‘Pulling the Future into the Present’, RUSI Land Warfare Conference 2024

The two-day conference, which was held in London at RUSI’s Westminster Church House, brought together international senior land and ground forces leaders, policymakers, industry and think tanks to discuss and debate the dangerous security challenges that are currently facing the UK and its allies. This year’s conference was titled ‘Pulling the Future into the Present’ and was one of the first opportunities for CGS, to set out his vision for the future.

The full speech can be found below:

“David, thank you and thank you to RUSI for hosting the conference.

Given all that is changing, which I think we’ve digested over the last two days, I thought I’d close, for the avoidance of any doubt, with what we in the British Army are doing about that change: so this will be a short talk around purpose, fighting power, and our offer.

But I want to start here - our soldiers, this is what it’s all about.

They are not just in the Army; they are the Army.            

They are the competitive advantage – the single point of difference to any Army that I’ve worked with or squared up against.

And even recently from the Ministry of Defence, I saw the impact that they had, through support to the population through COVID, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the support to the Afghan refugees that followed…

…How they honoured our late Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and celebrated our King’s accession……From rescuing Britons fleeing Sudan and supporting Ukraine’s Armed Forces, in their hour of need.

As General Zaluzhnyi said: “Evil has drawn near, and it is out to kill.”

So, by any measure, these are challenging times, and their stoical forbearance in the face of that is legendary.

And we have a long and proud tradition of making people better through service – ‘Be the Best’ is not just a recruiting slogan. It is our creed. You can join with so little but through merit and effort, you can change your life and your family’s in a single generation.

I am incredibly proud of them and the contribution they make to our nation, but I want to make clear that ultimately, for me, the key measurement is the fighting power we generate for Defence – that combination of winning conceptual thinking, moral will, and the physical capability in their hands that means any British land force needs to be able to destroy a force at least three times its size…

And that’s what ensures that we are secure at home and strong abroad.

So, let me start with two personal observations that frame my position.

Firstly, I do think that we have struggled to shake a ‘big Army’ mindset, where some still believe that raw troop numbers alone determine fighting power. As the Chief of the Defence Staff [CDS] said this morning, “The answer to our problems are more troops and more money and more time”. And I think that is out of date.

We are, in fact, a medium-sized army and we should embrace that as the catalyst that drives even greater integration for a more powerful joint force.

Our selling point from that perspective, and perhaps uniquely from the land, is to help that joint force, NATO, set up for the unfair fight. So unfair, to our advantage, that no one would dare to go to war against us, or our allies and partners. But if they did, they would be met with such devastating lethality that they would be decisively defeated in the first battle and would be denied a strategy of a quick war. And the strategic dilemma is do they make the first move.

The second observation is the paradox of how we think about the future but fight in the past.

For example, our ‘Futures’ teams of concepts and doctrine writers, scientists, and academics, all think deeply and correctly about ways to win in the future, and that drives the capability investment decisions that result in programmes. And those can take decades to deliver.

And it is only when they are close to fielding those new systems do our trainers adapt the field manuals to teach those new ways.

There can therefore be a gap of twenty years between what is thought and what is taught.

And it is no wonder, to my mind, why we’re criticised for always being ready for the last war.

And with the pace of technological change today, that should be nearer twenty weeks, and twenty minutes for urgent adaptation in combat.

Now, to be fair, my predecessor and his command group recognised much of this and responded.

So, I must pay tribute to them for four really, and perhaps generational, significant, contributions to our modernisation:

• Firstly, in settling the Army’s purpose, on fighting and winning. Supremely clear!
• Second, they commissioned and published new doctrine to drive how to fight – what’s thought, the firmware that now needs to be taught, if you will. It has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and war-gamed, and many of you here in the room, allies and academics have taken part in that. It’s much, much more right than wrong and I’m glad to say that Major General Alex Turner DSO, Director Army Futures, and his team are already turning that into field manuals now. Which is good!
• Third, they birthed the Land Training System, which I think is a really profound and progressive change, pioneered by Major General Chris Barry CBE, Director Land Warfare, and his team, in how we train. More importantly, it provides the ready-made spirals for accelerated force modernisation. Which I think is brilliant!
• And fourthly, they put in place a programme that modernises our main fighting systems over time. And that has catalysed the re-emergence of a land industrial base, that has strengthened our strategic foundations, and it has generated an exciting export market that is already beginning to deliver.

Which is excellent – but – and there was always going to be a but…

Because it will take more time than I think we have for those new fighting systems to be fielded at scale in our fighting formations, we must be realistic that if called to battle before then, it will be with much of the old hardware, and we will have to work within the limits of their stockpiles and their logistic support systems.

