Defence

European Trends in Defence

Defence budgets are being cut as Governments rein in spending. As consequence the role of armed forces in Europe is changing with less emphasis on large scale expeditionary operations and greater focus on smaller contingencies and capacity building. With this shift in emphasis of mission there is a major restructuring to reflect this across all elements of military capability whilst continuing to invest in new battle winning capabilities such as iSTAR. As well as structural changes to uniformed organisations and an increased emphasis on reserves, defence is looking urgently to remove the high frictional costs within its operational and corporate support processes including property, finance, HR, support chain, commercial models and defence acquisition. Finally, there is renewed impetus on homeland security and resilience capabilities with particular emphasis on cyber and intelligence.

The aerospace and defence industry is having to adapt to meet the challenges within this new environment and an increasingly globalised defence and security market. In a shrinking market, international collaboration and global defence platforms are key. Industry faces a constantly changing regulatory environment, ever-developing technologies and new approaches to contracting including an increased desire to transfer risk for Industry to manage. At the same time, the expectation from the defence customer is for ever quicker response to evolving threats through accelerated procurements to satisfy urgent operational requirements.