Defence Futures and Force Design (F&FD)
Our mission is to design the forces Defence needs to be prepared for the challenges and opportunities we face now, and to prepare for those we expect to face in future.
What we do
F&FD is part of the Military Strategic Headquarters (MSHQ).
It informs, guides and supports strategy and force development through the provision of strategic foresight, concepts, capability strategy and force design analysis.
Strategic Foresight
The Foresight Team provide the threat-informed, long-term global strategic context for policy, strategy, force design and capability development.
In collaboration with their global network the team consider what the future might look like in the coming decades and publishes its thoughts and findings through its Global Strategic Trends Programme.
The Strategic Foresight Team also contributes to cross-government thinking about the future and works closely with international partners and allies.
Publications include:
- Global Strategic Trends: Out to 2055
- Global Strategic Trends: Out to 2055 – Nordic Synthesis
- Human Augmentation – The Dawn of a New Paradigm
- The Global Strategic Trends Programme – a collection of publications that develop, challenge and inform Defence strategy, policy and capability development through a broad range of strategic and foresight analysis.
Insights, Analysis, Research, Challenge (IARC)
The team provides analysis and research to inform and support activities key to the continuous development of policy and strategy within Defence.
To encourage critical thinking, academic discourse and insight, the team identifies, reviews and analyses publications from across the Defence sector and thought leaders, disseminating them directly to Senior personnel and periodically publishing content on an internal blog to stimulate debate.
The team also facilitate access to external academic support via the Strategic Analysis Support Contract and maintain engagement with diverse academic stakeholders.
Publications include:
- Global Strategic Partnership research papers bring expertise from think tanks, academia and industry to support Defence thinking, and policy and strategy development.
- Handbooks, primers and guides
Strategic Concepts and Warfare Development
The Strategic Concepts and Warfare Development Team sets Defence’s conceptual vision and drives short-term change to achieve it.
The team consists of two branches:
Strategic Concepts
The Strategic Concepts Branch develop and assure concepts to inform and influence the evolution of policy, force design and capability development.
Working closely across MOD and wider government, engaging with academia, industry and multinational allies and partners, the team write exploratory and operating concepts that look beyond current policy and financial horizons at the likely ways Defence might fight and operate over the next 15 years.
Publications include:
-
Strategic concepts explain how the military instrument can be employed against future challenges to achieve policy aims.
Strategic Warfare Development
The Strategic Warfare Development Branch assesses the current force, synthesises strategic lessons, codifies military strategic problems within a 0 to 5-year time horizon and offers evidence-based solutions to resolve them.
This involves the prioritisation, synchronisation and coherence of multiple strands of Warfare Development activity across the Armed Forces. Warfare Development activity also shapes and drives future capability strategies and force design.
Internship Programme
F&FD run a paid internship programme open to any Masters-level (post-graduate) students. This is designed to bring recent academic research and practice to support Defence Futures and Force Design key activity while giving interns experience of working in government on major strategic issues.
Read more on the Defence Futures and Force Design Internship Programme page.