Good afternoon.
We are 54 nations, and 17 Army Chiefs taking part in this conference: that’s the power of shared missions and interests. Welcome, and thanks for coming.
I concluded this event last year by reflecting on the grim strategic situation.
Amongst other things:
Russia had seemingly abandoned the principle of mutual co-existence with us here in Europe, and so we needed to prepare accordingly.
I also said that we needed to see a fundamental shift in how we fight on and from the land.
And that this transformation, importantly, would need to be matched by an equally transformative relationship with our defence industrial base.
I offered a vision of how 5th Gen land forces could set the joint force up for the unfair fight.
And I shared an ambition to double then triple the fighting power of our land forces, by 2027 and 2030 respectively.
A year on, I think those reflections have been validated, not least by the Government’s SDR.
Today I want to open the event with three reports: what the SDR means to us; a ‘we said – we’ve done’ look at the last 12 months; and a ‘what next – what more’ for the year ahead.
To the SDR, whose analysis and recommendations I fully support.
For me it’s a story of reversal and change, as well as massive collective opportunity.
So, the reversal is really of a trajectory in defence policy that characterised the second era of NATO, that ‘peace dividend’ period that followed the Cold War. That trajectory is now shifting, definitively, as a matter of policy.
And being in the third era of NATO, we are now in the business of focusing our preparedness and resolve to fight war at scale and over time.
For me, as Army Chief, that means generating the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps as one of NATO’s two strategic reserve forces, in both mission and taskorg. That is why last year I put the British Army’s specialist enabling brigades under Com ARRC’s command last year, and why he now has tactical command of both the 1st and 3rd UK divisions. The Corps-level of fighting is also the focus for accelerated modernisation, alongside hardening the edge at every echelon within.
Secondly, rebuilding a national arsenal, an ‘always on’ system of production that innovates in peacetime and scales in wartime. More of that in a minute.
And thirdly it means strengthening our ties with society – it takes a country to fight and win a war – which we will do through the Standing Joint Command headquartered in Aldershot, the traditional home of the British Army, to enhance resilience, prepare to regenerate force, and help defend the homeland. It takes a country to fight a war, after all.
The change comes in the way we fight, as signalled in the SDR, as an increasingly integrated force.
The case for integrating greater autonomy and more robotics into our fighting system is well understood, but to unlock the extraordinary power they offer, we have to digitise our system deeper and wider than we’re doing at the moment, which is why I could not be more pleased to see in the SDR the commitment of at least £1Bn for a Digital Targeting Web. We will soon get the data, the all-important commodity, moving horizontally not just vertically, at light speed, with a precision focus on the defeat mechanisms to an adversary’s fighting system, from top to bottom, from back to front, from the fundamentals of how they build that fighting system, to the frontlines where they might use it. To me, it’s an approach of corrosion and erosion from within, not just explosion from without.
And finally, to the big opportunity, let me explain my vision for how fighting power and market power come together, with a model we call Growth Through Transformation, it’s a pitch not a plan, to make this real, from the foxhole to the factory floor.
For the sake of argument let’s say the square on the screen represents a pair of attack helicopters, or a pair of tanks, or a pair of self-propelled howitzers. Today nearly 100% the British Army’s lethality – our ability to project destructive force over an adversary, while protecting ourselves from attack, and doing this sustainably so n+1 works for us (ie they run out before we do)– comes from these highly sophisticated crewed platforms, and nearly 100% of our equipment budget goes on sustaining those platforms we have and acquiring new ones.
In themselves, they sustain a decent and traditional defence industrial sector, and given where we are with CR3, Boxer and AJAX, is building resilience as well as growing it. It could be more, given the total addressable market for modernising AFVs around the world is judged to be $43Bn over 10years. That’s opportunity we need to position ourselves for.
But…if those are the only platforms we fight from the land with, no matter the wizardry of our digital targeting web, I reckon we lose. Or at the very least, it won’t be an unfair fight we’re after.
That’s because T hey take months to produce and years to train competent crews for. They’re also increasingly on the wrong side of the cost curve when it comes to price per kill. A £20M tank and four experienced crew members lost to a £1k drone operated by kid with only a few days training – who probably isn’t even on the same map sheet as the tank.
Let me be abundantly clear though, we are going to need survivable and lethal platforms for as long as land forces need to seize and hold terrain, which means boots on the ground to close with and kill the enemy, if it comes to it. We wouldn’t put troops there without a rifle, radio, body armour and helmet, so why would we put their vehicles there without guns, armour plating and comms?
