• New five-year contract to support UK Armed Forces from the warehouse to the front line
• 675 jobs sustained across UK supply chain
• Contract expected to deliver £54m in efficiency savings

The contract supports implementation of the Integrated Review and Defence Command Paper, published last year, which placed an emphasis on more productive, active and globally deployed Armed Forces.

Logistics Information Systems (LogIS) support vital services including inventory, transport, engineering and general ledger management, ensuring the UK can successfully deploy military personnel and equipment globally.

Supporting the Ministry of Defence’s ongoing Modernising Defence Programme, this new contract will ensure all single services have access to a single technology-enabled system to support essential inventory services, covering everything from washers and bolts to replacement parts for nuclear missiles.

Around 300 jobs will be sustained at Boeing Defence UK’s Milton Keynes and Bristol sites, as well as a further 375 roles in the wider UK supply chain including IBM, Fujitsu, Sopra Steria and BAE Systems.

Minister for Defence Procurement, Jeremy Quin said:

This contract helps ensure our Armed Forces can rapidly deploy personnel and equipment on operations at home and abroad whenever required, maintaining their reputation as one of the finest fighting forces in the world.

Safeguarding the UK’s ability to provide critical defence, security and resilience, the contract enables the management of current and future equipment through ongoing access to cutting-edge software applications that are maintained and updated in line with the changing needs of Defence.

Head of Support Chain Information Systems at Defence Equipment & Support, Dave Penlington said:

Defence cannot mount or sustain operations without logistics information. This crucial capability will make our Armed Forces more agile and better placed to support future cutting-edge equipment.

I am delighted that the team’s hard work alongside industry has ensured the UK Armed Forces have the tools they need to do their jobs effectively.

Director Support Transformation at UK Strategic Command, Air Vice Marshal Richard Hill said:

Securing this contract will provide the means to deliver and modernise Logistic Information Systems (LogIS). This in turn will enable our transformation programme by integrating with industry partners to deliver Support Advantage.

Negotiated by Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S), the procurement arm of the UK Ministry of Defence, the £460 million contract is being delivered three months early and is expected to save £54 million over the five years.

Originally developed by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and Innovate UK, SAPIENT is an open software architecture that helps different sensors, interfaces and decision-making modules work together with little or no software engineering, and can improve efficiency through use of autonomy.

With the misuse of small, widely available drones representing a significant and growing risk to operations and day-to-day defence activity, NATO is working with industry to develop capabilities to counter this threat, and in November 2021 undertook a trial of various counter-drone technologies and systems. The counter-uncrewed air system technical interoperability exercise (C-UAS TIE 21) included testing SAPIENT’s Interface Control Document (ICD) as a candidate draft standard for counter-drone systems.

During the demanding air defence exercise, SAPIENT proved highly successful in providing the standard for underlying information exchange.

It enabled more than 70 connections between counter-UAS (uncrewed air systems) and Command and Control (C2) systems. It also facilitated 17 advanced autonomous sensor modules (ASM) from different vendors to connect to 7 decision-making modules (DSM). Impressively, in some cases this connection was completely plug-and-play, achieving zero-second integration time.

As a result, many suppliers of counter-drone technology have now adopted the SAPIENT standard. It has already been adopted by MOD as the standard for counter-UAS technology.

David Lugton, Dstl Project Technical Authority for counter-UAS systems, said:

NATO TIE adds to the recent success of the SAPIENT deployment at Contested Urban Environment 2021 and builds on its adoption in the UK MOD C-sUAS Strategy.

The widespread voluntary adoption of SAPIENT by industry across NATO was highly impressive, paves the way to an open commercial market of SAPIENT compliant C-UAS components and places the architecture as a crucial enabler as the demand for rapid C-UAS interoperability increases across the NATO nations.

By providing a common standard for interfacing sensing, effector, fusion and C2 element, SAPIENT facilitates the use of autonomy and reduces the workload on operators. And by using the openly-available SAPIENT Interface Control Document, suppliers and partners can ensure they develop compatible modules, making integrations between systems quick and easy.

Dstl’s Professor Paul Thomas said:

Zero-second integration is really important. Rather than spending months or years developing a system, by which time the threat has changed or gone away, you can simply click together these pieces and they just work at deployment time. So you can respond to a new or an emerging threat by integrating the pieces you need at the time you need them.

The NATO TV channel have produced a video article about the exercise, which includes footage of various counter-drone technologies in action.

