DHN0036

Written evidence submitted by Planet.

This submission from Planet highlights to the Defence Committee that existing capabilities are outdated and must be urgently replaced in order to safeguard the UK and its operations in the High North. The UK should utilise cutting-edge, readily-available space-based Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (SBISR) capabilities to ensure its armed forces have persistent and predictive understanding of the battlefield, reform procurement to keep pace with rapid innovation, and ensure personnel are equipped with the required AI-leveraged skills relevant to the High North environment.

About Planet

Planet was founded in 2010 with the mission to image the Earth every day and make change visible, accessible, and actionable.

Planet operates the largest, highest-frequency constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in Low Earth Orbit, with approximately 200 satellites capturing daily imagery. The constellation provides, on average, a three-metre resolution image of the entire Earth landmass every day, serving the resulting data and insights to clients. This also means that we have an archive of over 3,000 images over every imaged location, enabling a rich data stack for change detection and insight generation. We are proud to be an existing partner to the British armed forces and to other NATO member countries, providing persistent, wide-area Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities tailored to our users’ needs.

Answers to specific questions

Question C. How will the UK work with, and without, key allies and partners in the region, both within and outside NATO, including through the JEF, and how does this support or undermine the UK’s policies set out in Question B?

●        The UK must maximise NATO/JEF collaboration by prioritising a granular High North understanding, leveraging interoperable space-based ISR systems with archive capability to counter increasing hostile activity

Working with allies in the Arctic is critical - particularly Canada and the Scandinavian nations. The Joint Expeditionary Force plays a vital role because not all NATO members share the same level of interest or possess the necessary resources as the UK and other invested Alliance nations. Targeted collaboration enables concerned nations to effectively combine their capabilities.

For closer NATO collaboration (and JEF membership) to deliver maximum effect, the UK and its allies must prioritise gaining a granular understanding of what is currently happening in the High North to properly assess requirements and priorities. This is necessary because of the significant increase in daily activity by hostile actors in the region.

Further advantages can be gained by using SBISR systems which have a multi year archive capability, in the form of a high fidelity analysis of Areas of Interest (AOIs) within the High North. Access to archive data allows users to identify baselines of behaviour over time - for example in the movement of military assets, vessels and ice - that can be used to understand how key dynamics are changing, and determine adversaries’ future options and potential actions.

This granular, foundational level of operational understanding - and the effectiveness of any subsequent collaboration - also requires the interoperability of ISR systems and approaches. The tried-and-tested alliance frameworks available through NATO and, potentially, through JEF should help enable these capabilities.
 

Question D. Do UK Armed Forces have appropriate capabilities for sustained operations in the region now; and are appropriate plans in place to meet the needs of the future?

●        No and no. The UK needs to do the following, without delay:

○        utilise cutting-edge, readily-available SBISR capabilities to ensure its armed forces understand what is happening and likely to happen in the High North;

○        reform procurement to enable the rapid acquisition of bespoke SBISR capabilities;

○        overhaul intelligence processes to ensure personnel are equipped with problem-focused, AI-leveraging SBISR skills relevant to the High North environment;

○        establish situational awareness and force multiplication approaches suited to the vast, unstable High North environment

i. Space-based Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance

From a UK perspective, the vast, dangerous and distant nature of the High North makes responsive, accurate SBISR capabilities essential. The isolated and demanding environment means that by the time allied forces are able to identify suspicious or actual hostile activity, it is likely too late to respond. This underlines the importance of daily monitoring capabilities to tracking opponents’ activity as well as changes in the physical environment - literally to the ground and ice beneath soldiers’ feet.

The UK should utilise bespoke, commercially-available EO systems within its ISR ecosystem to safeguard its interests in the High North. The UK’s armed forces risk being outpaced by technology, with the continued use of obsolete processes and systems preventing servicemen and women from realising the transformative benefits of SBISR systems. Commercial systems provide a lower cost, lower risk and mission-ready alternative to sovereign-procured assets. Further, these systems are run, maintained and upgraded at cost to the supplier.

