Capability roadmap
Defence contracts are argued years before they are tendered.
Order books are full and there is no capacity outside them, and the capability the next cycle will ask for is being argued now, in published strategies, doctrine and concepts. FORCE reads the documents you release and returns a capability map in which every entry quotes the sentence it was read from.
Six combat functions
Five working days
Every entry quotes its source sentence
In one sentence
For a supplier whose order book leaves no capacity to read the customer's own documents, FORCE reads the strategies, doctrine and concepts you release and returns a capability map in which every capability, and every enabler it depends on, carries its source passage — and no recommendation on whether to bid.
The situation
Which capabilities will the next defence contracts ask for?
Order books are full, and a full order book pays for today's product. The capability the next cycle will tender is being argued now, in strategies, doctrine and concept papers written by people who will never sit in a bid review. An EDIP call, MOD contracts and a national programme all arrive in the same shape: a specification at the end of an argument published somewhere else.
Thousands of defence documents are published every year, and the argument behind one requirement sits across several of them. Read one at a time they are clear; read as a set they are hard to compare, because nobody applied the same frame twice. A company further down the defence supply chain sees less again: the tender text arrives through a prime, the concept paper does not.
Development follows the current order book, and the next cycle asks for something else
What it costs: The requirement arrives as a tender the portfolio cannot answer, and the decision is a no-bid.
An enabler the tender never named, that the customer's own documents argue for
What it costs: Certification, spectrum, a data link or test infrastructure sits inside scope after award, and the change request costs more than the margin on the lot.
Proposal budget commits before anyone has read the argument behind the requirement
What it costs: A quarter of a capture team goes into a submission that comes third, and the money is gone from the opportunity behind it.
In practice
Who pays for an enabler the tender never named?
An enabler the tender never named can still sit inside the scope after award. FORCE holds capabilities apart from the enablers they depend on: the worked example on this page sets 108 capabilities against 7 enablers, each with the passage it was read from.
The map names the dependency and does not size it. What an enabler costs to build, and who carries it, are priced by the people who will build it.
What the map shows
An enabler the customer never named is a risk nobody has priced
A roadmap gap stays visible where the capability itself looks well covered
An empty cell records silence in the released set, not an absent capability
The alternatives
What are the five routes to reading the customer's own documents?
A bid team has no capacity outside the tenders it is already answering, and the argument behind the next one is published somewhere else. Five routes are open, and four of them cost less to start than FORCE. What separates them is elapsed time, whose reading of the set it is, and whether a finding can be traced to a passage afterwards.
| Route | What it gives you | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Do nothing | No release, no contract and no cost. The proposal budget stays free for the opportunity behind this one. | Development follows the current order book, and what the next cycle asks for arrives as a tender the portfolio cannot answer. |
| Read the set in-house | The reader already knows the product, the programme and the customer, and nothing leaves the building. | It costs weeks of an engineer taken off a delivery programme, it is framed by whoever had the week free, and it is the first thing cut when a delivery date moves. |
| Commission a consultancy or a think tank | A view, a recommendation and a network, argued by people who follow the field full time. | It costs more and takes longer than the bid window allows, and a finding traces back to its author rather than to a passage a gate review can open. |
| Run the PDFs through a language model | An answer the same afternoon, from a seat the company already pays for. | A silence gets filled with a plausible paragraph, no passage ships with the finding it produced, the standpoint the set was read from is not fixed, and what is pasted into a public service has left the company. |
| FORCE | One frame over the released set: six combat functions in five working days, capabilities held apart from their enablers, and the source passage under every entry. | No bid or no-bid comes back. The same public documents are open to a competitor commissioning the same read, and the set is sized in pages and quoted before anything moves. |
What you get
What does a capability map establish before a bid or a development decision?
A capability map places every relevant passage from the released set under one of six combat functions and holds each capability apart from the enablers it depends on. The columns follow NATO Allied Joint Doctrine and stay fixed between engagements. The worked example on this site ranks 52 topics.
Which capabilities the released set argues for, read from the standpoint agreed before the run and shipped with the result
Which enablers each capability depends on, listed against it, and where a capability recurs with no enabler attached
Why one topic was ranked above another, with the grounds recorded during the run
Deliverables
How long does it take, and what comes back?
Four deliverables come back, and four stages lead to them. The five working days start when the released set arrives; before that the set is sized in pages and quoted, and the quotation holds for 30 days.
Capability map
Six combat functions across the columns, three relevance tiers down the rows. The columns follow NATO Allied Joint Doctrine, and an empty cell means the set is silent, not that the capability is absent.
Capabilities and enablers separated
The capability the set argues for is held apart from the enabler it depends on, with the enablers your set attaches listed against it. A capability that recurs with no enabler attached is a finding in its own right.
Source traceability
Every entry carries the passage it came from, down to a character range in a named document. Topics are compared against each other rather than counted, and the grounds for each comparison ship with the result.
A complete summary, in one interactive document
One interactive and editable HTML document carries the findings and the source passages behind them in full. A disputed entry resolves to one sentence rather than to a bibliography, and nothing is installed.
How an engagement runs
Stage one
The enquiry
You describe the decision that has to be taken and roughly which documents could be released. No document changes hands.
Within two working days
The scoping reply
A written reply states what an analysis of that set could and could not establish.
At your speed
Sizing and custody
The set is sized in pages and quoted against four page bands. Custody is agreed in writing, and nothing is transferred until the quotation is accepted.
Within five working days
The capability map
The five working days start when the released set arrives. The summary, the capability map and the source passages come back in one interactive document.
One step
Send us the question, not the documents.
Describe the bid or development decision in front of you and roughly which documents could be released. A scoping reply comes within two working days, stating what an analysis of that set could and could not establish.