How Defence Reform can Lead the Public Sector

*This article first appeared in Open Access Government, 1 June, 2026.

Across government, there is a growing focus on resilience. In defence, that conversation is framed in terms of readiness and operational capability. In health, it may be about service continuity and data security. In local government, it’s about maintaining frontline delivery through change fatigue and funding pressures.

Although the contexts differ, the underlying challenge is the same: how do large public institutions turn investment in technology and skills into durable capability?

Throughout the transformation programmes I’ve worked on in government and defence, there are common themes. Reform succeeds when organisations define problems clearly before procuring solutions; when small, empowered teams are trusted to test and learn; when leadership communicates consistently; and when digital and organisational resilience are treated as inseparable entities.

Take the Royal Navy’s Data and Navy Applications Team, responsible for building and scaling digital and data capabilities across the force. The culture encourages a test-and-learn mindset, building in parallel and working directly with users. Leadership has consistently communicated what’s mission-critical, what can wait, and what needs to be done over time, whilst building the skills of its own team.

This kind of clarity and discipline will only become more important. With spending on UK defence set to increase towards 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, expectations on impact will run especially high. As investment grows, so too does scrutiny, and politicians and the public will expect that funding to translate into real, lasting capability.

Yet too often, transformation begins by jumping to solutions rather than by clearly defining the problem. New IT systems are being produced, digital platforms are being introduced, and new agreements are being made at an enterprise level. But if the underlying organisation is not set up to support those changes, if data is inconsistent, decision-making is slow, or expertise is not sustained, then the impact of investment is limited.

How can institutions understand the need and nature of change before they can benefit from it?

The Ministry of Defence, like any large public body, must work effectively as an organisation before it can deliver operational capability. It’s a huge leadership task, but it means ensuring that information flows where it needs to go, that decisions can be made without friction, and that accountability is clear.

‘Readiness to deploy’ is often understood in purely operational terms. But when capability needs to be stood up at speed, accurate and consistent information must be accessible, usable and visible. Across defence, there are already systems and services, often under the radar, which do exactly this. And these are great examples of what pace, people, prototyping and process can look like when the right set of permissions is given from day one.

There is also the recurring issue of maintaining skills continuity. Defence’s two-year rotation system illustrates this clearly. Service personnel move roles every two years to build experience across commands and functions, which has advantages, but it can also mean that as someone becomes highly effective in a specialist area, they are reassigned elsewhere. Over time, this makes it harder to retain deep expertise. Knowledge becomes fragmented, and organisations can find themselves rebuilding the same capability time and again.

This points to a wider requirement for digital resilience in modern service delivery. It needs to be treated as a core part of operational infrastructure. That requires clear skills progression, investment, and the leadership recognition that digital capability is mission-critical.

Skills, solutions, and technology; what else is standing in the way of resilience?

Procurement

It is slow. Innovation can struggle to move from concept to deployment quickly. Investment is often directed towards new tools and techniques before the foundational issues. Data quality, clarity and organisational design receive less attention than headline-grabbing announcements, yet they are the foundations that determine outcomes.

As public spending rises, particularly in defence, scrutiny will grow across policy areas. Stakeholders, particularly taxpayers, will look beyond the size of the investment and focus on impact. What has actually improved? What risks have been reduced?

Regaining public confidence to approach defence with a ‘whole of society’ mindset is going to take some work. Communication, relevance, and tracking spending to fix the basics will help, and it will take a bold shift to do so.

Defence reform is not just about national security; it reflects a broader challenge: how to build state capacity institutions that can adapt, learn, and sustain capability in complex environments.

Investment is essential, but on its own, it does not create capability. Capability is built through principles of intentional design: reliable data, empowered people, continuity of expertise and structures that enable timely decision-making.

If defence can embed these principles consistently, it will strengthen readiness and provide a practical model for public sector transformation more broadly, grounded not in announcements, but in durable capability that can be applied to deliver some of the country’s most important outcomes.