prototype warfare first appeared on UK Defence Journal.
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