Collaboration Through Innovation

To ensure dominance in the battlefield of tomorrow, it is vital to innovate across every domain, to deter evolving threats and empower the UK armed forces with new solutions.

Nowhere is this more important than in the context of military training, where innovative working practices are already bringing transformation to the UK's armed forces. This is in line with the changes outlined in the Government’s Integrated Review Command Paper, which emphasises the need for enhanced, innovative capabilities to be adopted by the Ministry of Defence.

But innovation in defence training is rarely achieved on its own. It requires an ecosystem of partners working collaboratively to provide emerging technologies, transparency, inclusion, agility and value for the customer. Raytheon UK is collaborating with trusted training partners to provide sovereign technologies, capabilities and systems, and it is through this collaboration that the company seeks to help the armed forces innovate and better meet the fast-evolving threats to the UK’s national security.

“At Raytheon UK, collaboration is at the heart of what we do,” said James Gray, managing director for Cyber, Space & Training at Raytheon UK. “Our partnerships enable us to tap into the best that industry has to offer in cutting-edge technologies, and new and emergent best practices in military training. This provides us with the ability to help increase the adaptability of the armed forces and help deliver critical national security missions.”

In December 2020 Raytheon UK joined a Capita-led consortium, which included Elbit Systems UK, Fujitsu and several smaller British suppliers, that was selected to provide the Royal Navy with transformative technology, training and learning solutions. And this year, Raytheon UK is building on this by leading and continuing to work closely with their strategic training partners Elbit Systems UK, Raytheon Professional Services (RPS), Fujitsu UK and Frazer-Nash Consultancy on upcoming prime and integration projects that will develop and deliver transformational training solutions.

“We want to help enable our armed forces to deploy personnel with world-class training behind them in order to protect UK national security interests at home and abroad and continue to contribute to the NATO coalition and wider allies,” added Gray. “The ability to draw on the experience of our strategic partners is crucial to making that happen.”

RPS, a global provider of managed learning solutions for commercial, government and military customers across 15 industries, is recognised as a leader in the fields of learning, performance consulting and technology-enabled solutions. Their discriminator is their “architect” process. Through the application of this systematic methodology, RPS can align training to specific learning objectives and generate the building blocks for performance-driven learning.

Raytheon UK’s strategic partnership with Frazer-Nash Consultancy allows them to draw on its significant domain experience of supporting many strategic national programmes, in particular the submarine enterprise, to underpin its comprehensive design and assurance solution portfolio. The company has also been supporting the MoD to capitalise on the benefits that new technologies such as artificial intelligence offer, developing data analytics and information processing tools and techniques that support defence’s decision-making processes.

With Fujitsu, Raytheon UK benefits from a wealth of knowledge on delivering secure integrated IT/IS solutions for complex military programmes. And as the selected synthetic integrator for Royal Navy training, Elbit Systems UK is ideally placed to provide the partnership with training knowledge and experience of synthetics. The company is an established supplier to the UK armed forces for several major defence programmes, such as Morpheus, and collaborates with major defence partners on projects such as the Military Flight Training System and Project Selborne.

By maintaining relationships with these companies, as well as other academic and technology partners, including Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), Raytheon UK can keep abreast of current and future training technologies available to its customers and utilise specialist capability where required. This enables their solutions to remain adaptable, flexible and scalable.

“We have long welcomed collaborative relationships with our strategic partners, SMEs and academia, and we believe them to hold the key to unlocking innovation”, said Dave Carter, Raytheon UK’s supply chain management director. “We are also committed to giving our customers easy access to the best that the UK SME community can offer and helping SMEs reach markets without overburdening them with process and risk.”

Working in collaboration with their partners is key to delivering the transformative training solutions that Raytheon UK customers need to bring innovation to defence. In doing so, they can help the armed forces keep pace with the ever-evolving threats that they face, effectively deliver on their national security missions and thrive in the 21st century.