A SBISR solution provides strategic warning, maritime domain awareness (MDA) and enables timely operational responses, leveraging best-of-breed sensory imaging with pioneering AI capabilities. Examples of High North-relevant capabilities enabled by modern ISR include:

○        “Dark vessel” detection, including identification of spoofing[1] and bunkering[2]

○        Monitoring melting of sea ice and littoral changes

○        Ice sheets and snow coverage analysis

○        Extent of permafrost’s impact on ability to manoeuvre

The significant gains delivered by SBISR systems can be further enhanced when merged with analysis from maritime patrol aircraft and/or unmanned systems. Fixing these gaps in ISR capabilities would materially improve the UK’s effectiveness as a key member of NATO, JEF, and other relevant alliances. Best-of-breed SBISR would offer the UK military major force multiplication benefits and improved efficiency, as well as better-focused use of government money and less wastage of precious resources in a vast and challenging operational environment.    

Other countries are doing a much better job of transitioning to SBISR approaches. Many of the technologies currently adopted by the Ukrainian armed forces, for example, originated in the commercial sector and were rapidly adapted for military use. The UK should recognise that its best capabilities in AI, software, and space often reside in commercial startups and scale-ups, that can be tailored to match the other parts of its defence ecosystem. Utilising them in the High North would be both cost-effective and timely. Without them, the UK risks being blind, slow, and behind the realities of modern warfare.

ii. Change procurement processes to enable the rapid acquisition of key services such as bespoke SBISR capabilities

The MoD’s ability and willingness to partner with commercial organisations in a flexible and responsive manner is fundamental to the efficient and effective evolution of UK Defence capability in the round, not just for SBISR. The current procurement framework remains a hindrance rather than enabler for the British armed forces. There is a clear and increasingly urgent imperative to improve procurement from its current weak state, to ensure UK forces can meet the rapidly evolving threats that witnesses described during the Committee’s oral evidence sessions.

Our assessment is that the rate of change in MoD procurement is too slow, and characterised by bureaucracy, inertia and caution. A myopic focus on being seen to achieve best value confounds logic and hands ‘primes’ a vested interest in preserving the status quo, with processes that are so impenetrable that they defeat smaller, valuable organisations who may otherwise wish to compete.

We observe that existing MoD procurement processes are heavily directed towards the acquisition of bespoke military equipment rather than services from commercial providers. The MoD’s Annual Budgeting Cycle (ABC) process provides no flexibility to allow rapid procurement of services not attached to existing equipment programmes, for example, with procurement processes too commercially rigid to allow the continual change and update of services - preventing the agile delivery of service-based solutions (a standard means of delivery in industry). Of the available procurement reform options, we believe that allocating specific budget within the ABC for the acquisition of services from commercial providers, and the ability to procure using relevant Crown Commercial Service (CCS) frameworks would better enable SBISR capabilities to be rapidly inserted into the UK defence ecosystem.

Without such a change, the slow pace of current acquisition processes will hinder the UK’s ability to keep up with rapid battlefield innovation, such as that witnessed in Ukraine. We have recently seen cases where acquisition of operational services have been directly impacted by the delay in delivering the Defence Investment Plan (DIP), where capabilities required by operational users were cancelled because of budgetary constraints.

iii. Skills and training

The vastly improved SBISR options available to the MoD present an opportunity for the UK to improve its capabilities in the High North. This enhancement also requires analysts to be able to manage the resulting data and insights, and equipped with the skills required to fully utilise new approaches.

We have regular contact with MoD ISR analysts who tell us that current processes are more suited to the environments and practices of 1976 than those of 2026. Existing processes are too often determined by existing platforms rather than the nature of the problems facing military planners. Problem-focused approaches need to be the starting point, using the most effective tools and technologies rather than those that continue as a result of habit and familiarity.    

As the saying goes: “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into a military brain is getting an old idea out”. We see this reflected in existing Intelligence Community practices and culture. The government must ensure personnel are equipped for the High North by instilling awareness of its unique environment and best-of-breed ISR capabilities skills, including being adept with systems that leverage AI and Machine Learning technologies. 

