The UK's Digital Targeting Web: Implementing a Targeting Superstructure

The Digital Targeting Web (DTW) was first announced in a Ministry of Defence (MoD) press release in May 2025. The Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published in June 2025, described the DTW as 'connect[ing] ″sensors″, ″deciders″, and ″effectors″', and included a pledge to allocate more than a billion pounds towards the initiative. Yet the SDR described little about how the DTW would be implemented. This led to widespread uncertainty among industry, the MoD and the UK public about what the DTW would actually comprise.

More than a year after the publication of the SDR, the DTW has progressed significantly, both as a conceptual framework for a major modernisation initiative and in terms of technical integration. Given the large scale and ambition of the initiative, this paper aims to specifically understand the military and conceptual components of such an effort, and details how the DTW's progress can be assessed.

Modernisation initiatives such as the DTW are intended to provide the basis for the next generation of digitalised military capabilities, enabling a software-defined fighting force to process, target and iterate at an unparallelled speed. The outcome of the DTW's implementation will therefore determine the UK's ability to field and operate modern military capabilities in future conflicts. To understand such targeting modernisation initiatives, this paper provides a novel conceptual framework of the targeting superstructure, and uses this framework to assess the progress of the burgeoning DTW. Fundamentally, this paper demonstrates that the DTW has set strong foundations thus far, but that gaps remain in the implementation of the DTW's ambitions.

The first section contextualises the DTW, introducing the targeting superstructure as the framework for understanding targeting efforts such as the DTW. The section then describes the four areas of components necessary for its successful implementation. The second section details the organisational and architectural approaches of the DTW. The third section evaluates the DTW's progress against a series of practical benchmarks across the four key areas from the first section.

Establishing the Targeting Superstructure

Vision and Context of the DTW

Following the 2025 SDR, key DTW stakeholders outlined their vision for the DTW as 'enhanc[ing] UK's warfighting capability by 2030, by creating the ability to sense, understand, decide, effect and assess at a pace that overwhelms adversaries'.1 By connecting sensors, 'deciders' and 'effectors' across domains, and enabled by an MoD digital backbone, the UK will be capable of 'full spectrum, cross-domain … joint targeting' at a greater speed, accuracy and scale than before. The UK government committed to the SDR recommendation of delivering a 'digital targeting web in 2027', with the government committing to delivering a DTW minimum viable product (MVP) in 2026.

While increasing the 'scale, pace, precision and accuracy'2 of targeting by 2030 is the primary mission of the DTW initiative, its second mission — arguably of equal importance — is to cohere the MoD's digital estate behind a single operational use case – that is, targeting. Both of these missions will be achieved by the DTW's delivery of '[A]n adaptive, secure and evolving set of digital services that unite users, systems, and platforms to enable targeting accuracy, precision, speed, and resilience across all domains'.3 The DTW would result in a coherent superstructure capable of provisioning and sustaining services from the MoD enterprise, while continuously iterating and integrating capabilities for both edge and enterprise users. The DTW is therefore described in this paper as an 'initiative', since it was never intended to deliver a single outcome or product, as a programme or project normally would. And the vision and approach for this initiative was driven by the MoD's organisation and technical realities, in addition to the operational lessons drawn from recent conflicts, described below.

Context for the DTW

Digital capabilities have been growing in salience in the defence sector for decades. However, prior to the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they were often not prioritised or even well understood by many commanders and leaders in the UK. Combat in Ukraine demonstrated that modern combat power now relies on resilient, scalable and iterative digital foundations to enable rapid, large-scale targeting of enemy capabilities. These lessons resonated across Europe, including the UK MoD, where it was beginning to reckon with the limitations and vulnerabilities of its fragmented IT systems. At the same time, the MoD began to emphasise greater openness in its architecting, driven mainly by challenges in system integration. As digital integration became ever more relevant to operational capability and therefore deterrent effect in Europe, digital integration and targeting became complementary priorities for defence modernisation.

The timing of the DTW's development aligns with other major change efforts in the MoD, such as Defence Reform, overhauls of MoD commercial functions to enable faster and more iterative procurement, and an empowerment of the digital function within the MoD.

The Targeting Superstructure

There has been substantial confusion about the nature of the DTW. In part, this is due to its description as a 'web', thereby reminiscent of a 'targeting' or 'kill' web, which is effectively a meshed evolution of the traditional 'kill chain' that often extends up to operational echelons. However, the DTW vision aimed higher, intending to integrate tactical-operational 'webs' across services and domains while combining with enterprise IT, military-policy leadership in the MoD and the intelligence capabilities available at higher echelons. Such a vision thus shares greater similarities with a conceptual strategy such as the US Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) than a true targeting web.

Yet, CJADC2 explicitly focuses on advancing C2, while the DTW is intended to cohere digital capabilities for the purpose of enabling targeting. The DTW's vision is therefore best described as the design and implementation of a targeting superstructure, characterised by the integration of tactical- to theatre-level targeting webs alongside strategic and enterprise capabilities to create a digital targeting system that connects the whole force. A targeting superstructure is thus conceptually distinct from a force's C2 or wider digital architectures in its referencing solely of capabilities involved in or enabling targeting as a function. However, it naturally involves significant overlap with other technical systems, processes and architectures.

A targeting superstructure is a conceptual approach to building integrated, whole-of-force targeting capabilities that can range from closely integrated force designs with tightly centralised decision-making and digital infrastructure, to federated structures that emphasise decentralised decision loops and meshed digital resources. The core characteristics of a targeting superstructure are therefore horizontally integrated targeting webs that are simultaneously integrated through enterprise-facilitated integration layers that overlap with a core digital backbone. Enterprise IT and strategic capabilities connect through this digital backbone foundation, with centralised governance providing oversight, architectural design and standards, technical assurance, and doctrinal and policy guidance. Figure 1 illustrates the superstructure alongside the evolution of targeting structures.