Defence Collaboration is becoming more complex and more critical
The UK’s Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) 2025 makes one point clear: the defence sector is not only a pillar of national security, but an engine for economic growth.
According to DIS 2025:
- The UK defence sector supports over 460,000 jobs
- MOD spends £28.8 billion with UK-based businesses
- Strengthening the resilience and sovereignty of the industrial base is now a national strategic priority
At the same time, modern defence programmes are becoming increasingly distributed, multinational, hybrid-cloud enabled and dependent on SME innovation. The result: collaboration is critical, yet more difficult.
- A Growing, Distributed, and Interdependent Industrial Base
DIS 2025 makes repeated reference to the need to strengthen UK industry, empower SMEs, and broaden the supplier base. It emphasises:
- “Backing UK-based businesses” to drive innovation and resilience
- Making it easier for SMEs to enter defence programmes
- Building long-term, collaborative, multi-organisation partnerships
But this expanding supply chain brings new complexity:
- More organisations involved in each programme
- More sensitive intellectual property (IP) owned by SMEs
- More need for cross-organisation data flows
- Greater risk from supply-chain cyber attacks
A recent UK supply-chain security study found 90% of UK Security Teams experienced at least one incident in their supply chain in the past year (Risk Ledger – Every Link Matters: The State of Supply Chain Security 2025). Defence is more exposed due to the volume of sensitive data exchanged.
Secure, assured collaboration is no longer optional, it is a prerequisite for sovereign capability.
- National Programmes Are Now Multinational by Default
DIS 2025 emphasises the UK’s intention to strengthen:
- International partnerships
- Industrial cooperation with allies
- Coalition capability development
Modern programmes combat air, space ISR, maritime autonomy, electronic warfare systems, increasingly involve coalition partners and multinational industrial teams.
This multiplies the challenges:
- Multiple national security classifications
- Divergent cryptographic policies
- Cross-domain barriers
- Varying levels of industrial security maturity
- The need to share only what is necessary
- The absolute requirement to protect sovereign IP
Traditional methods of collaboration: standalone project networks, shared drives, or manually controlled information exchange, simply cannot scale.
- Interoperability Is Now a Strategic Defence Requirement
DIS 2025 repeatedly highlights:
- The need for “integrated, resilient and interoperable industrial capability”
- The shift to a “whole-force, multi-domain approach”
- The adoption of digital-first and data-driven capability delivery
The theme is clear: interoperability determines advantage.
But interoperability does not mean centralisation. It means enabling:
- Primes to collaborate securely with SMEs
- UK companies to work with coalition partners
- Joint ventures to protect proprietary technologies
- Cross-domain data flows to work without exposing classified environments
- Hybrid and multi-cloud usage
- Including Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, MODCloud, AS domains
This is where legacy collaboration approaches fail.
Most collaboration platforms:
- Do not meet defence-grade assurance requirements
- Are not interoperable across multiple accredited networks
- Cannot operate at Above OFFICIAL
- Do not protect IP in multi-organisation environments
- Do not integrate cross-domain solutions
- Do not support multiple cloud providers without risking sovereignty
- Procurement Reform Accelerates Timelines — But Increases Pressure to Collaborate
DIS 2025 introduces:
- A five-year acquisition pipeline
- New time-to-contract targets
- A new National Armaments Director
- Procurement segmentation for faster delivery
- Streamlined processes for SMEs
All designed to accelerate how fast capability is brought into service.
But faster procurement means:
- More parallel workstreams
- More distributed engineering
- More frequent data exchanges
- More organisations accessing secure information
- More need for automation in data assurance
Without modern collaboration infrastructure, speed of delivery will be constrained by speed of communication and security bureaucracy.
This is the environment a capability like LynX MESH is designed for.
- Why LynX MESH Aligns Exactly with DIS 2025 Priorities
Based on the strategic direction set out in DIS 2025, the UK defence sector needs collaboration infrastructure that is:
✔ UK-sovereign and fully assured
Aligns with the DIS emphasis on a resilient, sovereign industrial base.
✔ Enables secure collaboration across primes, SMEs and allies
Directly supports DIS goals to broaden participation and strengthen partnerships.
✔ Protects intellectual property
Critical as SMEs contribute increasing amounts of proprietary technology.
✔ Operates at OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE up to SECRET
Meeting the reality of modern programme classifications.
✔ Interoperable across multiple existing networks
A core DIS requirement for integrated capability delivery.
✔ Cloud-agnostic (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure)
Supporting DIS ambition for digital innovation and hybrid architectural flexibility.
✔ Reduces duplication and programme-specific silos
Saving cost and accelerating capability deployment — a procurement reform priority.
✔ Strengthens supply-chain resilience
A key strategic priority in DIS 2025.
This makes LynX MESH a direct enabler of DIS objectives — not just a technical solution, but an industrial-capability multiplier.
The defence sector lacks a secure, sovereign, scalable way to collaborate across organisations, networks, nations and clouds.
LynX MESH fills that gap.
In an era where national programmes are multinational, supply chains are expanding, data is everywhere, and security cannot be compromised, LynX MESH delivers the trusted, assured, interoperable collaboration infrastructure the UK Defence Industrial Strategy demands.
This is not just a technical upgrade —
It is the foundation of future sovereign capability.
