5 minute read
“We must navigate this era of radical uncertainty with agility, speed and a clear-eyed sense of national interest.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer, The Strategic Defence Review, 2025.
A new era of defence
The Strategic Defence Review, 2025 (SDR) sets out the UK’s transition towards warfighting readiness. The report commits to the largest defence spending boost since the Cold War – increasing to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, with a further planned increase to 5% by the parliament after next.
The review outlines a number of further significant investments – including an £86 billion investment into technologies that will boost the UK’s military competitiveness, £15 billion to a sovereign nuclear warhead programme and the construction of six new munitions production facilities nationwide.
These measures confirm the need for resilient, robust, agile and scalable supply chains that can adapt to the shifting demands and speed of national security and defence.
Logistics as a strategic enabler
“[The ‘defence dividend’] must drive innovation at a wartime pace, making the UK the leading edge of innovation in NATO and equipping our forces with the full range of conventional and technological capabilities.” Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, SDR.
The UK’s Armed Forces operate in complex, multi-domain environments, across land, air, sea, space and cyber. Sustaining forces across this breadth creates new levels of demand for integrated, highly visible logistics solutions that can meet operational needs effectively. These include:
- The ability to scale quickly and perform under pressure
- Real-time visibility of assets
- Secure distribution of crucial resources
- Complete lifecycle management from procurement to deployment
In this era of radical uncertainty, supply chains must be flexible enough to absorb disruption, agile enough to respond quickly ensuring the continuous flow of materiel and managing secure and timely delivery of mission-critical assets.
Transforming defence supply chains
To meet the demands of a high-readiness force, supply chains must undergo strategic optimisation to deliver at greater pace, scale and resilience. This means:
- Reducing points of failure
- Improving inventory visibility to ensure assets and materiel are always in the right place at the right time
- Ensuring end-to-end traceability for compliance and control
- Pre-positioning critical resources for faster mobilisation
From munitions to consumables, every item must be visible, traceable, accessible and deployable with precision. This ensures that not only are the right commodities deployed across air, land and sea, so that the Armed Forces have what they need, when and where they need it, but supply chains are continuously ready to respond.
Effective logistics boost operational success, ensuring front-line personnel can focus on critical tasks, confident that reliable systems are in place to sustain them and deliver against their objectives.
Wincanton: a logistics partner ready for the challenge
With a proudly British heritage, and over sixty years’ defence experience – across air, land and sea – Wincanton is uniquely positioned to help deliver the SDR’s vision of a warfighting ready UK.
Our integrated systems and innovative approach give supply chains enhanced mobility, scalability and visibility. We offer comprehensive technology systems that ensure robust supply chains with accurate inventory visibility around the entire warehouse.
“Through Warehouse Management Systems, barcode systems and RFID, we delivered transportation and storage of 20 million materials and parts during the nine-year build of Queen Elizabeth-class aircrafts with 99.94% accuracy and savings of over £200,000.” Derek Stirling, Operations Director – Defence at Wincanton
Wincanton understands that when it comes to defence logistics, there is no room for compliance failure. The people and organisations handling materiel must be qualified, reliable and security compliant. Our team operates with full FSC and List X compliance, Section 5 capability and a team of cleared personnel.
Our ability to comply is how we’ve had such longevity in the industry. We have an external compliance team that relentlessly audits us, and ensures we’re continuously meeting, or exceeding, regulation requirements.
As part of GXO, we have the international infrastructure in place to support global operations quickly, securely and with confidence.
Wincanton defence in numbers (as of 2025)
- £1 billion of assets managed across our estate
- 1 million square feet of warehousing
- 99% inventory accuracy
- 5 million transactions carried out annually
- 100,000 annual export-controlled movements
- 600 highly trained, security compliant operatives
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We’re only as strong as our supply chains
The UK’s warfighting readiness will only be as agile, scalable, flexible and responsive as its supply chains. For the greatest success, supply chains must be innovated and transformed. Logistics is both a support function and a force multiplier – accelerating deployment, enabling rapid redeployment, supporting inventory forecasting and tracking, providing access to pre-screened capacity, and ensuring assets can be mobilised at short notice.
Fast, reliable and secure movement of materiel is a strategic necessity. Effective logistics underpin high levels of readiness across multiple forces, enabling faster mobilisation and deployment. As the Ministry of Defence implements the recommendations in the SDR, logistics must be recognised as strategic national infrastructure.
Discover more about Wincanton’s experience servicing the defence industry
About the Author: Derek Stirling
Operations Director - Defence
Derek leads the Defence and Industrial Sector. He joined Wincanton in 2015 to lead the TUPE of the BAE Contract and closure of the ACA Contract. Derek assumed the role as Country Manager in 2021 to lead the groups strategy to develop and implement our new Scotland Gateway. Derek worked for Amazon before joining Wincanton. Experienced operational leader with over 25 years working for large corporates throughout his career.