Foothold

A foothold is the secured ground on the far bank. Not the whole operation, the place you hold and push out from. Breaking into UK defence is much the same: you have to get across the river, hold ground, and have somewhere to work from. Foothold is that ground.

It is a free, defence-native knowledge system you install and own. You stand it up in an evening and walk into Monday with the structure, the discipline, and the public reference content that would otherwise take months to assemble.

The problem it solves

Defence is one of the hardest markets for a small company to enter, and the barriers are rarely technical. There is no map of the world: you find the organisations that matter by accident, and there is no one to call to ask the stupid question. Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus and JOSCAR feel like an exam nobody set the syllabus for. And everything you know is scattered across a dozen tools, with you as the only person who can find any of it.

Generic productivity templates do not help here. They have never heard of an RDSC, or JOSCAR evidence, or why an OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE marking matters.

Foothold runs where these two meet: Claude’s Cowork does the work, Obsidian holds your vault.

What you actually get

Foothold is an installable Obsidian vault: the structure, page templates and conventions that hold a defence business together, with a guide in every folder so you always know what goes where. It comes pre-populated with open-source defence reference content, the regional clusters, the frameworks, the MOD bodies, the programmes and the portals, so the map that founders keep telling us does not exist is already drawn. And it ships with skills for the jobs you do every week, from adding a contact or an organisation, to keeping up with the MOD’s constant renaming, to getting your Cyber Essentials evidence in order.

There is a rename command to make it your own, an update command to keep it current, and an offline installer for the many defence networks that block GitHub.

It is yours

Foothold installs on your own machine and you own the copy. It runs in Obsidian alongside Claude’s Cowork app, which needs a paid Claude plan, and it keeps working if MilUX goes quiet. Your contacts, your research and your accreditation work stay with you, not locked inside someone else’s platform. In a sector rightly nervous about where AI providers put your data, plain files on your own machines is not a design preference; it is the sovereignty answer.

Free, with help if you want it

The core is free and available to anyone. If you would rather not set it up yourself, or you want it tailored and your team walked through it, hands-on setup and ongoing support are there at a modest cost. You never pay for the thing you could have done yourself.

Why trust it

Foothold is the system MilUX runs its own business on, packaged for you. The structure came from our own vault, and the content and priorities came from research with defence founders who kept describing the same gaps. We ship the discipline, never our relationships.

Get Foothold

Foothold installs into Claude’s Cowork app from its public GitHub repository, with a step-by-step walkthrough in the repo. Get it at github.com/MilUX-Ltd/foothold. If you would rather we set it up with you, book a call.