Speed and innovation dominated the debate at Defence Tech Day. Behind those soundbites, reality is more nuanced.

One of the keynotes came from Jeroen van der Vlugt, CIO of the Dutch Ministry of Defense. He described the new submarines (Opens in new tab): ordered years ago, and not due in port until around 2035. His conclusion: the submarine will be outdated by the time it reaches port. Not a decade of delay, but, in his words, “a century in technological terms.”

That same day, the message came back even sharper. Lieutenant General Ludy Schmidt outlined a threat landscape that, in his view, has not been this diverse and persistent in eighty years, drawing one lesson from it: the advantage goes to whoever adapts fastest, not whoever has the most weapons. Brigadier General Steven Lauwereys made that concrete: small drones in Ukraine are adapted weekly (Opens in new tab) based on direct feedback from the front. Innovation that doesn't reach the front in time, he argued, isn't useful, no matter how good the technology is.

That stuck with me. Not as criticism of my field, but as a question: what does this mean for Integrated Logistic Support (ILS), and for the companies I help with it?

Developments are moving fast, and speed is becoming increasingly important in the Ministry of Defense's decision-making processes. So why would a company even start with Integrated Logistic Support (ILS), even partially? Most engineering and R&D teams encounter ILS for the first time at a bad moment: when something has already gone wrong, or at the end of a project, when it turns out they aren't compliant and evidence for requirements is missing. What they see then is mostly extra work. Higher costs, longer lead times, little direct payoff.

That question isn't strange, then. Why add something that slows you down, in a world where delay is the one thing you can't afford? That picture is partly true. But not entirely, and that “not entirely” is exactly where the nuance is needed.

Boston Consulting Group recently published an analysis of how industry revenue is distributed in defense (Opens in new tab). One key finding: for high-end platforms, roughly half the profit comes not from the sale, but from maintenance and support after delivery.

For the F-18 Super Hornet, that's more than ten billion dollars in profit from sustainment, on a total program worth over twenty billion dollars.

For expendable systems, like drones that fly only once, it's the reverse. Almost all the value sits in the initial sale. That's why speed is often used as an argument against ILS. For a drone like this, that argument holds. Extensive ILS is unnecessary there.

That's the exception. Most defence systems stay in service for years to decades. ILS stays relevant throughout. Think of integration with SAP-based asset management, spare parts supply, configuration management, and solid RAM analyses (Reliability, Availability & Maintainability). Not because it's required, but because a system that doesn't fit how Defence organizes maintenance and stock simply doesn't work. No matter how fast it was delivered.

That risk affects the supplier too. Without solid analyses of sustainment and lifespan, you don't know what your own maintenance and warranty obligations will cost. So it's not just a sales argument. It's risk management for your own business.

Alongside profit and risk, a third factor comes into play: trust. Harder to express in monetary terms, but no less important. A supplier without a solid maintenance concept, documentation, and analyses may deliver quickly, but not with demonstrable reliability. Trust isn't bought with speed. Trust is built with evidence, and that evidence is exactly what ILS is about.

That trust is exactly what the Ministry of Defense selects on, often before a tender is even issued. Ministries buy more readily, and earlier, from companies with an existing ILS philosophy at the product level. That means putting the user in the field, the technician or operator, at the center from the start of development. Not as an add-on later. As part of how the product itself is designed, ILS included.

This directly affects the strategic choices of technology companies looking to enter the defense market, or already in it. What does it cost you if you wait until the Ministry of Defense asks for it?

Yet the reflex at many OEMs is the opposite of investing, and that reflex is often nothing more than a gut feeling. Bringing ILS into the picture feels like development will take three times as long, and production will become many times more expensive. An assumption, not a calculated figure, and in practice usually not justified.

Speed and ILS aren't opposites. The mistake is treating ILS as all-or-nothing, and therefore, under time pressure, dropping it altogether. Not every system needs the same amount of ILS, as the BCG figures already showed, but for most systems, it isn't a choice you can simply skip.

Back to that room at TU/e. Everyone talked about speed. Almost no one talked about what happens after the first delivery. For a drone written off after a single flight, that hardly matters. For nearly every other system, that's exactly the trap many companies fall into. Getting a system out the door feels, to them, like the finish line. For the Ministry of Defense, it's the start of twenty years of use.