This inertia is reflected in existing Intelligence Community practices, where even supposed “centres of excellence” resist modernisation, operating as separate fiefdoms with separate vested interests. The entire manner in which intelligence is gathered, handled, fused, and communicated to military leaders and decision makers must be urgently adapted to the pace and clarity that SBISR technology offers. In environments like the High North, this adaptation is essential to manage the challenging complexity of conflict and competition, especially since hostile activity commonly occurs at a 'sub-conflict' level.

iv. Environmental and domain awareness

The High North is increasingly unstable, with the reduction of ice cover enabling greater access by “Arctic” and "Near-Arctic" states and increased boldness in activity, as rivals vie for access and control.

As the Committee has heard during oral evidence sessions, the scale of the High North makes monitoring extremely resource‑intensive, requiring coordination between military assets, commercial infrastructure operators and scientific EO domains. The fragility of the environment - especially as a result of melting ice caps - means there is a particular need for effective ‘daily scan’ ISR approaches to tracking changes, as Figure 1 indicates.

Figure 1. Planet images of Milne Ice Shelf, Arctic Ocean, Canada, 26 and 31 July 2020

Figure 2. Milne Ice Shelf size in relation to Central London

In just five days, between July 30 and August 4 2020, the Milne Ice Shelf - Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf - collapsed into the Arctic Ocean. This single event shrunk the remaining mass by an estimated 43 percent, losing over 30 square miles of land area. For comparison, the Milne Ice Shelf is roughly equal in size to the area shown across Central London in Figure 2. This rapid, climate-driven change underscores how frequently the physical environment of the High North transforms, necessitating a constant "daily scan" approach to tracking changes to the ground and ice.

The Ukraine conflict demonstrates how access to data and insights provide a battlefield advantage. Innovation in space, drones and AI offers critical situation awareness to understand military movements, the surrounding landscape and inform decision-making.

These are not peripheral enablers - they are central to gaining situational awareness.

If MoD funding and focus was correctly applied to these technologies, they could dramatically improve the effectiveness of the wider set of UK military assets and options. While this observation holds true for any environment and theatre, it is especially important in the High North - where the extreme cold weather and physical environment makes maritime and ground operations particularly strenuous and difficult. The area is also a challenge due to its large size and sparse, remote populations.

Consequently, the ‘Observe’ and ‘Orientate’ parts of the ‘Observe, Orient, Decide, Act’ (OODA) Loop are particularly important in the High North.[3] The ‘observe’ function is critical to success because operating in the snow can be rapidly degrading and catastrophic. Where best-of-breed SBISR analysis is available, it is hugely advantageous and an immense force multiplier.

Additional observations on the UK’s existing and future capabilities

At present the UK has limited broad spectrum and domain capabilities and has in recent decades been focused on theatres requiring distinctly different approaches, principally Iraq and Afghanistan. The UK can send a Carrier Strike Group to the High North - programmes such as Atlantic Bastion are steps in the right direction - but the UK still lacks the scale and persistence required to maintain a presence there.

UK Space Command uses an ‘Own, Collaborate, Access’ (OCA) framework to guide its space capability management, as detailed in the Defence Space Strategy and subsequent updates. This framework determines the UK’s development and employment of space services to achieve strategic advantage, balancing sovereign control with international partnerships and commercial reliance. We believe the UK needs to double down on the OCA framework in collaboration with Arctic partners and urgently acquire the readily-available, foundational capabilities for SBISR to understand what adversaries are already doing in the High North.

When these ISR capabilities are put into place, the challenge becomes managing the resulting large flow of data. This is the point when AI-enabled insights are vital in order to cut through the noise - enabling, for example, the tracking of the growing traffic of “dark fleet” vessels in the High North and identifying hostile states’ intentions.

Question E. To what degree can military capabilities developed for the High North be re-deployed for operations in other theatres, and vice versa?

●        Acquiring crucial remote sensing and SBISR capabilities to guide activities and counter hostile actions in the High North, should be the first step towards filling the capability gap

The UK currently lacks the military capability for deployment or re-deployment. The question presupposes the existence of assets and the feasibility of their permanent or semi-permanent deployment to the High North. In the present absence of such assets, the focus should instead be on foundational SBISR capabilities, which would better serve the UK's strategic objectives. Since the UK does not have a fleet or forces to re-deploy, remote sensing stands out as a crucial, quickly achievable capability enhancement, to guide its activities, and understand and counter the hostile actions of others.

25th March 2026