Britain, alongside other European nations, faces rising threats to its security. The UK’s Strategic Defence Review 2025 reshapes the priorities of defence and national resilience sending a clear signal that supply chains can no longer be a back-office concern. National security, resilience, and domestic capability now demand urgent and sustained attention.
Increasingly, UK armed forces, defence contractors, and critical national infrastructure providers will need to deliver under intense geopolitical, environmental, and social scrutiny.
“You cannot fight tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s assumptions,” says Major General (Retired) Seumas Kerr CBE, Achilles Ambassador. “Modern defence operations rely on supply chains that must be both resilient and intelligent. We need suppliers who are known, vetted, and ready.”
Agility: Reacting Fast
The Strategic Defence Review highlights the need for rapid deployment and response. That depends on an agile supply base, not just fast-moving, but pre-qualified, proven, and compliant with shifting regulatory and ethical requirements.
Achilles helps organisations prepare by mapping and segmenting their supply base in advance. When the need arises, you don’t scramble, you act.
Predictivity and Prevention
Defence logistics has traditionally prized robustness, but as Lt Col (retired) Dr Darren Mann, a military surgeon, puts it:
“Good risk management isn’t about reacting quickly, it’s about seeing it coming. Predictive insight saves lives. We have known for a while that our lack of domestic capability in terms of vital medicines creates a significant vulnerability. Building that resilience means identifying those gaps early, understanding supplier capacity, and investing upstream before the crisis hits.”
Modern supply chain risk tools must integrate real-time signals, from sanctions data to cyber threats and climate disruption. Predictivity means understanding where suppliers are heading, not just where they’ve been. Achilles brings together operational, ESG, and geopolitical insights to help organisations stay ahead.
Defence must move away from “Just in Time Logistics” that has been utilised since 1989.
Epistemic Validity: Trust the Data, Trust the Decisions
In an environment where mistakes have strategic consequences, decision-makers need to be confident that the information they rely on is accurate, complete, and current.
Epistemic validity, or the reliability of your data, depends on how information is collected, verified, and maintained. Achilles triangulates data from suppliers and trusted third-party sources, independently verifies it, and continuously monitors changes to help organisations make decisions based on trusted evidence.
Audit Capability: Making Your Reasoning Defensible
Organisations increasingly operate under scrutiny, from regulators, shareholders, and the public. It’s not enough to make the right decisions, you need to show how and why those decisions were made.
With Achilles, organisations can document the rationale behind supplier choices, with a clear trail of evidence, who was selected, under what criteria, and based on what data. This approach supports transparency, accountability, and informed risk management.
The Takeaway
The Strategic Defence Review highlights that today’s threats are fast-moving, multifaceted, and often strategic or systemic rather than purely physical. In response, supply chains must be designed for agility, foresight, data integrity, and accountability.
If your supply chain was tested tomorrow, would it hold? Discover how greater visibility and validated data can make all the difference. Request a call back from an Achilles consultant using the form below.