And so as we transition from old to new, our fighting power will come from a hybrid system. And that’s OK. Hybridity, in the right hands, can inspire extraordinary creativity, and resilience, vigour… …

And with the fresh firmware and some secret-sauce software, we can make this system devastatingly lethal now…

…Which is why my conclusion is to the challenges presented over the last two days is to accelerate aspects of our modernisation, to field formations that are much more powerful, and earlier than the current programme plans.

And I know Major General Jon Swift OBE, Director Programmes, and Brigadier Lizzie Faithfull-Davies, Director Land Equipment DE&S, are quietly groaning and dying inside at the requirement that’s about to land, but I know they know they can do it…

And whilst there are numerous challenges, which I do not wish away for a second, what I am saying is not science fiction or just management speak.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine, under General Zaluzhnyi and now under General Syrskyi have demonstrated, for example, what can be done from land with a hybrid system.

…You’ve heard his soldiers sank ships… forcing the Russian fleet back to port.

…His soldiers held the Russian Air Force at reach… and do their best every day to shoot down missiles and drones.

…And let us not forget, it was his soldiers who inspired barely trained civilians to stop a in a matter of days to stop a Russian army dead in its tracks, as it made for Kyiv. Let alone the devastating lethality in the offence and defence that many have spoken on.

And that’s what they’ve done. Just imagine what we could do with the same mindset.

And it starts, of course, with the winning idea, obviously, because if we fight using the old ideas; chances are, we lose.

The Defence Futures Capstone Concepts for warfighting and strategic campaigning, and our own Land Operating Concept – the firmware – I believe, as many do, will work and they are the right way forward. Please read and understand what they are saying, and I would like the Army to lead the way in their adoption.

So if the purpose of an Army is to protect the nation and help it prosper by being able to fight and win our battles from the land, then…

My vision for the British Army is to field fifth-generation land forces that set that joint force up for the ‘unfair fight’.

Fifth Generation Forces in this context exploit advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and autonomous systems to integrate data from all domains for precise battlefield impact.

And these forces will lie at the heart of NATO, and be filled with the best soldiers in the world, supported by incredibly committed civilian staff and leading industrial partners, and the nation itself, and providing value at every turn – societally, politically, internationally, economically, as well as just militarily.

This is the One Defence mindset that the Secretary of State referred to yesterday and to which I fully subscribe.

And to that end, I have a bold ambition to double our fighting power in three years and triple it by the end of the decade.

And I’ll unpack that in practical terms shortly but the key point to make is that the need is urgent. We have got to pull the future of fighting power into the present, faster than we thought we could.

You don’t need me, and I won’t rehearse the urgency of geopolitical threats. We are not, as the CDS reassured you, on an inexorable path to war, but in an increasingly volatile world, we must restore and communicate, through all our words, deeds, and actions, credible hard power to underwrite deterrence, as well as to manage the crises of the day.

This to my mind is not just a military strategic imperative, driven by the threat and our own responsibilities under Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty.

It is also a very practical matter of responding to NATO’s ask of us, which is demanding for British land forces, and rightly so.

We probably do have just enough time, as Jack Watling said yesterday, to prepare, act, and re-establish credible land forces to support that strategy of deterrence.

And hence my remedy, as I said, is to double down on modernisation to meet that demanding mark.

My command group and I, many of whom are here today, have a clear view on how modern, lethal, and productive land forces can set the joint force up for that unfair fight, but this relies on both thinking and then doing differently. That way, we get the book value, in raw fighting power terms, of what NATO needs, from the baseline assets we have to work with.

Lethality, in this sense, from the land in particular, has been democratized, and the British Army is already responding to this call-to-arms.

The big, bold bet, and this should be of no surprise after the last few days, is on the exploitation of rapidly maturing technologies fuelled by Artificial Intelligence, which leverages the booming technology sector as the catalyst to our modernisation.

We want an ‘any/any network’, one that is capable of connecting any sensor, from any domain, from any partner to any effector. This will create that internet of military things, capable of quickly, cleanly, and efficiently integrating sensors and effectors for impact.

We will sense twice as far, decide in half the time, deliver effects over double the distance with half as many munitions. Our Ukrainian partners are beginning to do this with great results now, marrying cheap and expendable sensors and effectors to smart software that is coming from British coders.

We can double in three years with this hybrid system, and then we’ll triple it when the new fighting systems come online.

In parallel, we must also recognise that tacticians cannot deliver battlefield success alone. Tactics may well win us the first encounter, but on a transparent battlefield, they are understood completely by the end of the second encounter and are unceremoniously unpicked in the third.

There is therefore to my mind no such thing as a templated tactical solution to a battlefield problem anymore.

Today’s tacticians must partner with technicians at every level to constantly spiral the system that underpins their fighting power, giving tactics an invaluable configurability and flexibility.

