With over 20 years of experience in geotechnical engineering, Dave Cage, Lucion Ground Engineering's Business Development Manager, explores the critical but often overlooked role of ground intelligence in UK defence strategy, exploring why understanding what lies beneath our strategic assets has become a matter of national security.
“This is the most dangerous period that I have known.”
When the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, made that statement on the BBC last Friday, it was a deliberate move to focus public attention on the sheer scale of the challenge facing the United Kingdom.
Warning that threats to the UK are now greater than at any point since the Cold War, Sir Richard spoke of escalating Russian activity, with air space incursions in the first half of 2026 already matching the entirety of last year, alongside the urgent need for Britain to prepare for longer, more demanding conflicts. Reflecting on the 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which he described as a vital “call to arms,” his warnings arrive at a key moment, just weeks ahead of the highly anticipated, delayed Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which will dictate how billions of pounds will be funnelled into defence capability and infrastructure over the coming decade.
The Strategic Base
The 2025 SDR established an uncompromising emphasis on readiness, resilience, mobilisation, and the critical importance of the Strategic Base. The strategic base being the critical infrastructure required to ready, deploy, sustain, and recover military forces while defending against modern hybrid threats. Taken together with Sir Richard’s urgent 2026 mandates, they paint a picture of a nation facing a challenge to adapt to an increasingly volatile world.
Unsurprisingly, most public discussion has focused on the highly visible aspects of military capability such as new weapons systems, expanded manufacturing capacity, cutting-edge drone technologies, and modernised infrastructure.
But a more fundamental, systemic question is hiding beneath the surface:
How much of the UK’s future defence capability depends not on what we build, but on the ground we build it on?
The Strategic Base as a Front-Line Capability
One of the most important concepts within contemporary UK defence planning has received remarkably little attention outside military circles. Current strategy argues that the Strategic Base (the vast network of airfields, dockyards, training estates, fuel depots, logistics hubs, and communications facilities) should no longer be viewed merely as a background support function for Defence. Instead, it must be regarded as a critical component of active defence capability in its own right.
This is a monumental shift in thinking. The UK Defence Strategic Base has evolved from a concept centred on military facilities and logistics into one that encompasses the full ecosystem required to generate and sustain defence capability. In doing so, greater attention is being paid to the physical ground beneath the estate itself. From training areas and airfields to dockyards, ammunition depots and new strategic infrastructure, ground conditions can directly influence performance, resilience, safety and future development. Understanding the opportunities and constraints presented by geology, geotechnical conditions, contamination and groundwater is therefore becoming an increasingly important element of maintaining and enhancing the UK’s Defence Strategic Base.
The True Cost of Uncertainty
The anticipated Defence Investment Plan is set to direct billions of pounds into modernising infrastructure, bolstering industrial capacity, and upgrading operational estates. New energetics and munitions facilities have already been announced, and existing assets must rapidly evolve to support a more resilient, more technologically advanced, high-readiness military.
Yet, scrutiny from Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in the last few days has highlighted a recurring vulnerability across the defence estate: uncertainty.
The Committee warned that past delays to major defence planning have degraded contractor confidence, inflated costs, and raised serious questions about the credibility of future capability delivery. Defence contractors have echoed these warnings, noting that systemic uncertainty drives project costs higher, while parliamentarians question whether the lack of a clear, predictable plan has itself become a strategic risk.
While these concerns are often discussed at a national budgetary level, the principle applies directly to physical infrastructure:
Uncertainty rarely becomes cheaper over time. It usually becomes exponentially more expensive.
The longer unknowns remain unresolved in a construction or expansion programme, the greater their potential to cripple budgets, timelines, and ultimately our military capability.
This is not a failure of current leadership; it is the natural byproduct of history. Many UK defence sites have evolved continuously over decades, and in some cases, centuries. Infrastructure has been extended, repurposed, demolished, and modernised across generations of conflict. Utilities have been diverted, fuel systems buried, and old structures built over. Decades of records have been archived, superseded, lost, or forgotten, while critical site knowledge has retired alongside the people who held it.
The result is that some of the greatest risks facing future defence projects are not directly linked to the underlying geology. They are legacy constraints:
- Undocumented utilities.
- Unknown buried structures.
- Unmapped historic ground hazards.
- Unexploded ordnance.
- Unknown contamination.
When multiplied across one of the largest and most complex estates in the country, these localised risks have the potential to escalate into strategic vulnerabilities. The UK is actively trying to prepare for future conflicts while still carrying the unmapped physical uncertainty of past conflicts beneath its most vital military sites.
Ground Intelligence Reduces Ground and Operational Risk
Our military organisations place an immense importance on intelligence. The entire purpose of intelligence is to reduce risk, reduce uncertainty, expose hidden threats, and improve decision-making. No responsible commander would willingly deploy forces into an operational environment with significant gaps in situational awareness.
With defence priorities firmly pivoted toward rapid mobilisation, readiness is ultimately defined by the reduction of uncertainty before a crisis occurs. Before a runway is extended, a munitions facility upgraded, or a naval base expanded, commanders and planners must fully understand the hidden environment they are altering.
This requires moving past traditional fragmented and compartmentalised approaches. It requires mapping the complex interplay between the natural ground, buried infrastructure, utilities, environmental constraints, topography, and historical land use.
A Strategic Necessity
At Lucion, this is a challenge we encounter regularly across defence estates, operational infrastructure, and nationally significant assets. True resilience cannot be built on fragmented information. Through our group of companies, we actively help clients eliminate uncertainty by integrating geospatial intelligence, utility mapping, ground investigation, and environmental assessments into a single, unified risk profile.
As defence strategy redefines the Strategic Base as a front-line capability, and as Parliament questions the financial and operational impacts of project delays, understanding the physical foundation of UK defence is a strategic necessity.
Every undocumented utility, unknown asset, and incomplete record represents an operational risk. Uncertainty is never neutral. It delays programmes, inflates costs, and directly degrades the nation’s readiness.
The question is no longer whether the UK can afford to map and understand the ground beneath its strategic assets. The question is whether, in this dangerous new era, we can afford not to.
For further information about how we can support your defence development project, email me at [email protected]
