The Defence Investment Plan just made comms a strategic priority. Most dual-use companies haven’t noticed yet.

The Defence Investment Plan landed on 30 June. £298bn over four years, defence spending heading to 2.7% of GDP and 3.5% by 2035. The headlines went where you’d expect – warships, F-35As, drones, the nuclear deterrent. As they should.

But that’s the kit list. It isn’t the story. Not for you, anyway if you are here reading this. 

If you’re a business in dual-use, defence or space tech, the story is buried in the first few pages – and it’s that the plan doesn’t just put money on the table. It builds a machine to go and find the companies worth backing. That changes what your comms are actually for.

The plan is a discovery engine

Read sections 1.2 to 1.5 and a pattern jumps straight out. The government isn’t only buying capability here. It’s trying to see the market.

There’s a new Defence Investment Unit whose job is to turn MOD priorities into “market-facing propositions.” An Investors’ Advisory Group of VCs, growth capital and banks. A Defence Investment Summit and a published Roadmap to give investors “earlier visibility of opportunities.” And UK Defence Innovation – £400m a year – running workstreams it has named Market Transparency and Industry Access and Dual-Use Technology Acceleration, with regional teams sent out to find the SMEs and spin-outs worth a look.

Add the British Business Bank money for dual-use SMEs, the National Wealth Fund’s first defence deal, and a 10% slice of the equipment budget ring-fenced for novel tech, and the direction is hard to miss.

Here’s the line – government has signalled it’ll route capital and contracts towards the companies it can see and understand.

Visibility used to be optional in this sector. It’s now the mechanism – this changes everything downstream.

Why silence stopped being safe

For decades, the smart move in defence was to say nothing. Stay grey. Let the primes do the talking. The risk lived in saying too much, so saying nothing won by default.

This plan flips that. If MOD, an investor, or a regional innovation team can’t quickly grasp what you do, why it matters to the threat picture, and that you can actually deliver – you don’t get found. You’re invisible at the moment the doors opened.

And this is the bit most founders will get wrong. They’ll assume the plan rewards the loudest voice in the room, and either keep their heads down or start shouting about features and technology readiness levels. Both miss it. What the plan rewards is being legible to the right people – and that’s a comms discipline. 

Two tracks, not one

It wants companies to be visible to capital – “showcase opportunities to investors” – while also “protecting national security and commercially sensitive information.” Those two things pull in opposite directions.

So the companies that win build a two-track narrative.

Track one is public. A clear profile that establishes credibility, category leadership and why you matter. It’s what an investor, an MP or a journalist meets first, and it works out in the open.

Track two is controlled. A security-aware channel for the capability detail – the specifics that belong in the right room, with the right people, under the right conditions.

Conflate the two and you fail one of two ways. Either you’re so cautious you say nothing useful, or you let capability detail slip into the public domain where it really shouldn’t be. Keep them separate and you get to be confident in public and precise in private – OH – both of these fall under your comms strategies right? Let your comms teams into the room – save money on doing it twice. 

Evidence, not assertion

The other hard truth in the plan? It has no patience for companies talking their way in.

MOD’s reform thrust is openly anti-“entryism.” It’s done with programmes that got going on a good pitch and a vague promise. New capability work only starts when something is “demonstrably affordable and deliverable.” The bar is proof.

So “we’re critical to the system” isn’t a line you can throw any more. It’s one you have to evidence – and frankly it makes you sound silly if you can’t back it up. Who do you already supply? What have you actually delivered – to the UK, to allies, to Ukraine? What can you build, at what volume, how fast? The munitions and energetics language all through the plan is about capacity, not cleverness.

Profile gets you the awareness. Evidence gets you the next step. Build your comms around what you can prove, not what you can promise (we’ve all had enough of the hype). 

Position against the threat, not the product

One more shift worth naming. The whole plan is framed around a threat picture – Russia, Ukraine, the Iran war, space as a “contested frontline.” That’s the language government and capital are thinking in right now.

Companies that explain which gap in that picture they close will land. Companies that lead with how elegant their platform is won’t. The unit of persuasion isn’t “our solution leverages AI.” It’s “we keep military comms resilient when they’re contested,” or “we cut the kill chain from days to minutes.” Same technology – completely different legibility – the language needs to land.

If you’re a dual-use business that’s nervous about the defence label – for talent reasons, for investors, for your own comfort – the plan hands you the frame. It treats dual-use as the prize over and over: civil spillovers, growth, jobs in every region. Dual-use widens your market. It doesn’t narrow it.

The discovery now starts in an AI answer

Here’s the part almost nobody in this sector has clocked – it’ll separate the leaders from the left-behinds. 

The plan’s discovery machine – the investors, the analysts, the UKDI teams, the journalists who shape the story around you – increasingly doesn’t start with a phone call or even a search. It could start with a question put to an AI assistant. Who are the credible UK companies in counter-drone? In space domain awareness? In sovereign energetics? The model hands back a shortlist. If your company isn’t on it, you were never in the room – and you’ll never know you got left off. 

It’s the same problem the rest of the plan describes, just moved up a layer. Being legible to people now means being legible to the models that brief those people. And the models can only cite what they can read: clear, structured, substantiated content that lives in the open, gets referenced by others, and says plainly what you do and what you’ve proven.

The good news? It rewards the discipline the plan asks for. AI surfaces evidence over assertion – it cites the company with the published delivery record and the named partnerships. And the two-track rule still holds: track one has to be rich enough for a model to understand and quote you, without giving away the track-two detail that belongs behind closed doors.

If you’re not already thinking about if AI can find you, name you and cite you correctly, you’re behind the curve. And in a market moving this fast, behind the curve is a hard place to climb back from.

So, what now?

The Defence Investment Plan is the clearest demand signal this sector has had in a generation. The money is real, the bodies to spend it exist, and the dates are near-term.

The companies that benefit won’t be the ones with the best tech – they’ll be the ones whose technology government and capital can see, understand and trust – in public where it counts, in private where it matters, and in the AI answers that decide who gets looked at in the first place.

We know comms in defence tech is hard – harder than it’s ever been to know what to say, how to position, and how to strategise around it. But this is the moment not to leave your comms team at the door. They’ll be one of the most valuable assets you’ve got. 

Halo is a communications and PR agency working with clients across space, defence, deep tech and sustainability.