Government Foresight Report Flags Accelerating Supply Chain Risks

Homeland June 22, 2026

The Government Office for Science has published a new Foresight report on supply chain risk and resilience that carries direct relevance for the defence sector, as the industry navigates an increasingly contested global environment and a government push to build sovereign industrial capacity.

“Global Supply Chains: A Foresight report on risk and resilience” sets out an evidence-based framework for identifying vulnerabilities, testing assumptions, and stress-testing supply chains against different future scenarios. Its central finding is one the defence supply chain already knows from experience: supply chains are not linear systems but complex networks, where a product may appear secure while remaining dependent on a wider web of interconnected components and materials with vulnerabilities in unexpected places.

The report’s warning on timing is particularly relevant to defence. It notes that risks are increasingly emerging earlier in supply chains and evolving faster than organisations are adapting, with geopolitics and climate change expected to intensify these pressures. For a sector already grappling with long lead times in rocket motors, energetics, and critical raw materials, the message is that the structural pressures being felt now are likely to worsen, not stabilise.

Government Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Dame Angela McLean said: “Recent disruptions have shown how complex and interconnected supply chain risks have become. This report helps decision-makers better understand where those risks sit and how they may evolve, supporting more resilient, evidence-based, forward-looking decisions.”

For defence supply chain businesses, the report’s analytical tools, including scenario-based planning and vulnerability mapping, offer a methodology that maps directly onto defence procurement thinking. The MoD’s own Category Strategies work, currently underway in areas like sensors and energetics, is addressing precisely the kind of upstream vulnerability this report describes.

The publication also reinforces the broader policy direction of the Defence Industrial Strategy, which identifies supply chain resilience as a national security imperative rather than a purely commercial consideration. Businesses that can demonstrate they have analysed and addressed their own supply chain vulnerabilities will be better positioned as the MoD increasingly factors resilience into procurement decisions.

The full report is available at gov.uk.

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