Armed Forces Day – 27 June 2026
On Saturday 27 June, towns across the United Kingdom will hold parades, flypasts and family events to mark Armed Forces Day. The week leading up to it begins on Monday 22 June, when the Armed Forces Day flag is raised on public buildings and landmarks around the country, and this year the national event will be hosted in Aldershot, long regarded as the home of the British Army. It is a week of visible gratitude, and rightly so. But the visible part is only ever a fraction of what supporting the Armed Forces actually involves.
At Corassure, we sit in the part that does not make the flypast. We are a defence consultancy specialising in cyber security airworthiness, the certification of programmable elements, and systems assurance. Our work is, by design, invisible to most people including, much of the time, to the personnel who depend on it. That invisibility is the point. When the assurance has been done properly, nobody has to think about it.
What “support” means when you build it into a system
It is easy to picture support for the Armed Forces as something that happens around the people who serve: the welfare, the recognition, the covenant. All of that matters. But a great deal of the most consequential support is built directly into the equipment those people are handed and told to trust with their lives.
A modern military aircraft, crewed or remotely piloted is no longer a mechanical object with software bolted on. It is a network of programmable systems making continuous decisions, exchanging data, and increasingly exposed to a contested electromagnetic and cyber environment. The question of whether that aircraft is safe can no longer be answered by structures, fatigue life and aerodynamics alone. It now depends just as heavily on whether its software behaves as intended, whether its data can be trusted, and whether an adversary can reach into it.
That is the question Corassure exists to answer. And when we answer it well, the support we provide reaches the person in the cockpit or at the ground control station in the most direct way possible: the system they are operating does what it is supposed to do, and only what it is supposed to do.
The frameworks behind the confidence
Confidence in a military system is not a matter of opinion. It is the product of a regulatory framework, a body of evidence, and a discipline of argument that has been built up over decades and is constantly evolving to keep pace with the threat.
In the United Kingdom, military air systems are governed by the Military Aviation Authority and its Regulatory Articles, including RA 5890, which sets out the requirements for cyber security in airworthiness. Sitting alongside that is the international family of standards that the wider aerospace community relies on; the airworthiness security process and methods captured in DO-326A, DO-355A and DO-356A, and the long-established software and hardware design assurance standards, DO-178C and DO-254, that underpin the programmable elements at the heart of every modern platform.
These are not abstractions to us. Our team has carried airworthiness and certification work across remotely piloted and uncrewed systems including Protector, Watchkeeper and Reaper, and we work today across the Ministry of Defence and the wider defence industry. The standards are, for us, the working language of keeping people safe.
That expertise extends beyond the air domain. Corassure’s founder authored Issue 3 of Defence Standard 23-015 Part 06, which governs the assurance of programmable elements in the land environment, a reminder that the discipline of demonstrating a system can be trusted applies wherever capability is fielded, on whatever platform.
Why cyber and safety can no longer be separated
For most of the history of aviation, safety and security were treated as different problems handled by different people. Safety asked whether a system might fail by accident. Security asked whether someone might attack it deliberately. Those two questions are now inseparable.
A cyber compromise of a flight-critical system is, by definition, a safety event. An adversary who can alter the data a system relies on, or interfere with the logic that governs its behaviour, can produce exactly the kind of failure that safety engineering has always tried to prevent – except this time the cause is intelligent, adaptive and intentional. The threat environment of recent years, including the elevated risk posed by state and state-aligned actors, has made this concrete rather than theoretical.
The discipline our work brings is the marriage of those two worlds: building a security case that stands up to the same rigour as a safety case, and demonstrating – with evidence, not assertion – that a system can be trusted in the environment it will actually face. That is genuinely difficult to do well, and getting it wrong is not a commercial inconvenience. It is a risk borne by the people who operate the equipment.
A whole of Society effort
The Government has set out a direction for defence built around renewing the nation’s contract with those who serve, and around a whole-of-society approach in which industry, communities and the public all have a part to play. We think that framing is right, and it captures something about why a week like this matters to a company like ours.
Supporting the Armed Forces is not only the work of those in uniform, nor only of the institutions that sit closest to them. It is also the work of the engineers, assessors and assurance specialists who never deploy but whose decisions shape whether deployed capability is safe and survivable. It is the work of getting the unglamorous parts right the audit, the evidence, the argument, the standard nobody outside the field has heard of because those parts are load-bearing.
We are a small, independent consultancy. We are not the story of Armed Forces Day. But we are part of the much larger machine that allows the people who are the story to do their jobs and come home, and we take that responsibility seriously every day of the year, not only in the last week of June.
Marking the week
So this Armed Forces Week, alongside the parades and the flag-raisings, we would simply offer our respect to the serving personnel, veterans, reservists, cadets and families who make up the Armed Forces community. The recognition they receive this week is well earned and long overdue in many cases.
And to the colleagues across the defence enterprise in the MoD, in industry, and in the small specialist firms like ours who do the quiet, exacting work of making capability safe and secure: this week is a reminder of who that work is ultimately for.
Corassure provides independent cyber security airworthiness, programmable elements certification and systems assurance services to the Ministry of Defence and the UK defence industry. If you would like to discuss how we can support your programme, please get in touch.