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What would defence reform look like if we stopped overcomplicating it?
In this Oxford+ in brief episode, host Susannah de Jager asks Alison Hawks questions that reveal how leaders think under pressure, what shapes their decisions, and what they are curious about right now. Alison argues that defence needs to get out of its own way: procurement should be a clearer transaction where the military owns the problem, industry owns the solution, and requirements reflect that division of expertise. She shares practical advice for anyone entering the sector tomorrow, using the simple test of desirability, feasibility, and viability to avoid building solutions nobody will fund or use.
Looking ahead to 2050, Alison predicts a different defence marketplace where today’s primes may not dominate in the same way, even as scale still depends on major supply chains.
Dr Alison Hawks: Dr Alison Hawks is co-founder and CEO of BMNT Ltd, the UK arm of BMNT, where she advises governments and technology companies on accelerating adoption of commercial innovation in defence and national security. She also serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Common Mission Project UK, a charity delivering mission-driven entrepreneurial education programmes in the UK. She was named Woman of the Year for Innovation and Creativity at the Women in Defence Awards (2022).
Connect with Alison Hawks on LinkedIn / Visit BMNT Ltd
Susannah de Jager: Susannah is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in UK asset management. She has worked closely with industry experts, entrepreneurs, and government officials to shape the conversation around domestic scale-up capital.
Connect with Susannah on LinkedIn and Subscribe to the Oxford+ Newsletter for Exclusive Content
Oxford+ is hosted by Susannah de Jager and supported by Mishcon de Reya, HSBC Innovation Banking, and James Cowper Kreston.
Produced and Edited by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford.
In this Oxford+ in brief episode, host Susannah de Jager asks Alison Hawks questions that reveal how leaders think under pressure, what shapes their decisions, and what they are curious about right now. Alison argues that defence needs to get out of its own way: procurement should be a clearer transaction where the military owns the problem, industry owns the solution, and requirements reflect that division of expertise. She shares practical advice for anyone entering the sector tomorrow, using the simple test of desirability, feasibility, and viability to avoid building solutions nobody will fund or use.
Looking ahead to 2050, Alison predicts a different defence marketplace where today’s primes may not dominate in the same way, even as scale still depends on major supply chains.
Dr Alison Hawks: Dr Alison Hawks is co-founder and CEO of BMNT Ltd, the UK arm of BMNT, where she advises governments and technology companies on accelerating adoption of commercial innovation in defence and national security. She also serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Common Mission Project UK, a charity delivering mission-driven entrepreneurial education programmes in the UK. She was named Woman of the Year for Innovation and Creativity at the Women in Defence Awards (2022).
Connect with Alison Hawks on LinkedIn / Visit BMNT Ltd
Susannah de Jager: Susannah is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in UK asset management. She has worked closely with industry experts, entrepreneurs, and government officials to shape the conversation around domestic scale-up capital.
Connect with Susannah on LinkedIn and Subscribe to the Oxford+ Newsletter for Exclusive Content
Oxford+ is hosted by Susannah de Jager and supported by Mishcon de Reya, HSBC Innovation Banking, and James Cowper Kreston.
Produced and Edited by Story Ninety-Four in Oxford.
Creators and Guests
What is Oxford+?
Welcome to Oxford+, the podcast series that explores the myths and truths of the Oxford investing landscape hosted by Susannah de Jager. Since moving to Oxford, Susannah has collaborated with experts, entrepreneurs, and government to shape the conversation around domestic scale-up capital. Oxford+ aims to inform, inspire, and connect. We'll talk to Founders, investors, academics, politicians, and facilitators and explore how Oxford is open for business.
[00:00:01] Susannah de Jager: Alongside our main episodes of Oxford Plus for Season Four we are introducing a short fortnightly miniseries in between the main episodes. Brought to you by me, Susannah de Jager, and in partnership with Mishcon de Reya. In each episode, we ask our guests the same four questions designed to reveal how they think, what shapes their decisions, and what they're curious about right now.
