Defence needs universities in the development engine room

Dr Tom Smith, Academic Director at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell and Director of the University of Portsmouth's Military Education Team, argues that universities must play a far greater role in Britain's defence-industrial ecosystem. Written for Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, the article contends that higher education institutions should be treated not merely as providers of graduates and research, but as active partners in delivering sovereign capability, innovation and defence readiness.

Britain has finally started to think differently about defence, industry and economic growth. The 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy promises to make defence an "engine for growth", rebuild the domestic industrial base, reform procurement and innovate at wartime pace. All of that is welcome. Yet there remains a university-shaped gap in the machinery supposed to deliver it.

That sounds odd because universities are suddenly everywhere in defence policy. The new Defence Universities Alliance (DUA) brings together 35 institutions around research, skills and closer collaboration with the Armed Forces. Government is investing in defence-related university places and discussing easier movement of people between the military, industry and adjacent sectors.

But the underlying view of higher education remains too narrow. Universities are still largely seen as places that produce skilled graduates or conduct research that defence and industry can draw upon. Both matter but neither is enough.

If Britain is serious about sovereign capability, technological adoption and warfighting readiness, universities need to be treated as part of the defence ecosystem rather than simply suppliers to it.

Bridging the gap between innovation and capability
The UK does not lack defence innovation. Nor does it lack university researchers working on AI, autonomy, cyber, space, advanced materials, robotics and quantum technologies. The harder problem is turning knowledge into usable capability.

That journey is messy. A military problem has to become a requirement somebody can work with. Researchers need enough operational context to understand what matters. Technology has to be tested, manufactured, funded and secured. SMEs have to find a route through defence procurement. Eventually somebody in Defence has to want the capability, buy it and integrate it. More research funding alone does not solve these challenges.

The real challenge is connecting military need with research, development, manufacturing, procurement and adoption.

I see this problem from inside the defence-university boundary. The striking issue is rarely a shortage of goodwill. Defence personnel want access to expertise. Academics want their work to matter. Universities want meaningful defence partnerships. The problem is translation.

The institutions speak different languages, move at different speeds and reward different things. Even when relationships are good, translating a military requirement into something a university can respond to, and then getting the resulting knowledge back into operational practice, requires constant brokerage. Putting the right people in a room is useful. It is not a system.

Universities should not only educate people before they enter defence. They should be part of how people learn throughout their careers.

That distinction matters. We do not mainly need to persuade universities and Defence to collaborate. We need the connective tissue that makes collaboration work. The Defence Universities Alliance should help build it.

From skills pipeline to skills ecosystem
The same is true of people. Defence needs engineers, computer scientists, technicians and other specialists. Increasing university places in these areas is sensible. But a strategy built around producing more graduates risks applying a twentieth-century workforce model to a twenty-first-century problem.

AI makes the weakness obvious. Nobody entering Defence at 21 can expect what they learned at university to remain sufficient for a 40-year career. The Defence Industrial Strategy already recognises the need for greater career mobility, including work on a Defence Skills Passport. That idea should go much further.

Universities should not only educate people before they enter defence. They should be part of how people learn throughout their careers through modular study, professional military education, conversion courses, technical updating and secondments, with people moving more easily between universities, the Armed Forces and industry. We need less of a pipeline and more of a circulation system.

Universities have some work to do as well. Defence problems do not arrive neatly divided into faculties.

Take autonomous systems. The obvious disciplines are engineering, robotics and computer science. But deploying autonomy in military service also raises questions about command, law, ethics, cyber security, procurement, doctrine, organisational design, education and training. Universities contain expertise across all these areas. Yet too often external partners are left to navigate institutions one department, centre or academic at a time.

That is backwards. A defence customer should be able to bring a difficult problem to a university and have the institution assemble the expertise around it. If universities want to become strategic defence partners, they need to organise themselves around the problems Defence actually has, rather than expecting Defence to understand how universities are organised.

This requires leadership within universities every bit as much as reform within the Ministry of Defence.

Building stronger regional networks
There is also a geographical opportunity. Britain's defence capability is not confined to Whitehall, the major primes and a handful of national laboratories. Across the country there are concentrations of university expertise, advanced manufacturing, SMEs, military establishments and specialist research.

The emerging combination of Defence Growth Deals, regional clusters and translational organisations such as the Catapult network points towards something valuable: institutions that sit between discovery and production. That middle ground matters. It is where technologies can be tested, investment de-risked, manufacturing processes developed and SMEs helped into markets they might otherwise struggle to enter.

But we should resist the temptation to build identical defence innovation structures everywhere. Different regions have different strengths. The challenge is to identify those concentrations of expertise and connect them deliberately to national capability requirements.

That is more than regional policy with a defence label attached. A distributed industrial and knowledge base can broaden supply chains, support surge capacity and reduce dependence on a relatively small number of organisations. If defence is truly to be an engine for growth, it should have more than one engine room.

Which brings us back to the Defence Universities Alliance. There is already an important debate about academic freedom, transparency and the safeguards required when universities work more closely with Defence. Those arguments matter. But another question also needs answering: what is the Alliance actually for?

If success is measured through membership numbers, conferences and the sharing of best practice, it risks becoming another worthy network with a logo and a LinkedIn presence. The DUA should instead be judged by whether it can solve problems that individual universities cannot tackle alone.

Give it a handful of national challenges each year. How can Britain expand manufacturing rapidly during a crisis? How can promising SME technologies cross the gap between demonstration and procurement? How should the Armed Forces adopt AI at operational speed? Where does Britain need sovereign capability? How can people and skills move more easily between military service, industry and universities?

These are not research questions. They are system problems. Build challenge teams around them that bring together military customers, researchers, manufacturers, educators, SMEs and investors. Do not begin with another report. Begin with the barriers to adoption and ask what must change to move useful capability through the system.

That would give the DUA a purpose beyond networking. It would also give Defence a practical route into a university sector that can otherwise be difficult to navigate at scale.
Britain is trying to increase readiness, rebuild industrial capacity, exploit fast-moving technology and convert higher defence spending into economic growth at the same time. That is a demanding agenda.

Universities cannot deliver it alone, nor should they become extensions of the MoD or industry. But treating them merely as providers of graduates at one end and research at the other overlooks what they can contribute in between.

Defence needs universities that can organise around real-world problems. Universities need to become easier for Defence and industry to work with. Government needs to reward the difficult work that takes place between discovery and adoption, not simply the discoveries themselves.

The Defence Universities Alliance is an opportunity to build some of that machinery. Regional defence ecosystems are another. The choice is not whether universities belong in Britain's defence system. They are already part of it.

The question is whether we are prepared to organise the relationship properly. If defence is going to be an engine for growth and national resilience, universities cannot simply supply the fuel. They need to help power the engine itself.