Land Deployed Applications Discovery (LDAD)

Situation

In 2021, the British Army faced mounting challenges in delivering coherent, interoperable, and user-centred digital services in the deployed space.

Decades of legacy procurement approaches, siloed capabilities, and an equipment-centric mindset had left the Army struggling to adapt its command-and-control (C2) tools to the complexities of modern warfare.

With programmes such as MORPHEUS introducing open digital architectures, the Army recognised a strategic need to reassess how applications were developed, integrated, and deployed within the warfighting division.

The Land Deployed Applications Discovery (LDAD) was initiated as part of the MORPHEUS Programme to explore the development of Land Deployed applications within an open architecture ecosystem.

This initiative aims to enhance Command and Control (C2) capabilities by providing dynamic, integrated tools that improve Situational Awareness (SA) for commanders. The Deployed Applications Group, part of Army Digital Service was particularly focused on developing a suite of tactical applications that will support multiple infrastructures and operational requirements beyond the existing TacCIS framework.

These applications include Fire Control, Ground-Based Air Defence (GBAD), CBRN, ISTAR, MEDIC C2, and Personnel Support, among others. Given the complexity of requirements, a Discovery Phase was deemed essential to understand user needs, existing offerings, and business contexts before progressing to procurement and development.

Context

The Discovery was commissioned as the first strategic digital discovery into the warfighting domain, intending to identify systemic issues with existing application development practices and surface user needs across functional areas such as Fires, Medical, CBRN, Intelligence, Engineering, and Logistics.

Historically, digital capabilities had been treated in isolation, aligned more with hardware procurement than iterative software delivery. This approach resulted in significant capability gaps, duplicated effort, suboptimal user experiences, and delivery failures.

As described by Defence Digital, “the Army has repeatedly tried to force the square peg that is software through the round hole of equipment procurement” .

Activity

MilUX formed and led a multidisciplinary team that included user researchers, human factors engineers, technical architects, business analysts, and military subject matter experts, and conducted an extensive discovery across 50,000+ personnel and 8 functional domains.

The team interviewed 178 end users and 58 enabling users, using scene-based analysis to replace unusable persona maps and linear journey maps. Problems were aggregated and categorised into 17 themes, producing 119 problem statements and 48 Alpha options for experimentation.

In parallel, the team validated the capability to deliver an interoperable air picture using in-service radios and open-source software within 12 working days, proving the potential of agile, user-led delivery.

Result

The Discovery surfaced systemic issues with how the Army conceived, delivered, and measured digital services.

It demonstrated that many digital challenges were shared across silos and could not be solved by treating applications as standalone capabilities. The discovery also challenged the existing governance and commercial models, highlighting the impact of vendor lock-in, unmeasured benefits, and the failure to track user satisfaction.

Importantly, it created a reusable service performance framework that blended qualitative problem data with survey-based metrics, providing a benchmark for future service design and assurance.

“I was personally impressed by the motivation and dedication of the team for this discovery work, and the commitment by all to the articulation of user needs. I have spent some time reading through your documentation online, and I have yet to see something of this magnitude across Defence.” Dr Silvia Grant Head of User Research at DDS

Impact

LDAD reshaped the Army’s understanding of its deployed digital landscape. It was the first instance where the Army explicitly acknowledged that it might not even be aware of the scale of its digital problems, let alone equipped to address them.

The discovery established that “we don’t train/procure/build/operate as we fight” and offered clear recommendations, including halting project proliferation, aligning capability delivery to operational outcomes, and embedding service thinking into delivery models.

It marked a cultural pivot from equipment-first procurement to user-centred digital service design, laying critical groundwork for future agile deliveries and the successful realisation of MORPHEUS and LE TacCIS ambitions.

The team was also the first in Defence to conduct a Service Assessment for a warfighting service, we met all aspects of the Assessment. The assessment panel concluded:

“Despite being a mixed team of contractors, suppliers and military, the team displayed a fantastic amount of personal dedication and commitment to this discovery. The outputs of discovery are conspicuous, and of clear re-use across Defence, particularly in mapping the military user pain points (which will be persistent across Land, and other domains).

The panel was impressed by the quality of the outputs, as well as the amount of ground covered by the discovery. The radio prototype proof of concept was an effective demonstrator for how existing data and tech can be harnessed in-house to resolve recurring pain points.”

You can read more about the discovery on this Defence Digital Blog – Land Deployed Applications – A Strategic Discovery.