Commanders, therefore, must be systems integrators first and foremost, understanding the technology of their lethality as well as the tactical application of it – and this is what some are already beginning to call techcraft – the marriage of field craft and technology.

I want to bring academia, science, industry, and technicians – you – into our command posts, prototyping this tech craft at the edge to ensure we have a joint, and extroverted approach to doing business.

And Industry, you know this, we need your help, in this One Defence endeavour.

You are as much a part of our plan as we are of yours. Stronger together, for each other.

You need an intimate understanding of our problems if we are to hack, scavenge, and fix the modern battlefield’s challenges together. It’s the foxholes on the front line, all the way back to the factory floor that others have talked off.

But I’m not just appealing to industry. Capital is flowing into the Defence sector. Obviously, there is self-interest at play in the form of profit, but that’s how our system works. But investors also recognise that a lot is at stake and we share mutual values in the rules-based system as well as mutual interests in maintaining it.

So, I also want to better connect investors of venture and private equity capital to our problems, and not just UK investors – this is a game for all of Europe, for NATO, and the Joint Expeditionary Force countries.

Importantly to grow our Defence technology ecosystem as a source of strategic advantage.

Because if we are to deter an increasingly aligned axis of upheaval, we need to apply all our strengths as a strong democracy against the weaknesses of rigid, autocratic regimes.

And economies will probably do more than explosives to check those authoritarians and autocrats who seek to ruin our freedom and prosperity.

As so a Chief, I recognise my responsibility to help them understand our national security challenges, so they can sharpen their investment in the most promising solutions that will double our fighting power in short order and set Defence and wider NATO up for that unfair fight.

And so as I draw to a close, these are the outputs I will describe to the Strategic Defence Review team should they ask (I think they will).

Our offer to the joint force must be based around three configurations of employment and two of command and control, none of these are exclusive, and all are NATO first and national second. If you will, a three plus two offer.

First, Advance Force Operations. Activities and investments. Prepositioned, with positional advantage, acting well in advance of the problems arising, their power comes from making other peoples’ mass more lethal. They form the partnerships in the places that matter, and by illustration will include our forward land forces in Estonia and Poland, as well as the global deployments of the Land Special Operations Force, as well as our wider global footprint.

Second, would be the Reaction Forces, designed for speed to react quickly to cauterise crises when they flare and where their fighting power comes from velocity, not mass. They include the balance of a brigade for our Forward Land Forces in Estonia, and the conventional and unconventional land forces aligned, at the moment, to NATO’s Allied Reaction Force, currently led by Major General Dan Reeve MC, General Officer Commanding of the First Division, as well as to the UK’s global reaction force in the fullness of time.

Third, would be the Response forces, ultimately organised and optimised to fight in wars at scale, where their power comes from combat mass, able to respond with strength if battle is called for; and delivered by the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, led by Lieutenant General Sir Ralph Wooddisse ACB CBE MC, which provides SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) his strategic response to commit to the decisive phase of the battle.

We need to be able to deliver these forces at different echelons of effort, from Group, Division, to Corps; as CDS said this morning, but of course it only works if it’s joined up across all domains and is uncompromisingly lethal in application. Devastating destruction from ever greater distance is the aim.

These three employment configurations will be then supported by two for command and control. A national Land Component Command, led by Lieutenant General Mike Elviss CB MBE, Commander Field Army, who you heard today, and the UK’s Standing Joint Command under Lieutenant General Charlie Collins DSO OBE, Commander Home Command, who you also heard from. That Standing Joint Command already supports national resilience but could underwrite national defence and regeneration.

Now, I know for many of the audience that’s technical, force design jargon, which you’ll hold me to account for, but what does it all mean in plain English? This is my point: If we can double and then triple our fighting power, any British land force will be able to destroy an enemy force at least three times its size and keep on doing that.

And that way we will have every confidence in being ready and able to fight anyone and win.

It will also give our soldiers every reason to stay in the Army and contribute adding value to society.

Success, for me, will be when we are defined by others – you – by what we provide for the joint force, not by who we are in terms of our internal tribes…

And when we’re judged by the nation for what can do, because we’re doing it, and not by what we can’t do.

We on the inside have a clear vision, but this is a much bigger endeavour than just us, and will need a lot of advocacy and support to make it happen – not least with industry, the defence technology sector and their investors – but all of you in the media and across society and our partners and allies who are here today, who all care so deeply for what we do and ultimately for those who serve within our ranks.

So, to them, and those who you want to help, I say, let’s do this together…

…Don’t look back – dangerous times lie ahead and so we have got to look forward, we have got to hunt for advantage, forage lethality from wherever we can find it, personally, technically, and tactically, and importantly to blaze a trail for others to follow, because they will.

If you do that, you will have my full support and that of my General Staff.

Thank you very much for the chance to speak.