My Lords, fellow chiefs, ladies and gentlemen, good morning and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity, yet again, to come and address this conference. As the Chief of the General Staff, my role is clear – well, certainly it is according to Wikipedia – my role is to develop and generate the nation's land forces.
Each year we take roughly ten thousand civilians, turn them into new soldiers, group within generalist and specialist units and formations which are already filled with experienced soldiers. We then equip them and train them with the tools and methods of war. In short, we prepare them for war to better keep the peace. And we don't do this alone. So firstly, thank you, all of you, for what you have done, and are doing, as part of this effort; be that our industrial partners, our allies, our friends and our sister services. My thanks, in particular, go to Defence iQ and, in particular, to Gillian and Anneesa, and to all of those who have been involved in bringing this conference together. This unites the tacticians and the technicians, the scientists and the artists, the thinkers and, importantly, the doers. And it connects the factories to the foxholes, because that's what it takes.
Let me frame my opening comments around three areas. I can't not talk about the global situation that we face. I will just reiterate the imperatives that I have set out for the UK's land forces, in response, and then I will finish with a summary of the health of our fighting vehicle pipeline. I will be followed, as you've heard, by Lieutenant General Sir Ralph Wooddisse, who is the commander of NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC). That is a UK led corps and he will expand on much of what I talk about in his keynote speech. So I am, literally, his warmup act, which is a role that I have performed for the last twenty years with great pleasure, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
So, really, just very quickly, and picking up on many of the comments that Scott (Scott Milne – Vice President and General Manager for UK Operations, GD (General Dynamics) UK) has covered too, I think we would all agree, particularly my fellow Army chiefs, that the threats we face today, I think, are dangerous. They are converging, and they are increasingly interconnected. So, we have a resurgent Russia that is waging war, essentially, on the Euro-Atlantic security consensus. We have an axis of autocracies that are testing Western resolve, and a world where, frankly, peace and prosperity cannot be taken for granted. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was born of a confidence - a number of confidences - and one of those confidences was that they held military parity with the West and could, therefore, get away with their endeavours in Ukraine. And that should give us pause, as to, “how on earth did we let that happen?” And despite absolutely staggering losses, thousands of tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, artillery and of course hundreds of thousands of lives of soldiers squandered in this folly, Russia fights on. And that's because, to our mind, Putin's goal is to fracture the transatlantic security arrangement that has kept the peace for the last 80 years. He seeks to divide Europe and to redraw the map, to recreate the spheres of influence over those old Soviet states that they feel they have dominion over, and to ensure that they are free of NATO and of the United States. In sum, in the words of a NATO analyst, “he seeks a strategic defeat of the United States”. And his strategy is clear: it is to destabilize, to divide and to dominate. He's after some sort of grand bargain with the United States, at the moment, offering false promise of stability in Europe in exchange for concessions about the future in Ukraine. But make no mistake, Ukraine is just one of a number of early dominos in his wider plan to undermine the global order.
To the war, itself, in Ukraine. It has taught us and retaught us many of the hard lessons. Armies may well be able to win the battles, but it takes nations to win wars. Deterrence today is not just about the boots on the ground at the front. It's about the ability to regenerate, outproduce and outlast from the back to the front. Operationally, the war in Ukraine has shown us that modern warfare is increasingly about the proliferation of cheap, available, accessible precision, alongside mass. A handful of soldiers, literally, with the right technology, can hold numbers of kilometres of frontline where 80 years ago that would have taken thousands of soldiers. This is absolutely not a conversation we are having about a bigger army, per se, it's about making it a smarter army and a much more lethal army, because we can. Tactically, that battlefield is being reshaped by that lethality. Soldiers in Ukraine are, increasingly, sinking ships beyond line of sight, and they are holding air forces at bay beyond the horizon. Drone pilots, civilian drone pilots, are rewriting the rules of anti-armour, and the Ukrainians have a steady state level of lethality measured in about 7 to 1 on a kill ratio. At particular points on that pipeline, that number goes up by multiples when they focus their attention on specific objectives. But let's not underestimate Russia in this battle. They adapt and learn incredibly quickly. Ukrainian tactics may well achieve the first encounter and win it, but by the third, the Russians have found a countermeasure, the patch, the block, the ambush and they're waiting. And right now, across a frontage of about 1,000 kilometres with a depth of 400 kilometres, what is seen is struck by either side within a matter of minutes.