What we do need is to layer around them a series of attritable platforms, from which more sensors sense at greater distances, and more munitions are launched. They fly, float and drive, and are the new source of combat mass. You don’t want to lose them, but it’s not a tragedy if you do because, although sophisticated, they’re uncrewed.
And around them is a third layer of consumable systems. These are your even cheaper single-use platforms, like one-way effectors. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
And that’s how we are multiplying our fighting power, with a three-ring source of lethality.
The challenge for the team her is that in the future I want 20% of our lethality to come from the survivable layer, 40% from the attritable, and 40% from consumable. That does not mean I want 1/5th the number of crewed platforms in the PoR, it’s that I want each one to be five times more lethal, survivable and sustainable. Because that’s how we’ll meet NATO’s land capability targets, as well as service our part in the regional plans.
And I want to spend 50% of our money on the 20% of crewed and expensive, and 50% on the remaining 80% of attritable. Why the maths?
An example. We could double the fighting power of that AH mission from 16 stowed kills from 16km standoff to 32 kills from the same distance, by buying two more attack helicopters and making it a four-ship mission. Or, for the same amount of money the two new AH cost us, we could layer attritable mule drones and consumable OWE to make that over 200 kills from over 50kms standoff. That starts to look a lot more lethal than 2x or 3x, is more survivable, and on the right side of the cost curve.
I want to test this hypothesis with a prototype on Ex STDE27, and I’m really excited that we’re close to going to market to make this happen, and to make a market in Land ACP.
Because here’s the strategic bit…to do this, we need to grow a completely new sector in our Defence Industrial Ecosystem. Bringing that hi/lo mix of crewed and uncrewed systems into being will, we think, as a minimum, create thousands of new highly specialised jobs in software, AI and advanced robotics.
A lot of this is dual-use: military and civilian. Which attracts private investment because it scales. So this is not just about the 2.6% of GDP the Government has announced for UK Defence, but about making Defence a great place for venture capital and private equity to invest in.
It allows us to access a total addressable market in drones of around £70Bn/10 for drones and £28Bn/10 for OWEs. That is pretty eye watering compared to the traditional system.
And this is as much a system of production and stockpiles as it is developing skills and talent in society.
This is how the necessary transformation in how we fight…becomes a virtue: an energised national arsenal stimulating economic growth, and direct benefit into society writ large.
So, to the double!
I described our soldiers as our competitive advantage: our point of difference. They are ingeniously creative and astonishingly resilient.
They are enabling Techcraft at every level – the fusion of fieldcraft and technology – every day. “Give us the tools and we will finish the job” was Churchill’s shout, and it still applies today our soldiers today.
Project Asgard is delivering. Not just our pathfinder to show we can find, fund, and fight transformative capabilities differently, better, cheaper, and faster. It’s a project that is flipping our Forward Land Forces in Estonia from a strategic tripwire into an invasion stopping capability. When Russian soldiers eventually return to barracks across the River Narva, they’re going to find the same lethal recce-strike systems there, which gave them such a mauling in the Donbas.
Last July we talked about it…in August we decided to do it…the Defence Secretary announced it in October…January saw partners on contract working alongside us…in May we exercised it in Estonia…and next month our first public expo here in the UK.
It’s a project that, through AI-fuelled, software defined, and network enabled capabilities we are confident has made 4 Light Brigade capable of acting 10 times faster and 10 times further than it could last year.
It’s a project that fields the first NATO FLF equipped with one way effectors, capable of striking targets over 250km away, or from 250km stand-off.
It’s a project that’s involved 20 industry partners, has already created 200 skilled jobs, and sees Allies looking to those same partners to build their own systems.
It’s effects were integrated into the Estonian Ex GRIFFIN LIGHTNING, enabling the ESTDIV to find and strike deeper than ever, with much greater precision and at a higher kill rate, though I admit in a simulated exercise.
So we’ve proved it, to a point with an MVP, now we start scaling to the Corps level, and we’ll continue to share our knowledge with our allies.
But it’s not just about Asgard.
A better trained force will often defeat a bigger and better equipped one. A lesson Goliath learned from David. Our new Land Training System is preparing us to do just that.
In the last 3 months alone, 72 fighting sub-units have gone through a new intensive 10 week ‘combat training at echelon’ programme. Over the next 12 months, 400 sub-units or around 90% of the Army will complete that training, an 80% increase compared to 2020.
