The biennial Defence Security Equipment International UK (DSEI UK) exposition returns to London – at an expanded Excel venue, between 9 and 12 September – and will bring renewed focus on enhancing partnering to deliver strategic advantage.
Such partnering – between government, armed forces, and industry – is central to the show’s overall theme, ‘Preparing the Future Force’. For NATO and other Western armed forces, building strategic partnerships is increasingly crucial to force preparation. For the UK as DSEI hosts, such partnering is prevalent in several different contexts, including multinationally (for example as a NATO member, or with its European Union neighbours); multilaterally (such as in the Australia/UK/US [AUKUS] or UK/Italy/Japan Global Combat Air Programme [GCAP] strategic accords); or bilaterally (as in its renewed links with France, Germany, and the United States).
Yet all such partnering constructs are being impacted – in various, and different, ways – by the continuing deterioration in international security, centred around war in Ukraine and wider state-based competition and crisis.
“DSEI UK this year is obviously coming at a difficult, but also important, time geopolitically, as alliances reshape …. It’s coming at a critically important moment,” Rear Admiral Jon Pentreath – a retired UK Royal Navy (RN) officer and aviator, now providing dedicated support to DSEI as Military Adviser to show organiser Clarion Events Defence and Security – told Naval News. “The show is therefore, as always, an opportunity for the UK government to showcase its defence sector, but also to build and confirm alliances, which are so important to the UK and its security.”
“DSEI UK offers that opportunity to bring countries and potential future partners together,” he added.
The ‘Preparing the Future Force’ theme – to be tackled in keynote addresses from senior political and military leaders, and in a range of panels across the air, land, sea, cyber, and space domains – will cover the strategic, technological, and organisational shifts taking place in and around the defence and security sectors. With an emphasis on delivering advantage for the future force, a series of three sub-themes will cover: securing advantage; driving advantage; and maintaining advantage.
“Securing advantage is focusing on the supply chain and acquisition,” said the admiral. “There’ll be much more about resilience in DSEI UK 2025, around sustaining readiness and enhancing agility through faster, more agile acquisition but also through more resilient supply chains.”
“Driving advantage will cover data analytics, cyber, cyber security, and artificial intelligence (AI),” Rear Adm Pentreath continued. This sub-theme will encompass enhancing decision making, operational efficiency, predictive maintenance, and other areas within the context of using digitization as a force multiplier.
“Maintaining advantage is focused on the human element, workforce management, and talent acquisition,” Rear Adm Pentreath added. “As defence budgets grow and governments expect the supply chain to respond and produce more equipment and weaponry, etc., the human resource to do that is in reasonably short supply,” he explained. “By DSEI UK 25 sharing best practice from around the world, it can actually make a real difference to that human resource element.”
In technology terms, while the show will see continued discussion of technologies emerging over recent years – like AI, autonomy, cyber, and data analytics – developments in these areas clearly will have advanced. “There’ll be new edges to all of those technologies,” said Rear Adm Pentreath.
Such technologies will be discussed in the thematic theatres dedicated to the air, land, sea, cyber, and space domains. In a separate innovation hub, ‘start-ups’ and innovators including from non-traditional defence companies will present their technologies.
Indeed, DSEI UK 25’s turn-out includes over 650 companies that have not attended previously, within an overall total of 1,700 exhibitors. With new participants attending alongside the show’s more traditional industrial stakeholders, the increased floorspace available to the event this year (following expansion work at Excel) has been filled. From the naval perspective, ships will be present once more in dockside displays, and waterborne demonstrations will return.
Reflecting the focus on international partnering, 37 countries will be present in the international pavilions programme.
“Genuinely, DSEI UK will be bigger, better, and more comprehensive than ever,” said Rear Adm Pentreath.
Overall, he continued, the event presents an opportunity for the UK government to communicate its key messages to strategic partners, especially the Ministry of Defence and Department for Business and Trade angles, and will build discussions that may help support the UK defence sector in turn to build trade opportunities as part of its contribution to the national economy.
Participating ships for DSEI UK 25 are set to be announced this week.
Naval News comment
On the back of the UK’s latest Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published in June, and occurring prior to the anticipated announcement of the Defence Investment Plan later in 2025, DSEI will be ‘front and centre’ of UK government and armed forces discussion of how SDR will be delivered and what core operational concepts and capability types will underpin this delivery. Such concepts and capabilities will be required to support SDR’s three core roles for the UK’s armed forces – defence of UK territories and interests, building Euro-Atlantic deterrence and defence, and contributing to shaping and sustaining international security. These concepts and capabilities must support SDR’s roles not only over the longer term, but in the context of any more immediate threats presented to national and NATO security by the continuing Russo-Ukraine conflict.
