GUEST COLUMN:
Alex Bigham
Director
Grayling
Delays to the deployment of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Dragon have prompted renewed debate about the readiness of Britain’s high-end military hardware. Yet the real “dragon” emerging may not be a warship or a traditional piece of hardware at all. Instead, it is likely to be a new generation of advanced technologies – semiconductors, sensors, autonomous systems and AI – that could help power the future of Britain’s fighting forces and be built in Wales.
That ambition was on full display when I attended the launch of the Welsh Defence & Security Cluster, bringing together the armed forces, government, universities and industry. The initiative comes alongside a new Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and Welsh Governments and a £50 million Welsh defence growth zone designed to increase defence spending in Wales from around 3 per cent of the UK total to 5 per cent.
For Wales, significant opportunities lie in supplying the enabling technologies behind the changing character of warfare.
Senior military leaders speaking at the launch made clear that modern conflict is shifting rapidly. Brigadier Mark Davies, commander of the 160th (Welsh) Brigade, and effectively the head of the Army in Wales, described a future force where traditional platforms such as tanks, helicopters and missiles could represent just 20 per cent of combat mass. The rest will come from autonomous systems and low-cost expendable technologies -including drones. A similar plea to shift to a different fighting force was made by the heads of the RAF and Royal Navy in Wales. This will need active partnership with both established defence contractors but also innovative SMEs.
Ukraine has shown how quickly the battlefield is evolving. Cheap unmanned aerial vehicles are now being deployed in swarms, capable of overwhelming traditional air defences. Militaries are responding with new counter-measures ranging from electronic warfare and radar networks to directed-energy weapons such as lasers. Ukraine is now advising our allies in the Middle East. The tech shift on the battlefield is taking weeks, so the traditional procurement timelines of months and years have to be torn up. The UK is due to launch a business centre in Kyiv shortly to support UK tech and defence firms to better understand and adapt to this shift.
Each of these technologies depends heavily on advanced electronics. Semiconductors power the sensors that allow drones to navigate and identify targets. Compound semiconductor devices enable high-frequency radar systems that can track multiple threats simultaneously. Power electronics and photonics are central to emerging laser-based air defence systems designed to shoot down drones at a fraction of the cost of traditional missiles.
This is where Wales already has world-class capability as the first compound semiconductor ecosystems through CSconnected, centred around Newport. Companies within the cluster produce the advanced chips used in telecommunications, sensing and power electronics – technologies that increasingly have direct defence applications.
At the same time, research taking place in Welsh universities is pushing the frontier of military-relevant technologies. At Cardiff and Swansea Universities scientists are developing next-generation semiconductor materials, advanced radar systems and data processing techniques that could underpin future surveillance and sensing capabilities. Other Welsh institutions are advancing work in cyber security, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems.
The new defence cluster aims to connect these academic breakthroughs with industry and government procurement in a way that Wales has not previously achieved. One of the challenges will be ensuring that as scientists develop technical breakthroughs which tend to be advanced and ‘high end' that these are aligned with the need for simpler, lower cost systems.
Officials from the Ministry of Defence highlighted a broader shift towards “dual-use” innovation – repurposing commercial technologies for defence applications. The pace of modern warfare means development cycles are shrinking dramatically. Ukrainian drone systems, for example, are evolving in cycles of just six to eight weeks. That means the military must draw more heavily on agile commercial technology sectors rather than relying solely on traditional defence primes. This will also help for industries experiencing a cyclical slowdown in production demand, such as automotive.
For Wales, this creates an opening for small and medium-sized technology companies that may never have considered the defence market before. Though it needs the UK Defence Invesment Plan, which has been much delayed, to be published urgently by the Ministry of Defence.
The cluster will also complement other innovation initiatives across the country, including the expansion of semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and proposed AI growth zones designed to accelerate the development of advanced computing and machine learning applications.
If successful, the effort could create a powerful “triple helix” partnership between government, industry and academia – one capable of delivering both economic growth and sovereign technological capability for the UK.
There is also a deeper historical resonance.
Wales has long played an outsized role in military innovation. The longbowmen of Wales helped shape the outcome of the Battle of Agincourt, where their weapons transformed medieval warfare and delivered a decisive English victory.
Six centuries later, the tools of war look very different. Instead of yew longbows, the decisive technologies may be energy directed weapons, AI algorithms and laser systems.
But the underlying story is remarkably similar: a small nation contributing a critical technological edge on the battlefield.
If the Welsh Defence & Security Cluster succeeds, the next “dragon” defending Britain may not sail from a naval dockyard at all. It could be designed in a Welsh laboratory, components fabricated in a semiconductor facility, built in a small drone factory and deployed across a network of autonomous systems protecting the UK and its allies.
