WIREDGOV

The UK’s Digital Targeting Web promises cross-domain targeting fit for the modern digitalised battlefield – but organisational complexity, procurement and funding challenges and a dearth of outcome metrics threaten to make its delivery targets more aspirational than assured.

Over two decades after the UK’s drive for Network Enabled Capability (NEC), joint low-latency targeting is seemingly within reach: a web of lethal, cross-cued sensors and weapons, augmented by artificial intelligence. But there are hurdles ahead. The near and long-term development of the UK’s Digital Targeting Web (DTW) is ambitious and holds promise; however, its development and subsequent introduction to Defence depends on more than just modern technology.

Strategic Purpose and Framing

Britain’s DTW is not a single system or technology but is instead a broad conceptual framing that unifies discrete targeting capabilities across the services and wider defence enterprise. Its purpose is to integrate, not merely to refine the procurement of a product or series of products. The MOD’s vision is for DTW to enable a ‘full spectrum, cross domain approach to joint targeting’ by using both ‘kinetic’ (for example artillery or air launched and loitering munitions) and ‘non-kinetic’ (for example cyber, electronic warfare or information operations) against physical and non-physical targets. Discussions among government officials have aimed to redefine these initiatives less as a ‘web’ and more as the creation of integrated targeting workflows.

As the DTW is neither a project nor a programme, it therefore lacks both an end state and discrete outcomes. The current focus appears to be on improving deliberate targeting capabilities across Defence with the intention of using these improvements as a ‘forcing function’ for integrating data flows across the services and wider defence enterprise. Indeed, in a briefing to defence industry companies, government officials described their objective as simply an ‘increase [in] targeting scale, pace and precision by 2030’. It remains unclear what the outcomes will be to meet the SDR’s commitment ‘to deliver a digital targeting web in 2027.’

Such an amorphous vision can be a double-edged sword: while eschewing an end state permits the flexible and continuous integration and improvement of capabilities in a fast-paced innovation environment, the lack of discrete outcomes inhibits one’s ability to judge progress. Absent overall measurable objectives, there will be difficulty determining how successful the DTW is besides simply being ‘more’ integrated than before.

The problem of measuring integration is not unique to the DTW and has plagued the defence sector for years. However, treating ‘flexibility’ and ‘iterative-ness’ as fundamentally incompatible with quantifiable metrics is likely to frustrate all DTW stakeholders, both internal and external.

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