R&D plan recognises need for UK to win race for technological advantage

The UK MoD on 19 October announced a new Science and Technology Strategy for R&D, set against the backdrop of the annual Army Warfighting Experiment (AWE) showcase of UK-developed systems (pictured).

This strategy includes ‘a renewed focus on data, including capture and curation, which will underpin research to identify threat trends and deliver generation-after-next military hardware’, the MoD noted in a statement.

Ben Wallace, Secretary of State for Defence, said: ‘We are in a very real race with our adversaries for technological advantage. What we do today will lay the groundwork for decades to come. Proliferation of new technologies demands our science and technology is threat driven and better aligned to our needs in the future.’

The  Science and Technology Strategy for R&D is intended to dovetail with the broader scientific ambitions of the UK government’s Research & Development Roadmap, published in July 2020, as well as the pending integrated review of defence and security capabilities.

The government hopes that these strategies will help the UK academic and industrial base to anticipate, invest in and rapidly exploit various critical technologies.

Public funds account for about 85% of UK defence R&D, so the military scientific community  is financially dependent on the government – all the more so because initiatives such as the Defence and Security Accelerator are a major conduit for SMEs and academia to participate in programmes.

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