Maximising Benefit from Defence Research: A Review of Defence Research and Technology for Alignment, Quality and Exploitation

The Defense Industrial Strategy emphasized the need to ensure our research is aligned to capability needs, that it is of the necessary quality, properly exploited and that we get best value for money from our investment. We announced in the Strategy that we had set in place an evidence-based peer review of research alignment, quality and exploitation, net as a one-off exercise, but to set a benchmark for future biennial reviews of our research programme. This report sets out the results of the review. Through the use of external peer reviewers to assess the quality of our research, we ensured the study was as independent and objective as possible. The resulting assessment of our research programme is therefore particularly welcome for its assurance that the vast majority of the work we commission is relevant to detect needs and at high quality. This does not mean we can be complacent. Inevitably, there are things we can do better and the study has made a number of useful suggestions for how we can improve yet further on our current performance. We will attend to these as rapidly as possible. Most importantly, we have now established a proven methodology we can use in future reviews of the research programme and a benchmark against which we can regularly measure our performance in this vital area of defense activity. This will help ensure we continue to provide our world-class Armed Forces with the leading edge capabilities they need.