And China, of course, is watching and its military buildup is staggering, and its ambitions, of course, are global. So how do we respond? So, just to rehash some history on this: the Strategic Defence Review gave us the framework - I won't reappraise you of that - we're absolutely on it; we're on it, now. We can't wait for the perfect army of 2035, we have got to transform the army that we have now, to field those Fifth-Generation land forces that set the joint force up for the most unfair of fights. My ambition continues to remain about doubling our fighting power by 2027, relative to where we were in 2024, tripling it by 2030. And the big, bold bet remains on the exploitation of this rapidly advancing, maturing technology sector, fuelled by artificial intelligence. It will leverage that thriving technology sector and stimulate it. We need to be increasingly software defined, not hardware confined. And the SDR (Strategic Defence Review) gives us our mandate, the vision gives us our method, and the times give us that sense of urgency. So, I’ve narrowed the focus for the 2026 in the Army, and with our industrial hinterland, to the essential, on what we judge to be the immediate. I've done that by asking and answering the pre-mortem question that goes like this:
“If we knew, now, that the UK's land forces would find themselves in large scale combat operations in 2027, what would we be doing differently now, and why aren't we doing that?”
The energising effect that that question has had, has surprised me. It has lifted the conversation with industry, for example, from a technical one about how soldiers war-fight, increasingly, to a conversation about how the whole country will war-wage. It speaks to a much more security aware conversation with our society: prioritisation of those technology sectors that need to be developed at pace; an industrial base that knows where latent productive capacity lies for scaling; and, importantly, an internal conversation with an army that knows where its first echelon will most likely deploy and fight, where its second echelon will most likely have to guard and protect, and it knows where its subsequent echelons are going to come from.
The question, to my mind, has driven five imperatives for me and my command group. First, the operational design must drive force design, so follow the missions. Those are the NATO missions that are now explicit. There is a concept of operations, a TASKORG and a Synch Matrix. This is quite straightforward to understand what we've been asked to do. Likewise, with the National Missions, and those that are existential to the United Kingdom. Secondly, that means we are all in on making sure that the ARRC is match-fit for the missions and the priorities that SACEUR has given, with the UK, frankly, should be good for a corps. Thirdly, I want to see a really aggressive pivot to fight along the principle of the 20:40:40 – I'll come back to that later – but with a particular focus on the 40% that is the attritable layer. Again, I'll come back to that. To do that, we need to therefore scale Task Force Rapstone, which is this group of entrepreneurs that are rapidly procuring equipment from inside the Army's headquarters, based on the lessons and the methods that have supported Ukraine so successfully, and to the priorities that our commanders have laid down under Project AKSA. Finally, my belief is that we need to be flowing hundreds of millions of pounds through Rapstone’s fingers, annually. Not only to show you in industry that we are really serious about doing this at pace and that it matters to our soldiers, but also to be that catalyst as an engine for growth for the country.
So, I hope, in the coming weeks, our Defence Investment Plan, coupled to our Strategic Defence Review of last year, will signal our clear resolve. But, let me be clear, we're not waiting for that to come. We have already privileged the prudent planning options – “the PPOs” in military parlance – which SACEUR has already tasked Ralph (COMARRC) to prepare last year and this year. We’re prioritising resourcing those options with the capability that allows him to meet his responsibility as NATO’s Strategic Reserve Corps. And later this year, with NATO, we hope to unveil the power of that fighting system, its height and its edge, with a strategic demonstration. So, our pivot to the 20:40:40 is already well underway. As a reminder, in the future, we want only 20 percent of our ability to kill - the raw lethality - only 20 percent of that ability to kill, to come from that central heart of crude, survivable platforms; “crude”, as in, with people in them. And those are our tanks, our armoured vehicles, our other fighting vehicles, as well as our attack helicopters. The next 40 percent comes from the attritable layer, the attritable platforms. These are mid-sophistication. They're going to be pretty expensive, but they are, largely, defined because they're uncrewed air, ground, and surface, vessels. And the final 40 percent will come from the consumable layer: these are the cheap, throwaway, one-way-effectors that are on a fast product burn and are available at mass.
All of that is designed to generate mass as well as rapid replacement. And those three rings are the fighting power - which I laid out last year and also at RUSI – that really gets us onto the right side of the cost curve when it comes to the business of fighting, and outlasting, and outfighting, our adversary. So, Task Force RAPSTONE is already seeding and scaling that 40% and 40%, in particular. From just September last year, we've invested over £200M in British systems that equip those forces that have just been earmarked for potential operations and support to Ukraine and the Coalition of the Willing. So, we know we can do this, we can move at pace, and it makes a big difference. We've partnered with Google to develop a secure community cloud that now allows us to marry our incredible intelligence operation at a national and international level with cutting edge agentic AI, and we're only the second country, alongside the US, to have this capability. We're scaling our one-way-effectors and our sensors to support our Forward Land Forces in Estonia, and we've provided thousands of first-person viewer drones to our operational formations. And for the first time, interestingly, our unit's exercising in Kenya last year actually turned off all the simulated systems for ISR and fires because they had enough of their own organic – real – systems of sensors and drones for their missions. That was not the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that we planned to judge our success, but it's an interesting reflection.
