Own the Decision: The Sovereign AI Stack for Defence, Security and Resilience
When we built our first Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline at Adarga in 2016, we did so because we knew that allied Defence, Security and Resilience organisations were unable to effectively process the vast volumes of human generated data they had access to and were therefore unable to realise the mission critical value contained within it. In former lives we have lived and experienced the cost of this firsthand; bad, sometimes fatal, decisions being made on the back of an incomplete understanding of any given situation.
So followed a company mission that remains true to this day: Adarga delivers technology that drives better decisions in organisations that uphold the values and interests that we believe to be integral to the Defence, Security and Resilience of our nation and her allies. Everything we do is focused on helping our customers win.
Now, in the middle of 2026, that original mission could not be more necessary. The increased geopolitical instability the world faces is well documented. Our customers are having to do even more in less time, always seeking to make decisions at the speed of relevance. Simultaneously, the world is going through a profound technological acceleration, again well documented. If Defence, Security and Resilience organisations do not seize the opportunity afforded by this acceleration, advantage will be ceded to adversaries who certainly are. We shall all be less safe - and the cost born across all of our society.
In the ten years since 2016, we have constantly evolved our technology offering as opportunities for what is possible have expanded enormously. Starting out with a focus on classical NLP that was anchored against defence-focused ontologies, knowledge graphs were quickly incorporated into our stack to enable the precision and accuracy we knew our customers demanded. The arrival of Transformer architecture opened up use cases that had not been possible before; summarisation at volume, topic clustering, synthesis across large corpora, low resource language models. Large Language Models (LLMs) offered new opportunities and we evolved our stack to give our customers access to generative tools and workflows, with models deployed alongside guardrails that underpinned our commitment to assurance. We take the same approach today in the agentic framework our customers use, with harnesses built for the specific needs of customers across Defence, Security and Resilience.
We have always placed ourselves at the frontier of what is technically possible, whilst balancing our desire to push the boundaries of innovation with the necessity to deliver outputs that drive mission value for our customers. By choosing to build technology for Defence, Security and Resilience organisations, we take on responsibility to deliver against the unique operating requirements of this sector. These requirements can be technical - relating to security, infrastructure, hosting; they can be output focused - relating to model interpretability, auditability and accuracy; and they can be people and process focused - relating to procurement, political realities and that fact that Adarga’s biggest competitor isn’t any other software provider but the analyst and their notepad, the planner and their doctrinal frameworks, the commander and their 30 years of institutional knowledge.
We have spent 10 years building and delivering for our customers - identifying unknown threats to people, organisations and nations, detecting vulnerabilities across supply chains and equipping decision makers with enriched intelligence. Those 10 years have given Adarga a detailed understanding of what our customers need. Foremost amongst that understanding is a recognition that choice and control sit as a core requirement.
And with this context, today we announce the Sovereign AI Stack for Defence, Security and Resilience. Victory for our customers is predicated on holding Decision Advantage - being quicker, smarter and more adaptive than the adversary. Adarga exists to help our customers win and we have built the Sovereign AI Stack to enable this. Comprised of three layers the Sovereign AI Stack delivers inference, data fusion and ultimately, mission value.
Catalyst
Sitting at the core is Catalyst, Adarga’s multimodal data fusion platform. A natural evolution from our original NLP pipelines, Catalyst is configured to ingest any modality of data, creating a dynamic representation that aligns with the context of any given situation. With the ability to host any ML model, Catalyst delivers an operational semantic layer that provides customers with the ability to rapidly build applications with their data. We know customers working across Defence, Security and Resilience need to keep control of what they invest in, and that their mission requirements will not stay still long enough for a fixed architecture to serve them well. Therefore, Catalyst is modular at the component level, with an open architecture designed to integrate with existing systems, scale up or down and deploy onto any infrastructure. As a result, the semantic layer and operational intelligence built on top of Catalyst all belong to the customer. They can be exposed to other systems, integrated into coalition architectures, or migrated entirely if the customer's strategy changes.
Mission
Adarga’s Mission Layer sits above Catalyst in the Sovereign AI Stack. This is where customer applications, tools and agents sit, built on top of Catalyst’s semantic layer. Although not exclusive, we focus deployment around four core Mission Threads relevant to the requirements our customers have. These are Intelligence and Investigations, Targeting, Supply Chain Analysis and Situational Awareness. Outputs from the Mission Layer range from generalised products delivering against established workflows, bespoke tools delivering against niche requirements, agent builders providing choice, and API calls delivering enriched data into external systems. Requirements across Defence, Security and Resilience are varied and change routinely. Our Mission Layer is designed to accommodate this.
Keystone
Every Mission Application delivered to a customer is built on top of Catalyst. In order to run the right models against the right data, Catalyst requires access to inference. Conventionally, this can be accessed via cloud infrastructure, but in the context of Defence, Security and Resilience, access to high performance compute is limited, often on account of security and deployment requirements and the existing limitations of customer infrastructure. As a result the Sovereign AI Stack’s enabling layer is designed to provide inference-as-a-service. We call this Keystone. Keystone provides the dedicated CPU/GPU compute infrastructure and operating model needed to run demanding AI workloads reliably in high security environments and under real world operational constraints. At its simplest, Keystone turns raw CPU/GPU capacity into a governed, usable capability.
The Sovereign AI Stack represents the output of 10 years of engagement with customers across Defence, Security and Resilience but it is not static and we look forward to driving another 10 years. Adarga’s Research Agenda is designed to ensure the Sovereign AI Stack constantly evolves with Adarga and our customers at the forefront of what is technically possible. My colleague Xavier Bull, Adarga’s Chief Technology Strategist, will provide an overview of this Research in our next article.
To find out more about the Sovereign AI Stack please reach out at hello@adarga.ai