DEFENCE &
PROCUREMENT.

Haemorrhagic shock kills 40% of potentially survivable combat casualties. The Eastridge et al. 2012 analysis of 4,596 combat deaths across Iraq and Afghanistan identified 887 potentially survivable haemorrhage deaths. These soldiers did not die because their wounds were unsurvivable.

They died in the gap. The gap between wounding and the arrival of a medic. The gap between the casualty's own limited interventions and the treatment they needed. Every existing prehospital stabilisation protocol assumes a trained medic is present. In large-scale combat operations against a peer adversary — the operational environment the British Army must now plan for — that assumption fails at scale.

The Soldier Donor Identification and Compatibility System. Walking blood bank enablement in peer adversary mass-casualty environments. Cold chain fails at scale — SDICS enables safe buddy-to-buddy blood donation with zero clinician involvement.

Blood type verification. Donor eligibility screening. Crossmatch risk mitigation. Transfusion event logging. Unit-level compatibility data accessible to the medic who eventually arrives — not just at the point of care but as a documented record for forward medical facilities.

ASCENT is the protocol that answers a question the MoD has not formally resolved in doctrine: what happens to medical authority when the medic is the casualty, in a peer adversary contact, where radio silence is non-negotiable and the patrol cannot stop fighting.

Four systems — SENTINEL, SDICS, VANTAGE, HEARTBEAT — integrated into a single competency-aware, noise-disciplined medical authority continuity protocol powered by SUCCESS.ION (GB2607848.5, filed 5 April 2026). The patrol never has zero medical authority. The system degrades gracefully through defined failover states, each one logged, each one reported to Line 2 at the earliest safe opportunity. No radio call. No audio alert. No pause in the fight.