[00:00:21] The questions stay the same. The answers rarely do. This is Oxford Plus in brief.
[00:00:27] So Alison, we are doing kind of mini episodes as well and I'm going to ask you a few questions. So what would success look like if we got this right for you? How do we iterate from this point?
[00:00:39] Alison Hawks: I think what success looks like is I think defence getting out of its own way and stop over intellectualising defence reform. It's a really basic simple relationship between industry and the government. The government needs to buy things and industry needs to deliver those things. And I think we forget, we lose sight of how simple and transactional it really should be, and we make it more complicated. So I think if we get this right, we think about how we write requirements differently that recognises the jurisdictions of knowledge that truly exist. So the military are the experts in the problem, not industry and industry are experts in the solution and they worked together in that collaboration. And I think if we got that right and wrote requirements based on that and understood how we can procure and empower our acquisition workforce, I think we would be in the right direction of getting it right.
[00:01:37] Susannah de Jager: What advice would you give somebody entering the defence sector tomorrow?
[00:01:43] Alison Hawks: Understand the problem you're solving more than anything, and understand if anyone cares about it. And a really good heuristic is desirability, feasibility, viability. Desirability, does anyone care about the problem you're solving? And would they use a solution? Feasibility, can it technically be done within the solution space and viability, does the organisation care enough about this problem to be willing to put money against it and solve the problem?
[00:02:07] Susannah de Jager: In your opinion, what does the UK defence sector look like in 2050? How will the landscape have changed?
[00:02:15] Alison Hawks: 24 years from now.
[00:02:18] Susannah de Jager: It's a long way off.
[00:02:19] Alison Hawks: I think that, and I'm being inspired by one of my clients who I think is really, truly innovative and changing the way that we think about defence. I don't think we are going to have the primes in the same way that we have them. I think we are going to have a different marketplace for defence, and that marketplace is going to be organised very differently.
[00:02:41] Susannah de Jager: How do you see this playing out between the larger players in the space, the medium size and the smaller?
[00:02:47] Alison Hawks: I think what I see with this kind of new cohort is they don't want to be acquired. So they're not looking for fast exits. They are mission-driven. They're looking for impact, and they're looking to play a role in what seems to be a conflict that resonates with them, quite understandably, more than a Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, as we see Russian encroachment on Eastern borders and what's happened in Ukraine, the companies feel legitimately they have a role to play and so they're not coming into it with the MOD owning the data is part of their strategy, they really believe and they're committed to defence being a better entity and it having a better competitive advantage.
[00:03:31] And I think the Primes, as we understand them, so that would be the Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Calise, I don't think they're the bad guy. And I know they get thrown under the bus a lot, but they do maintain a lot of our critical infrastructure through supply chains. We cannot scale without them.
[00:03:50] And so what I also see is companies who either understand that to scale, they need to partner with Primes, which I think is partially true. But there are some companies right now that have a mindset that they will not ever work with Primes, and in fact, they're going to change the entire paradigm of defence. That's really interesting. To answer your question, I don't know. But they're displaying different behaviours than they have been in the last 10 years.
[00:04:12] Susannah de Jager: I'd love to hear more about the educational side of what you have been focused on in the past, five, six years. Because you spoke earlier, you come from an academic background yourself, but you've launched this amazing educational charity called The Common Mission Project. Tell us a bit more about it.
[00:04:31] Alison Hawks: Yeah, so the Common Mission project was started out of the programme called Hacking for Defence, and that was run as a very kind of scrappy pilot summer course at Stanford in 2015. And then in 2016, it became a more formal course offering at Stanford, and at that point we understood that this course had legs and that we could spread it to every university in the US and I'll explain the course in just a minute.
