From Reform to Results: Incentives, Culture and the UK’s Military Intelligence Services

The UK Ministry of Defence’s early-December announcement of a new Military Intelligence Services (MIS) construct represents the most sweeping evolution of defence intelligence in a generation, empowering the Chief of Defence Intelligence with greater authority to cohere and professionalise intelligence functions across the Defence enterprise.

Change of Structure

Conceptually, the reform offers promise, as it seeks to address widely understood shortcomings in the UK defence intelligence enterprise. Fragmented command arrangements, inconsistent career management, limited interoperability, lack of institutional memory and ambiguous institutional status have constrained the effectiveness of Defence Intelligence – inconsistently considered the UK Intelligence Community’s (UKIC) ‘fourth agency’ – for decades. Consolidating collection, assessment and dissemination functions under a single conceptual umbrella offers a plausible route toward greater integration. Whether MIS ultimately delivers meaningful change, however, will depend less on the MIS construct than on how deeply the reform alters incentives, culture and inter-agency relationships.

The reform consolidates previously dispersed military and civilian intelligence personnel under a single Defence-led structure, located within Cyber and Specialist Operations Command (itself recently rebranded from UK Strategic Command). According to the MoD, the objective is to improve coherence, speed and resilience in response to an increasingly contested security environment, while implementing recommendations from the 2025 Strategic Defence Review. In the words of UK Defence Secretary John Healey, the move is designed to ‘meet the recommendations laid out in Spring 2025’s Strategic Defence Review, directly addressing the fragmentation of intelligence capability across Defence whilst improving MOD’s ability to collaborate and integrate with the UK’s dedicated civilian intelligence agencies.

The introduction of a dedicated Defence Counter-Intelligence Unit represents one of the more substantive elements of the reform. This reflects a growing alignment with US practice, where counterintelligence is embedded centrally within defence institutions rather than treated as a peripheral function. In principle, this should strengthen protection against hostile state activity directed at defence programmes and personnel. In practice, its effectiveness will depend on authority, resourcing and its ability to coordinate with existing counter-intelligence actors without adding further layers of bureaucracy which inhibit nimbleness.

Comparisons the US Intelligence Structure

In some ways the new UK model reflects how the US Department of Defense organises military intelligence. Since the twilight of the Cold War and particularly following the Goldwater-Nichols reforms of 1986 which demanded ‘jointness’, US defence intelligence has been characterised by a strong emphasis on institutionalised joint service in staffing and operations. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and service intelligence components provide a centralised, all-source backbone supporting combatant commands (and more), while remaining a key member of the broader US intelligence community. However, the MIS is not a British analogue to DIA in terms of scale, statutory authority, or institutional autonomy. The UK does not possess an equivalent to the US combatant command structure, nor does it tolerate the same degree of redundancy across intelligence organisations.

The UK’s MIS mirrors several of these US-style functional principles where intelligence is most often framed as a joint, multi-domain activity rather than a service-specific support function. However, the US system is beset by mission overlap in a crowded intelligence community comprised of at least 17 agencies that are sometimes territorial of their bureaucratic turf. The MIS consolidation under a single command is intended to reduce duplication and accelerate intelligence sharing.

Human Resources

The new structure matters because it shapes what MIS can realistically achieve, but structural consolidation alone will not resolve the persistent challenges that have limited the influence and effectiveness of Defence Intelligence. One of the most significant of these challenges concerns personnel management and professionalisation. An ideal intelligence system would support development of deep expertise and offer long-term intelligence careers for both military and civilian personnel. However, the current UK construct – that MIS makes no attempt to remedy – relies on short posting cycles and promotion models that prioritise generalist leadership experience over specialist expertise.

As a consequence, Defence Intelligence has historically struggled to retain deep analytic, technical and regional knowledge. Two- to three-year rotations undermine continuity, weaken institutional memory and impose recurring training costs. While the creation of MIS may improve coordination, there is little evidence so far that it will fundamentally alter the incentives for building a wide management base over providing analytic expertise and substantive professional depth. Without explicit mechanisms to reward specialisation and protect intelligence careers from broader military posting pressures, MIS risks perpetuating the same capability gaps within a new conceptual framework.

Training reform presents a related challenge. The proposed Defence Intelligence Academy could improve baseline skills and common professional standards, but previous efforts such as the still-nascent College for National Security suggest that training institutions cannot compensate for structural disincentives to the development and retention of expertise. Experience from both the UK and the US indicates that professionalisation depends less on initial training than on sustained career pathways that allow analysts to deepen their competence over time.

The UK Intelligence Ecosystem

Beyond internal Defence reform, MIS will also have to navigate the UK’s wider intelligence ecosystem. Defence Intelligence has long occupied an ambiguous position relative to the exclusively civilian intelligence agencies. Despite controlling significant collection assets and analytic capacity, Defence has rarely enjoyed parity of esteem with MI5, SIS and GCHQ, and this remains true in the eyes of the Joint Intelligence Committee as well. This hierarchy is reinforced in part by historical custom, unequal vetting regimes, lack of security clearance reciprocity across the UKIC enterprise, deeply embedded organisational cultures, and of course popular perceptions that James Bond has done much to shape. In contrast, the US intelligence community treats defence intelligence as a central pillar rather than a supporting actor.

There is room for cautious optimism. The UK has demonstrated that closer integration is possible. For instance, the National Cyber Force, jointly owned by Defence and the civilian agencies, illustrates how a focused and discrete mission set can help overcome institutional barriers. However, MIS does not replicate this model. As a Defence-owned construct, it lacks the formal buy-in of the civilian agencies, which may limit its ability to reshape longstanding perceptions of Defence Intelligence’s role. Further, practical issues such as vetting equivalence, information technology interoperability and access to compartmented intelligence will therefore be critical indicators of success. Without genuine parity in these areas, MIS may find itself more unified internally but nevertheless still operationally constrained, unable to exert the influence that its designers intend.

Work to be Done

The central risk is that MIS becomes a rebranding exercise that consolidates existing problems rather than addressing them. Without sustained attention to careers, incentives and inter-agency parity, Defence Intelligence may continue to struggle to convert latent analytical capacity into strategic influence, not least within Whitehall. Conversely, if MIS is used as a vehicle for subsequent deeper reform, particularly in professionalisation and institutional standing, it could strengthen the UK’s ability to operate in an increasingly contested security environment, especially when NATO instead of Washington must become the UK’s central security partner.

Overall, the creation of MIS should be understood as an incremental rather than transformative reform. It aligns the UK more closely with US defence-intelligence principles in terms of jointness and integration, but it does not replicate the US system’s scale or structures. This is appropriate given the UK’s different political, legal and fiscal context. However, it also limits the extent to which structural change alone can resolve longstanding performance issues or optimization hurdles. Whether this new approach proves effective will depend less on MIS itself than on political will, key leadership and institutional follow-through. The establishment of MIS is an opportunity for the UK to achieve its ambition of synergistic intelligence coordination. The outcome will depend on implementation.

© David Gioe and Will Styles, 2026, published by RUSI with permission of the authors.

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

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