But let me end on the health of our fighting vehicle pipeline; really, the purpose of this conference. Because, I want to be clear, the 40 and the 40 is very exciting, it's very dynamic, it catches a lot of attention. Of course, it's what we all largely see on the YouTube video and the feedback from the frontline in Ukraine. But I don't want our system to be undermined by an inability to field the 20 percent of survivable, sovereign, world class platforms which will carry our troops into, through and beyond battle. I think it's absolutely a reasonable bet to say that most soldiers, most of the time, will drive to, and fight from, their vehicles in battle. Some will choose to walk, a few will have the luxury of flying, but the majority will drive, and therefore fighting vehicles will remain at the heart of our fighting system. And we will need really high-quality armoured vehicles, no question, because we will be up against an extraordinary number of armoured vehicles en masse; no question, should war come to Europe. But let me quickly give you an update on where I think we are with our vehicle pipeline, and where I'm hoping we will hold it steady in the months and years ahead. So, on Challenger 3, we still intend to hit the IOC (Initial Operation Capability) with 18 new tanks delivered in 2027. We've had some really productive talks with RBSL (Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land), which is looking to accelerate certain aspects of that and move some of that to spiral development with our fielded formations to ensure that we are the first to field a fully digitised main battle tank that is designed to work within that 20:40:40 system.
On Ajax, I know you'll get more of this later, and you'll know that there is an investigation underway following events on Exercise Titan Storm more than covered in the media, and quite rightly so. But please be in no doubt, we need an armoured, reconnaissance and armoured cavalry programme for the reasons that I've laid out above. So we're going to turn this challenge that we've had over the course of the last few months into an opportunity. It has already bought the Army's tacticians closer to the technicians from our equipment manufacturers, from GD, and many of the subsystems. We know exactly what it is that our soldiers need to see to change, to have confidence that this is a warhorse they can go to war in. And we know with GD that we can get after those. So, I have confidence that the partnership is strong enough to make a virtue out of this necessity.
On Boxer – absolutely acknowledging that there have been delays – we do hope to reach IOC this August, and I am hopeful that we will hit FOC (Full Operating Capability) in accordance with the original contract, and that we'll see well over six hundred vehicles in the first batch.
On the mobile fires platform, this is the RCH155. I'm very grateful to ministers, as well as to my fellow chiefs, for agreeing to privilege accelerating MFP (Mobile Fires Platform) acquisition as a common-to-all outcome in our Defence Investment Programme. So this has had not had to wait for the DIP to conclude to get on with the early work on this; and, therefore, that should see the first systems in service rolling out in 2029.
On Protected Mobility, you will know that we have entered into the CAVS (Patria/Babcock Common Armoured Vehicles System) technical arrangement last year. And I hope to demonstrate progress on this program to you and others later in the year.
Finally, to our Light Mobility Vehicle, we aim to be on contract in the next financial year to begin the replacement of thousands of increasingly obsolete Land Rovers and Pinzgauer, as part of our wider land mobility program; and that looks to replace over 13,000 vehicles across all three services.
So, to summarise, we are trying to act with the urgency of wartime. Why are we doing that? Putin started a war in Ukraine that has not gone his way yet, and he has had to put Russia on a war footing as a consequence. And in the words of that senior NATO analyst – the best in the business – the only thing that Russia can do now is wage war. We, NATO, the West, and the US, are the object of his strategy. The last word goes to a former Ukrainian CGS who said to me last year, “Roly, Russia is not looking at your front lines, they’ve priced that in. They will only take you seriously when it comes to deterrence, and strength, when they see your factories producing at wartime production rates. So, as in the world wars, then as is now, industry and the world of finance must become the fourth arm of defence. And that is why I place so much store and faith in the new National Armaments Directorate to do just that. So, we need to clear the logjams. We need to deliver at speed. We've got the courage to do this. We've got the know-how. We've got the people to field this Fifth Generation series of land forces; and it's one that blends the bravery of the British soldier with the lightning speed of data flows. And I believe that is exactly what the SDR told us to do. We’re on a path to 10x-ing our fighting power, and we're getting on with it.
So, thank you, and I wish you a brilliant conference and I look forward to welcoming Ralph, one of my oldest friends and military colleagues, to the stage to lay out just the imperative and the focus that this NATO first policy has given us.
Thank you.