[00:05:00] But we built that charity around that original concept of Hacking for Defence. as you say, common Mission Project is an educational charity we run the programmes called Hacking For. So our big programmes are Hacking for Defence in the US, Hacking for Ministry of Defence here. But we've also proven the application of the methodology and the curriculum to Hacking for Sustainability, Hacking for Oceans, Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Local, and it really has nothing to do with coding or like hacking into systems. It's more like the life hack, because I do get that question quite a lot. How do you solve a problem? How do you solve a problem faster?
[00:05:34] And the premise of the programme is really simple, but really powerful, gives students real unsolved national security and defence problems and teach them how to validate the problem and build first versions of the solution in 10 weeks. So it's a flipped course model. The students have to interview 10 people a week, over 10 weeks. They often interview more than a hundred people in 10 weeks, and they give weekly presentations. And the role of the instructors is to provide critical feedback and to develop the student skills of how do they quickly defend a hypothesis? How do they justify their position? How do they use evidence that they've learned in order to validate some of their assumptions?
[00:06:12] But traditional education in this space is so theory heavy. I know it. I've taught it at King's College of London, Department of War Studies. I've taught our military officers at our defence academy. I've taught at Georgetown University. Students learn about defence policy and military history without ever meeting someone in uniform. So we flip that. We pair these students with problem sponsors from the MOD and NATO and they conduct this customer discovery.
[00:06:37] This is, the concept that Steve Blank, the godfather of Lean Startup developed and the co-founder of our programme. So they can go out and deeply understand the problem before proposing a solution. The concept itself was really the brainchild between Pete Newell, my business partner, former colonel in the US Army, and Steve Blank, And it was how do you take the best practises of what Steve developed in Lean Startup and Lean Launchpad, and then put them to the operational problems that Pete was trying to solve on the battlefield and the lessons that he had from the rapid equipping force?
[00:07:08] And so the hypothesis was we've been banging our heads for 10 years inside government trying to solve a problem. We're not making progress. Why don't we give it to our nation's brightest, our most talented, our most ambitious students, and see if they can have a crack at it. And if by doing that we can get them interested in defence or the government at large. And what makes this really powerful is it's this hands-on education in the kind of very messy reality of how government works, which we've talked about a little bit, and these student teams quickly learn problems that are not as initially described by their sponsor, that procurement constraints matter as much as technology, and that success requires understanding both the operational environment and the institutional context.
[00:07:51] But the students that come into it, I am so passionate about this, because we have got to get this generation to care about defence and national security. It is critical. A critical imperative. If they don't care about it, then what we are saying is, Russia come to our borders. Russia, take Ukraine. In fact, why don't you take the Baltics and the Nordics and go into Poland? Everything that we stand for and our values that we hold really dear, and those big problems that we're trying to solve, they relate to defence and national security. And if we can't get this generation to care about it, then I think that is a huge handicap for us.
[00:08:35] And so this programme is so powerful. 86% of the students who take our class indicate that as a result of taking the class, they want to work either in the MOD, join one of the single services, or work in the defence industrial base
[00:08:50] Susannah de Jager: Can I ask what the starting number is?
[00:08:52] Alison Hawks: Around 30%.
[00:08:53] Susannah de Jager: Oh, wow. So it's a huge jump because you might think it was a sort of self-selecting cohort to a degree.
[00:08:58] Alison Hawks: So that's really interesting and also we're not statisticians. But the 30% is what is their awareness of defence and then at the end we ask, what are your employment preferences? And so we're making some relationships from the data there.
[00:09:12] But I think what's really interesting in having scaled this programme, so it's over 60 universities in the US and it's to 27 here in the UK.
[00:09:21] Susannah de Jager: Which is just amazing. That's huge.
[00:09:23] Alison Hawks: It's incredible and it is so rewarding. when I went to university, I just felt like I kind of barely made it out of bed. I would study a little bit, maybe go to a party. These students are coming in and they're so focused and once they get excited about a problem, you can see that spark in their eye of, oh my gosh, I want to keep working on this. And so I think what we've discovered is there's such an enormous latent talent in mission-driven work. If you give students the opportunity to work on problems that matter, they choose it. So all of our classes are electives. All of these Hacking for MOD classes, they're all electives, which as means the students can choose what they take and they choose national security and defence. So that tells you something about this next generation.