We’ve trained over 3,000 drone pilots, with another 6,000 over the next year, as well as providing 200 simulators into unit lines.
That system has improved battlegroup performance against KPIs by 30% this year, reducing sensor to shooter time by 33% already.
That system has validated both of our divisions and seven brigades for their NATO combat tasks this year – which is an unprecedented state of readiness as judged by our peers.
And we’re making good strides with equipment too, although there is always room for improvement.
We’ve fielded 121 AJAX vehicles this year, expanding to 356 next year.
We’ve begun to field Boxer this year, with 113 next.
We’ve launched a joint c-UAS project with the US called Project VANAHEIM, involving 20 industry partners, on mission in Germany now developing the system.
We’ve begun recapitalising our MLRS, with first variants in service next year, doubling our range from 80 to 160km.
We’ve fielded 28,000 new SA80 assault rifles and 3,000 world-leading night vision goggles this year.
With edge processing we’ve integrated AI into existing equipment such as our Bowman radios, reducing packet size and prioritising the flow of data for targeting purposes, and that has seen faster decision cycles, increasing by an order of magnitude our lethality.
Our Corps HQ, on Project Convergence, with its industry partners embedded, combined three different software applications on a secret comms bearer creating a digital kill chain that made the Corps four times quicker at engaging individual targets, down from 16 mins to 4 mins for a fire mission.
The effect over multiple missions was even greater. The software-centric solutions reduced the Corps HQ’s cognitive load between missions enabling them to kill 10 times as many targets in a day.
That is why I welcome the SDR’s ambition to 10X our fighting power by 2035 – because with the right people, software, training, and technology it’s possible to do it.
So, I believe we’re on track…for now…to doubling our fighting power by 2027. The results are encouraging though I absolutelyacknowledge not all soldiers in all formations are experiencing this transformation yet.
Looking ahead, my main effort is to accelerate modernisation, prioritising the Corps and those closest to the fight, our Forward Land Forces.
I want to deepen our integration with SMEs through Taskforce RAPSTONE, with a clearer front door, simplifying our requirements into shared problems to solve. In short, we’ll be a better customer, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as genuine mission partners, in perpetual prototyping mode.
But finally and most importantly my focus this year is also on our people.
It’s absolutely pointless transforming if we don’t have enough of the right people, create the right environment for them to thrive, nor teach them the right skills. This is not just about recruiting and TEAMWORK, important though they are.
At a fundamental level, we are rethinking what it means to be a soldier in the 21st century, because 21st century soldiering is going to be different in so many ways. At the heart lies the need for strong ethical and moral values to withstand the pressures of combat, and we have a role to project that narrative deeper and wider into society, including our youth, whether through the cadets or educational pathways, or by the example of our service, not least to help protect them and ourselves from the toxic influences of racism, hate, homophobia, and misogyny, which are the antithesis of what we need in our soldiers and citizens.
I’m reminded of Monty’s memoirs where he said I shall take away many impressions into the evening of life. But the one I shall treasure above all is the picture of the British soldier – staunch and tenacious in adversity, kind and gentle in victory – the figure to whom the nation has again and again, in the hour of adversity, owed its safety and its honour.
That’s who we need and that’s who we want – the British soldier as the unrivalled force multiplier. And all that I have seen this year confirms the Army remains a place that creates memories for a lifetime, offering adventure, skills, camaraderie and a place of belonging – whoever you are, wherever you come from and whatever you do.
It’s very common to find people in the Army who grew up in some of the most deprived areas of our country. Many chose to become cadets to build confidence and find new friends. Many, just six years after joining, are earning £45,000 a year, with apprenticeships under their belts and their families in good-value accommodation,. This is a story told up and down the land amongst our officers and soldiers…testament to the Army’s extraordinary record on social mobility and our status as the country’s leading provider of apprenticeships, with over 13,000 at any one time.
So, to those who aspire to be make a difference, come and join us. Whether as a regular or a reserve, we’re making it easier and faster to do so, more digital and intuitive, and with greater choice and opportunity. You can change your life through the Army, so why don’t you?
To conclude this opening speech, you’d not be surprised to hear a Chief of the General Staff remind you of the uncertain and dangerous times we live in. They are, and I have.
With the commitments outlined in the vision of the SDR, we are building ever more lethal land forces, capable of operating over ever greater distances, in ways that will make fighting us such an unfair proposition that no-one in the right mind would do so. But if they try, we would fight.
That is the Army the Nation needs, NATO wants, and frankly, our soldiers deserve.
Thank you.