British Army launches The Forge

The project is funded by the MoD's Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) and is being brought-to-life by web3 startup Hadean and innovation services company Cervus. Over the past year, Hadean and Cervus have been working hard to create a tool that reduces the time and resources needed to rationalise complex problems, enables robust and repeatable experimentation and demonstrably improves the evidence trail underpinning decision outcomes.

The Forge uses a combination of new web3 technologies to automate decision making for rapid analysis of scenarios in increasingly complex battle spaces and against new forms of threat. A historically slow process which often involves many compromises and subjective viewpoints will now be optimised with a precise, data-driven approach, ensuring key opportunities can be captured at the pace of relevance and not be overtaken by rapidly shifting circumstances.



Image courtesy Hadean

Speaking on the project, CEO and co-founder Craig Beddis (above) said "It's incredibly exciting to see the launch of this joint venture, both for the product itself and what it means for our future. The idea of using the Hadean platform as part of a decision support system began in our relatively small innovation department, speaking volumes to its potential for new kinds of applications.

"By integrating distributed computing with Cervus' cutting edge AI, we're able to bring something truly new to the table using these emerging technologies. In defence, we understand digital transformation as one of the key modern challenges and we can't wait to continue accelerating this integration with future technology - giving governments and organisations greater control and observability of their defence and security."

In the past, governments and defence organisations have suffered from incumbent decision making systems that are reliant on human actors and subject to bias and heuristics that can have an overly strong influence on emotive decisions. By combining scalable compute power and advanced artificial intelligence, the Forge will address strategic issues, capability gaps and optimisation of processes and logistics. From both a top-down perspective, looking at high level at policy and wider architectures, through to bottom-up looking at incremental innovation, the project aims to improve decision making with a holistic view of current and emerging systems. It will increase both the speed and agility of the decision cycle, maximising preparedness and reducing risk across operations.

Alan Roan, Managing Director of Cervus commented, "We are really excited to launch our newest product 'Forge' at ITEC this year. The Cervus team have designed it to help teams understand then rationalise complex problems cheaper and faster than traditional methods. Forge can enable rapidly repeatable experimentation which with a 'fail fast, fail early' approach allows users to run ever-refined iterations on the issues that really matter to get to the crux of an issue.

"We use objectively derived data, pulled from cutting-edge simulation and analysed with our patented Data Engineering and Data Science systems to provide robust evidence for improved decision outcomes. Working with Hadean has been a dream; we share a vision of 'getting it done' with the end-user in mind. With our approach and their platform, we can bring evidence to bear at the 'speed of relevance' and are sure that the results will speak for themselves."

Cervus and Hadean will be unveiling the project at next week's IT²EC 2022 event in London.