UC UK ITEA Event Summary

The defence environment is changing at a velocity not experienced in decades. Governments, militaries and national security organisations across the world are having to adapt and react to unpredictable global events. Our adversaries are creating new threats and exploiting vulnerabilities that our allies are having to respond to at pace. Technology and rapid innovation in the battlefield is changing how war is fought and leading to the emergence of new and novel technologies – “whoever gets new technology into the hands of their Armed Forces the quickest will win” (MOD SDR 2025). The theme for the conference, “Delivering T&E to support the pace of technological change”, is a fundamental concept that must be adopted if our militaries are to stay ahead of the threat. T&E can no longer be seen as a drag on programmes, but should be a fundamental enabler through the evolution and adoption of technology, streamlined processes and ensuring that the enterprise continues to have and develop sufficient Suitably Qualified and Experienced Personnel (SQEP).

The conference was fortunate to enjoy a number of key senior speakers from the UK MOD, the US Department of Defense and industry who shared their thoughts on the latest challenges in the T&E world.

The conference key note speech was delivered by the Director of Strategic Programmes in the UK MOD, Shimon Fhima MBE who outlined some of the frustrations around getting military capability to the frontline quicker, observing Ukraine’s ability to rapidly innovate in days rather than months. Shimon challenged the mind-set within the T&E community on a number of topics. Firstly, and the most significant challenge, is around legacy thinking, peacetime traditional approaches to solving problems and outdated decision making. The political imperative and risk appetite should now drive T&E approaches that give decision makers choice around military performance and risk tolerability in order to field capability earlier even if suboptimal, rather than make assumptions that decision makers won’t accept the trade-off in risk and performance. Secondly, our adversaries are pushing boundaries day by day, evolving at a rate where today’s approaches are out of date by tomorrow, thus we can’t afford to tick every box and will need to take a risk based acceptance approach. The focus should be on developing T&E plans that get technology into the hands of the war fighter early and continuing the T&E process in the field as the capability is iterated. Thirdly, we must continuingly challenge ourselves to not to be complacent. Through everyone making small differences, the sum will provide a meaningful difference in the battlefield.

The second key speaker was Will Blamey, Chief Executive UK Defence in QinetiQ, whose speech focussed on the value of partnerships across the T&E enterprise. Echoing the thoughts of Shimon, that the complexity and pace of change in the threat environment is such that we no longer have the luxury of time to conduct T&E as we would in peacetime and so the T&E enterprise must pull together to address the challenges. Successful partnerships aligned to common objectives and collaboration provide a means of accelerating innovation, enhancing efficiency and cost-effectiveness and maintaining and developing SQEP.

International partnerships such as NATO and AUKUS deepen defence and security ties between the nations involved. These partnerships promote greater information and technology sharing, as well as the integration of security and defence-related science, technology, industrial bases and supply chains. This enhances interoperability and strengthens the ability of partner nations to operate together effectively in response to regional challenges. To increase the pace at which weapons are fielded requires a philosophy to only test where needed, which is dependent on mutual recognition of assurance frameworks across the partners. Sharing international access to T&E capabilities will reduce costs and enhance greater opportunities to integrate test environments with our partners through a shared understanding of each other’s capabilities.

“Test the way we fight, test the way the enemy fights” a remark from Dr. Raymond D O’Toole, Jr. Acting Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, Office of the Secretary of Defense that symbolises the mind-set needed in T&E. An enlightening speech touched upon many different areas from the biggest challenges in T&E to the importance of data and the need to remain agile during test. Dr. O’Toole echoed the sentiment of Will Blamey that T&E is a team sport and to be successful we must play together, with partnerships absolutely fundamental to this. Some of the biggest T&E challenges for the US DOD were explored:

• Test Range Limitations
• Increasing Complexity
• Software integration
• Training for a Contested Battlefield
• AI and Autonomous Systems

The importance of data management and the ability to collect data in an automated way was a key highlight, emphasising that data is king and augmenting with AI will be a real game changer. However, data management is absolutely fundamental if it is to be exploited or used in real-time to influence test plan evolution whilst the systems are under test. Not only to shift testing to the left, but also ensuring we continually look right as to what is next.

Andy Caldwell, Head Research and Development, Test and Evaluation in UK MOD Strategic Programmes Directorate, addressed the audience drawing from his organisation’s mission to “build the world’s most productive, relevant and responsive military T&E enterprise”. Through the Future Advantage Through Evaluation (FATE) initiative UK MOD are seeking to shift the T&E mind-set, enable blended testing, empower local change makers and ensure T&E data is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). Reiterating previous comments, the theme and importance of partnerships was once again apparent and the challenge set to all was “how do we work together to deliver what is required for the war fighter”. The view is there is now a continuous blurring of lines between experimentation, T&E and training, where previously they were seen as discreet activities. This blurring of lines means the diversity of organisations required to deliver these elements is now broader than ever yet, Andy explained, the T&E enterprise is a sea of islands each operating independently. The challenge is to connect these to be more effective. The significant commercial and technical challenge in transforming the T&E data enterprise is one that must be addressed in the UK. The enterprise is sitting on huge amounts of data that if made FAIR would enable a step change in how T&E challenges are solved.

Panel Discussion – Challenges and Opportunities Facing T&E

Across the two days, the conference also received valuable insights on an array of other topics from subject matter experts including the alterative acceptable means of compliance in weapon testing; adapting and creating agile T&E deployable capabilities to support rocket developments; an overview of how regulation and regulatory bodies are supporting innovation in UAS; and an overview of the NATO Modelling and Simulation Working Group. The conference also hosted three technical discussion panels which provided insights and debates on areas like SQEP development, the challenges facing T&E and a review of a recent data hackathon.

With many common themes from across the conference, it shows that the challenges faced are ones that are shared, but ultimately can’t be resolved by anyone person or organisation.

In closing, a productive and collegiate conference was enjoyed by both attendees and presenters demonstrating that international forums such as this remain a key means for ITEA to engage with its members and the broader T&E community. The ITEA Western Europe Chapter (UK) looks forward to hosting a conference such as this again in the near future.