Britain’s Defence Industrial Strategy Has a University-Shaped Gap

Britain has finally started to think differently about defence, industry and economic growth. The 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy promises to make defence an ‘engine for growth’, rebuild the domestic industrial base, reform procurement and innovate at ‘wartime pace’. All welcome. But there is still a university-shaped gap in the machinery supposed to deliver it.

That sounds odd because universities are suddenly everywhere in defence policy. The new Defence Universities Alliance (DUA) brings together 35 institutions around research, skills and closer collaboration with the Armed Forces. Government is investing in defence-related university places and talking about easier movement of people between the military, industry and adjacent sectors.

But the underlying view of higher education remains rather narrow. Universities are still mostly cast as places that produce skilled graduates or clever research which defence and industry can then use.

Both matter. Neither is enough.

If Britain is serious about sovereign capability, technological adoption and warfighting readiness, universities need to be treated as part of the defence ecosystem, not simply as suppliers to it.

The Problem is Not a Shortage of Ideas

The UK does not lack defence innovation. Nor does it lack university researchers working on AI, autonomy, cyber, space, advanced materials, robotics and quantum technologies. The harder problem is turning knowledge into usable capability.

That journey is messy. A military problem has to become a requirement somebody can work with. Researchers need enough operational context to understand what matters. Technology has to be tested, manufactured, funded and secured. SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) have to find a route through defence procurement. Eventually somebody in Defence has to want the thing, buy it and integrate it. More research funding on its own does not fix that.

The real challenge is connecting:

military problem → research → prototype → manufacture → procurement → adoption.

I see this problem from inside the defence–university boundary. The striking thing is rarely a shortage of goodwill. Defence personnel want access to expertise. Academics want their work to matter. Universities want meaningful defence partnerships.

The Problem is Translation

The institutions speak different languages, move at different speeds and reward different things. Even when relationships are good, translating a military requirement into something a university can respond to – then getting the resulting knowledge back into institutional or operational practice – takes constant brokerage. Putting the right people in a room is useful. It is not a system.

That distinction matters. We do not mainly need to persuade universities and Defence to collaborate. We need the connective tissue that makes collaboration work. The Defence Universities Alliance should help build it.

A Skills Pipeline is Not a Skills Strategy

The same is true of people. Defence needs engineers, computer scientists, technicians and other specialists. Increasing university places in these areas is sensible. But a strategy built around producing more graduates risks applying a twentieth-century workforce model to a twenty-first-century problem.

AI makes the weakness obvious. Nobody entering Defence at 21 can expect what they learned at university to remain sufficient for a 40-year career. The Defence Industrial Strategy already recognises the need for greater career mobility, including work on a Defence Skills Passport. That idea should go much further.

Universities should not only educate people before they enter defence. They should be part of how people learn throughout their careers: modular study, professional military education, conversion courses, technical updating and secondments, with people moving more easily between universities, the Armed Forces and industry. We need less of a pipeline and more of a circulation system.

Organise Around Problems, Not Departments

Universities have some work to do too. Defence problems do not arrive neatly divided into faculties.

Take autonomous systems. The obvious disciplines are engineering, robotics and computer science. But putting autonomy into military service also raises questions about command, law, ethics, cyber security, procurement, doctrine, organisational design, education and training. Universities contain expertise across all of these areas. Yet too often we make the external customer navigate the internal institution: one department, centre or academic at a time.

That is backwards. A defence customer should be able to bring a difficult problem to a university and have the university assemble the expertise around it. If universities want to be strategic defence partners, they need to organise themselves around problems Defence actually has, rather than expecting Defence to understand how universities are organised.

This needs leadership inside universities as much as reform inside the MoD.

Build Regional Defence Ecosystems

There is a geographical opportunity here too. Britain’s defence capability is not confined to Whitehall, the primes and a handful of national laboratories. Across the country there are concentrations of university expertise, advanced manufacturing, SMEs, military establishments and specialist research.

The emerging mix of Defence Growth Deals, regional clusters and translational organisations such as the Catapults points towards something useful: institutions that sit between discovery and production. That middle matters. It is where technologies can be tested, investment de-risked, manufacturing processes developed and SMEs helped into markets they struggle to enter alone.

But we should resist building identical defence innovation structures everywhere. Different regions have different strengths. The task is to identify those concentrations and connect them deliberately to national capability requirements.

That is more than regional policy with a defence badge attached. A distributed industrial and knowledge base can broaden supply chains, support surge capacity and make the country less dependent on a small number of organisations. If defence really is an engine for growth, it should have more than one engine room.

Give the Defence Universities Alliance a Job

Which brings us back to the DUA. There is already an important debate about academic freedom, transparency and the safeguards needed when universities work more closely with Defence. Those arguments matter. But another question now needs answering:

What is the Alliance actually for?

If success is measured by membership numbers, meetings, conferences and ‘sharing best practice’, it will become another worthy network with a logo and a LinkedIn presence. The DUA should be judged by whether it can solve problems that individual universities cannot.

Give it a handful of national challenges each year. How does Britain expand manufacturing rapidly in a crisis? How do promising SME technologies cross the gap between demonstration and procurement? How should the Armed Forces adopt AI at operational speed? Where does Britain need sovereign capability? How do we move people and skills more easily between service, industry and universities?

Those are not research questions. They are system problems. So build challenge teams around them: military customers, researchers, manufacturers, educators, SMEs and investors. Do not begin with another report. Begin with the obstacles to adoption and ask what has to change to move something useful through the system.

That would give the DUA a purpose beyond networking. It would also give Defence a route into a university sector that is otherwise difficult to navigate at scale.

Universities are Already Part of Defence

Britain is trying to increase readiness, rebuild industrial capacity, exploit fast-moving technology and turn higher defence spending into economic growth at the same time. That is a demanding agenda.

Universities cannot deliver it alone, and nor should they become extensions of the MoD or industry. But treating them as places that supply graduates at one end and research at the other misses what they can do in between.

Defence needs universities that can organise around real problems. Universities need to become easier for Defence and industry to work with. Government needs to reward the difficult work between discovery and adoption, not only the discoveries themselves.

The Defence Universities Alliance is an opportunity to build some of that machinery. Regional defence ecosystems are another. The choice is not whether universities belong in Britain’s defence system. They are already in it.

The question is whether we are prepared to organise the relationship properly. If defence is going to be an engine for growth and national resilience, universities cannot just supply the fuel. They have to become part of the engine.

© Tom Smith, 2026, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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