[00:10:05] Susannah de Jager: It's very interesting hearing you talk about making them care, because I think this generation really do seem to care. I feel like when we were growing up we weren't having as much geopolitical unrest and conflict. It felt quite abstract and it felt like a bit of a waste of money compared to the NHS potentially. It didn't feel as existential as it did for our grandparents, our parents, and now it's shifted so much and as you touched upon, everything that we hold dear is predicated upon defending our borders and that has come back to the fore. I think that somewhere between getting them to care and just making them aware, but I think even more importantly, what you're doing is making them feel like they have a part to play and some agency in that going forward because it is complicated. It is quite abstract and there are still quite a lot of, potentially negative, connotations that sit there for some people.
[00:11:01] Alison Hawks: This is the most important work that we do. So I'm really glad that you raised this. What I see, because I'm in the classrooms every term is, there's a generational shift happening, and I'm exposed, very privileged, exposed to some of the best universities in the world, and especially those in educated in progressive environments defence is associated with forever wars. It is associated with military industrial complex conspiracies. It is associated with imperial overreach. But when you ask these same students about defending democracy, protecting civilians from authoritarian regimes, or ensuring open societies defend themselves, they care deeply.
[00:11:39] And it's exactly as you said, the disconnect between the abstract concept of defence and the concrete reality of what it actually protects, that is the missing link that this programme provides. And so we reframe the conversation through this programme. We talk about missions, not militaries. We focus on problems like critical infrastructure, decreasing accidental deaths, increasing safety, defending against cyber attacks, climate change and sustainability. All of those problems students recognise as legitimate because they are. And we connect them with people in uniform who are thoughtful, who are principled and who are mission driven.
[00:12:14] And so I think that there is a huge shift in perspective where we have watched, as I said, students come in sceptical and saying they want to join the MOD, or they didn't realise that the work that defence was doing was about protecting the things that they care about. And once you meet the intelligence analyst trying to stop terrorist financing, or the submariner who's worried about detecting threats on a nuclear submarine. It stops becoming abstract and it becomes about people trying to do important work with insufficient tools and that is something this generation is desperate to do.
[00:12:46] Susannah de Jager: Well, it stops becoming faceless, and I think you'll be familiar with this, but I remember reading something that basically, members of the military in uniform in the US were treated with quite a high level of deference and that here in the UK actually it was often the complete opposite and very negative from the public.
[00:13:04] Alison Hawks: I've experienced it. I grew up in the US. my father was drafted into Vietnam. My brother was a Navy Seal. I'm married to a British Army officer. I've always grown up with a deep appreciation for the armed forces and an understanding of kind of where they sit in society and the kind of that defence and national security, that kind of wider narrative woven through the educational system of they defend that freedom that we all really enjoy.
[00:13:29] And that's a very different narrative here. And even if my husband has to go to a meeting and he's wearing his uniform and he's in London, I'll say, oh gosh, please be careful, please be careful. I never would've said that in the US. So I think that we don't have the same relationship with the armed forces that we do in the US. I think that from some of the younger generation, to the point we were just talking about, I think they equate defence with things like, actively killing people or doing really bad things or there's kind of this conspiracy around defence and what it does. But if you had the opportunity to look in defence and see the people that are working there, not only are they not making that much money as civil servants, they work very hard and they work in more complexity than any of us will ever work in our working life. And yet they show up every day trying to wade through that complexity and do the right thing. That is really major and I think that's what we expose students to.
[00:14:23] Susannah de Jager: I love that. I absolutely love that. I think it's amazing.
[00:14:27] Alison, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed this.
[00:14:30] Alison Hawks: Thank you for having me. Me too.
[00:14:32]
[00:14:32] Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+, presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website, oxfordplus.co.uk and sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford+ was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four.