Defence spending across Europe and beyond is climbing at a pace not seen since the Cold War. Governments are committing to rearmament programs, procurement pipelines are expanding and manufacturers across the industrial base are being asked to scale up fast. But defence demand is not like any other demand. It arrives in bursts, shifts with geopolitical winds and comes wrapped in compliance requirements, traceability standards and quality protocols that civilian customers simply do not impose.

Most companies supplying the defence sector cannot afford to run a purely military operation. Civil market revenues provide the stability and volume that smooth out the peaks and valleys of government contracts. But running both simultaneously is genuinely difficult. The two markets pull in opposite directions: defence requires absolute traceability, strict qualification processes and zero-defect standards; civil markets reward speed, cost efficiency and flexibility. The production lines, planning systems, capacity allocation logic and operational priorities that serve one well can actively undermine performance in the other.

How do companies actually manage that tension? How do they configure their operations when a defence contract arrives that demands priority, but the civil backlog is already pressing? How do they build capacity for a demand that is growing but whose timing and size nobody can predict with confidence? These are live, urgent questions for a growing number of manufacturers, and the academic literature has barely begun to address them.

This thesis maps that territory through structured literature review and in-depth case studies inside companies navigating exactly this dual configuration. The goal is to understand how operations, production planning, capacity management and priority-setting actually work when military and civil markets share the same factory floor.

If you want to do research on one of the most strategically charged corners of modern manufacturing, at a moment when the defence industry is transforming faster than at any point in a generation, this is the thesis for you.