Conversations about contemporary warfare and what it means for the future of fighting. Each episode will look at how wars are being fought around the world toda...
The continual changes to British defence acquisition and procurement processes, frameworks, doctrines, strategies and plans have wreaked havoc with the military equipment plan for decades. Various – and sometimes radical – reforms have been tried to evolve a system that is ubiquitously criticised from everyone inside (and outside) the national security community. No one is happy, yet most people actually involved in it are trying very hard to make it work. This is not a uniquely British problem however: There is nowhere in the world that people are content with their procurement system - each one could be faster, buy better kit, deliver imporved value-for-money and quality, pleasing taxpayers as well as the people who use the kit. Given that the on-going UK SDR must try and come up with some recommendations to make it ‘better’ (hopefully in a different way than every other one has promised to do since 1997), what are the opportunities and risks this time around? Dr Andrew Curtis helps us think thus through with some sage advice: how about starting by implementing all the bits of some previous attempts at reform?
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SDR Threat series - Missile Defence (you can't defend everything)
Successive reports from the UK parliament since 2022 have highlight the inadequacies of air and missile defences in the UK against a growing threat envelope. Like many European states, missile defence – from UAVs, conventional, ballistic or hypersonic missiles – has been an area that successive governments have underinvested in. Events in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen and Israel make those points with rather startling clarity. Part of the remit that the UK SDR has been charged with is a ‘so what’ moment on missile defence. What would good look like? What would it cost? Are we (in the UK and other European states) starting from scratch or is there an existing baseline to build on? One of the global IAMD experts and gurus in such matters is Tom Karako from CSIS in Washington DC. His pragmatism on what can be delivered, what must be defended against, and success looks like is noteworthy. As a finale, Tom offers some metrics of success of any UK announcement of a missile defence capability for the UK that is announced over the coming year.
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43:51
The Threat Landscape with Peter Frankopan
National security risk registers capture a large number of potential threats to societies. So should any review of national security or national defence. The impacts of these risks are often more severe than predicted, and we are due a few more (according to pattern analysis over the history of the planet). Professor Peter Frankopan, global best-selling author and world renowned historian, talks through some of the big issues that should be on the agenda of any threat-based national security review including food, health, fuel, water, and raw materials. The UK has a sound record of identifying these threats - even if successsive governments are poor at preparing for them. It is somewhat puzzling that any review of national security, like the one that the UK is currently undertaking, should be focused solely on military, geopolitical and technology risks and not those that might prove a much greater challenge to the safety and security of the state.
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SDR Threat Series: Misunderstanding Adversaries and Inconvenient Threats
National security is an all-encompassing, cross-society endeavour: Any national security strategy must be that too, or it will miss critical elements and levers. In conversation with Maria de Goeij Reid from the Changing Character of War programme at Oxford University, the often-ignored aspects of resilience and economics within SDRs is brought starkly to the fore. By relying on convenient threats (ie those that have a military and foreign policy solution), policymakers, military and political leaders return to their comfortable intellectual spaces of known-knowns and simply reprioritise some policy and military capability: the result is a series of surprises (that have previously been predicted by other arms of government), for which the state is ill-prepared or not equipped to respond to. At the heart of all this lies an inability to understand adversaries, or our own decision-making. Maria makes a compelling case for putting more emphasis on strategic empathy using the lessons from advances in complexity economics.
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SDR Threat Series: Weapons, Systems, and the promise of AI
Professor Tony King (author of “Command”, “Urban Warfare”, and “The Combat Soldier”) talks through his understanding of how threats will develop over the coming years, not least of which will be another Trump presidency in the USA. Using Great Power Competition as a guide, Tony talks about warfare regimes that will accompany the proliferation of state sponsored proxies, about where national security challenges will emerge, and the inability of tradiotnal (declining?) powers to deal with them alone. New weapons, the importance of systems, and the complexity of decision-making all feature in an episode that culminates in a discussion on AI and War; the topic of Tony’s recent research and his forthcoming book. His conclusions: we need to be more sceptical about what AI will deliver in terms of ‘savings’. This mini-series is sponsored by Raytheon UK.
Conversations about contemporary warfare and what it means for the future of fighting. Each episode will look at how wars are being fought around the world today, whether (and why) this is important, and what it all might mean for militaries and national security in the coming decades.
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