The Troika (the United Kingdom, Norway and the United States) and the European Union underscore their continued support for the democratic aspirations of the Sudanese people. Abdallah Hamdok played a major role in leading Sudan’s democratic and economic reforms. His resignation as Sudanese Prime Minister, two months after the military’s unconstitutional seizure of power, reinforces the urgent need for all Sudanese leaders to recommit to the country’s democratic transition and deliver on the Sudanese people’s demands for freedom, peace, and justice.

No single Sudanese actor can accomplish this task on their own. While the Troika and the European Union will continue to support the democratic transition in Sudan, Sudanese stakeholders will need to work on the basis of the 2019 Constitutional Declaration on how to overcome the nation’s current political crisis, select new civilian leadership, and identify clear timelines and processes for the remaining transitional tasks – including establishing the legislative and judicial branches of government, creating accountability mechanisms, and laying the groundwork for elections.

Unilateral action to appoint a new Prime Minister and Cabinet would undermine those institutions’ credibility and risks plunging the nation into conflict. To avoid this, we strongly urge stakeholders to commit to an immediate, Sudanese-led and internationally facilitated dialogue to address these and other transitional issues. Such a dialogue should be fully inclusive and representative of historically marginalized groups, include youth and women, and would help put the country back on the path to democracy.

The Troika and the European Union will not support a Prime Minister or government appointed without the involvement of a broad range of civilian stakeholders. We look forward to working with a government and a transitional parliament, which enjoy credibility with the Sudanese people and can lead the country to free and fair elections as a priority. This will be necessary to facilitate the Troika and the European Union’s provision of economic assistance to Sudan. In the absence of progress, we would look to accelerate efforts to hold those actors impeding the democratic process accountable.

At this critical juncture, we continue to hold the military authorities responsible for human rights violations which are against current national legislation and international law. The right of the Sudanese people to assemble peacefully and express their demands needs to be protected. We expect the security services and other armed groups to refrain from using further violence against peaceful protestors and civilians across the country, especially in Darfur.

The killing of scores of Sudanese, sexual violence and the injuries of hundreds more by the security services and other armed groups since the October 25 military takeover is unacceptable. We reiterate the need for independent investigations into these deaths and associated violence, and call for the perpetrators to be held accountable. Attacks on hospitals, detentions of activists and journalists, and communication blackouts, must also stop. We once again call for all those unjustly detained to be released and for the State of Emergency to be lifted immediately.

Sudan’s people have spoken as loudly and clearly as they did in 2019. They reject authoritarian rule and want the transition toward democracy to continue. Sudan’s leaders must now show they are listening.

The Prime Minister today updated the public on the government’s ongoing actions to tackle COVID-19 and prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed, including implementing Plan B measures, standing up local Nightingales to create extra capacity, buying more antivirals per person than anywhere else in Europe, significantly increasing testing capacity and rolling out the vital booster programme.

The Prime Minister thanked vaccinators for their enormous dedication over the festive period as well as everyone who came forward for a jab.

He welcomed the success of the Get Boosted Now campaign in delivering 10 million extra boosters across the UK and doubling the rate of vaccination from 450,000 doses a day to a peak of more than 900,000.

Outlining the significant protection offered by the booster jab, the Prime Minister reiterated his call for every eligible person to get their booster – with 2 million appointments available this week alone.

In his statement the Prime Minister also acknowledged the disruption to the workforce caused by the spread of Omicron and set out further measures the government is taking to address this.

He announced the Government will provide 100,000 critical workers in England with free lateral flow tests to help keep essential services and supply chains running.

Critical workers will be able to take a test on every working day and the provision of precautionary testing will be for an initial five weeks. This will help to isolate asymptomatic cases and limit the risk of outbreaks in workplaces, reducing transmission while covid cases remain high. These critical workers are those who work in essential services, cannot work from home and are at risk of infecting each other – for example, due to working together in an enclosed space. People covered by the scheme will include those who work in critical national infrastructure, national security, transport, and food distribution and processing. This includes vital roles in Border Force, Police and Fire and Rescue Services control rooms, electricity generation, test kit warehouses and test surge labs.

The full range of critical workers have been identified by the relevant departments and Government will contact these organisations directly on the logistics of the scheme this week. Roll out will start from Monday 10th January. Tests will be separate from public sectors who already have a testing allocation with UKHSA, such as adult social care or education, and separate to those delivered to pharmacies and homes, so those channels will not be impacted by the new scheme. We are now distributing around 600,000 packs of 7 tests on gov.uk directly to homes every day (more than 50% higher than last week).