AI in defence: the urgent need for a ‘theory of winning’

The game has changed, and the stakes are rising faster than ever. As Managing Director at Fujitsu’s Centre for Cognitive and Advanced Technologies, I explained this in my keynote at the Farnborough International Airshow, offering three powerful concepts that frame the future and demand our attention if we are to thrive in this new era:

Innovation Wars

We are now living in an age of Innovation Wars. In both markets and the military, the traditional methods of gaining competitive advantage through specific products or services have been eclipsed. What matters most today is not what you sell but how you innovate. It’s no longer just about having the best technology – it’s about constantly developing, refining, and outpacing competitors in the realm of ideas and execution.

The rapidly decreasing lifespan of companies on the S&P 500 is one stark illustration of this pressure. In the 1950s, a company could expect to last about 60 years on the index. Today, that average has dropped to just ten years. This dramatic shift reflects the speed at which industries are disrupted and how quickly the ever-advancing tide of progress consumes those who fail to innovate.

For Defence, right up until the First World War, technology came first, and the tactics came second. The longbow preceded Crecy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) by hundreds of years. Catapults in ancient history were much the same, so too machine guns, submarines, aircraft in modern history: we took years to work out how to fully apply new technologies in battle to make the most of their capabilities.

Today, technologies are obsolete within months – the pace of change in Ukraine is six weeks, particularly in cutting-edge fields like drone and electronic warfare. As in business, so on the battlefield: participation is non-discretionary; adapt or die.

Theory of Winning

To succeed in Innovation Wars, you to have a theory of winning. Following technology trends will leave you behind; the only way to win is to start ahead. As Jeff Bezos put it, you need to “think backwards”, starting with a clear vision of the future and inventing the technology to create it. But we’ve known this for over a century.

This quiet revolution – from taking tech and figuring out how to use it, to working out what you needed to win and building it – was led in the First World War by thinkers like Frederick Lindemann, later the chief scientific adviser to Winston Churchill in the Second World War, and known as “the Prof”.

In the First World War, before his fame, Lindemann was stationed at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, where today’s airshow takes place. With his colleagues, he was a dynamic source of innovative ideas throughout the Great War: ranging from acoustic submarine detection to weather prediction and acoustic range and direction finding for artillery. However, the ideas he pitched, now obviously prescient, were continuously rebuffed. As his biographer put it, “…it is difficult to dispel the picture of a reservoir of bright ideas from factory scientists lapping fruitlessly at against the solid dam of the War Office mind.”

Lindemann understood the importance of transforming defence with technology that didn’t exist but could be envisaged. In the 1930s, the notion that ‘the bomber always gets through’ led to Government, the War Office and many in the RAF refusing to invest in fighter aircraft and air defences. Lindemann, with Churchill, campaigned and helped establish the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence (CSSAD), called the Tizard Committee after Henry Tizard, its chairman. This committee, in turn, drove the development of the Dowding System, which, with those fighter aircraft – notably Spitfires – that many had argued they didn’t need and wouldn’t work, won the Battle of Britain.

We’ve seen this approach bear fruit in more recent decades. In 1978, for instance, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed the Assault Breaker concept to address the potential threat of huge second-echelon Soviet forces pouring into Europe. That led to Air-Land Battle and the development of a system to enable it, including JSTARS, UAVs, the multirole F-16, Apache helicopters and the F-15E Strike Eagle.

For me, this is the essence of a theory of winning: you don’t wait for the future to arrive. You imagine it and then work backwards to build the tools you need to thrive in that future.

The same holds true, I think, for businesses’ innovation cycles. They are shrinking, and the only way to survive is by developing a theory of winning that anticipates where the world is headed and builds for it.

And we must face a stark truth – we’ve gone backwards. In Defence, we lack an overarching theory of winning. Walking through the Farnborough Airshow felt like seeing all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle laid out – an array of incredible technologies – but with no one knowing what the finished picture should look like.

Trying to retrofit the pieces together wouldn’t work; innovation requires a theory of winning that pulls all the disparate elements into a cohesive strategy. Without that clear vision of the future – a theory of winning – even the most advanced technologies can lose their impact.

Innovation Escape Velocity

Perhaps the most provocative idea I presented is the notion of innovation escape velocity. This is the point at which a country or company gains such a significant technological lead – particularly in applying AI to…