Aerospace, Defence & Security

Cost Effective Specialist Training, Business Support and Helpline

Why not make our specialist in all areas of international trade and customs regulations part of your team? Why spend thousands employing specialists in these areas when we can be available via email or telephone when you need us.

The world of Aerospace, Defence and Security, commonly known as strategic controls is an area of international trade that goes beyond export compliance. The entity responsible for the export needs to understand what is being sent, who it is being sent to, why the party concerned wants it and where they will use it in the world.

The who, what, where and why will define the licence that is needed to transfer or export from the United Kingdom. The licence must be declared at HMRC when the consignment is declared for export.   

Goods as well as Technology and Software could require a licence to enable it to be sent compliantly to a destination outside the UK. This will mean a classification process to establish if Military or Dual Use controls are applicable. The “Military” term encompasses items specially designed for a Military purpose or modified from a Civil specification. It’s important to understand the definition of Dual Use. These items are controlled based on their inherent capability without requiring any modification. Therefore, an assessment of Dual Use means knowledge of the goods technical standard against the criteria listed in the UK Strategic Export Control Lists.



There are other reasons why a licence may be required. The UK (like all trading nations) administer Embargoes and Sanctions which are controls and restrictions on overseas trade. Goods or intangible transfers being supplied for the purposes of weapons of mass destruction would also require a licence irrelevant of the fact that they are not controlled as Military or Dual Use.

In this world we must also consider if the activity affects US Export Control compliance. If for example the export was of ITAR Military goods from the UK, then under US Extra-Territoriality controls we must also obtain a US Licence in addition to the UK regulations.       

Training Options

Strong & Herd LLP offer international trade training as a public or in-company solution. Public training courses relevant to the aerospace, defence and security industry sectors include:

Public Training Courses ➝

All the courses listed above can be tailored to fit the requirements of companies involved in aerospace, defence and security industries and extended to include the key international trade areas you need to know about.

Although we have a number of on-line international trade training courses for sale publicly on our website our main area of on-line training is creating bespoke in-company training solutions which enables businesses to create their own e-learning training packages in bite-sized chunks – what we call SPOTLIGHTS – lasting between 1-2 hours per session. These SPOTLIGHTS can cover standard topics (as listed above) but the main advantage of this type of training solution is that we can ensure SPOTLIGHTS are written (and kept up-to-date) specifically covering what your business needs.

We suggest considering 4 standards for training in international trade matters:

Therefore, we are able to offer Distance Learning courses for all areas of international trade and customs compliance, some topics already exists other may have to be developed to make them in-company specific. Distance Learning can be via our on-line training portal which can be used on an individual basis (cost of between £35.00 – £65.00 per person/ per session) or as a corporate designed package administered either by S&H or by you. Alternatively we can organise bespoke interactive webinars, generally up to 2 hour long, to cover bite-sized chunks of information. This can be supported, if required, by the use of our assessment programmes.