00:01:39.440I sort of hit all the big matches, as it were.
00:01:41.880I was a young tank commander in the first Gulf War and then did Bosnia War, Kosovo War,
00:01:49.660did a few UN trips in Cyprus, then was involved in the second Gulf War as well.
00:01:55.760and did a number of tours in Iraq when I was commanding my regiment,
00:02:01.040a number of tours in Afghanistan as well.
00:02:04.000When I left the army after 23 years, I then got involved in Syria for 10 years,
00:02:08.800in and out of there, and to see Assad gone and a lot of happy faces in Syria is great.
00:02:17.680After I left the army, I got into a whole host of things,
00:02:20.320sort of journaling as well and writing books. So yeah, I've had a very fortunate life, I think,
00:02:27.840from a military perspective and quite a lucky one. I've survived a few scrapes. And the irony,
00:02:36.720having somebody who did so badly at school, I'm also now a don at Magdalen College, Cambridge,
00:02:42.480which when they asked me if I would do it, I said, hang on, you've got the wrong man here.
00:02:46.800you know, I've got 1A level, you know, hardly any academics and a third class degree in
00:02:51.520agriculture. They said, Hamish, you've got a lot of very clever people here at Cambridge.
00:02:54.980We just need a few with a bit of experience. That's where you come in. So that's sort of my
00:02:59.800story in a nutshell. Well, it's great to have you. One of the things that we've been covering
00:03:04.560and talking about a lot, and it's been a big discussion point in our country, as I'm sure
00:03:09.260you're well aware, which is the state of Britain's defence, the armed forces, the lack of funding and
00:03:16.100other issues that this country has been dealing with for a long time.
00:03:20.080What is the state of Britain's national defence?
00:03:23.500Well, I think it's a very easy one to decry and put down.
00:03:28.540I think like a lot of NATO countries, European NATO countries,
00:03:32.500our government so overspent the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War
00:03:36.380that actually a lot of capability was denuded.
00:03:40.500A lot of people thought at the end of the Cold War, that was it.
00:03:43.140Then we got into all the counterinsurgency with al-Qaeda in Iraq, and then the Taliban in
00:03:51.060Afghanistan that we focused very much on there. And we sort of lost the ability to do war fighting,
00:03:57.380as it were. And as part of that, what it meant is we diminished our skills. So where we find
00:04:03.800ourselves at the moment is a very small military. I mean, when I joined the army, there are 150,000
00:04:09.960people and 1,000 tanks. At the moment, it's about 70,000 and 148 tanks. Now, not necessarily saying
00:04:18.200that that is a metric, but I think it just gives people an idea of what the contraction
00:04:22.460has been and the disinvestment. And it's not one individual government. It's been all of them over
00:04:28.420the last 20 or so years have disinvested. We invested in what we call urgent operational
00:04:34.220requirements for Iraq and Afghanistan. But counterinsurgency is a very different type of
00:04:39.640warfare. In the olden days, like our allies, like the Americans and others, the Australians,
00:04:44.920we could do it all. But we just focused on counterinsurgency. And I think morale in the
00:04:50.480British military also dipped. Now, I talk about my life up until 2012, where pretty much every
00:04:56.660year I was doing some sort of operational tour somewhere. And some people thought, you know,
00:05:01.340crikey, that's hard yards. And certainly my family and my wife were completely hacked off with it.
00:05:06.660But actually, as a professional, in whatever guise it is, as a professional soldier doing your thing every day, what keeps you sharp and keeps you going.
00:05:16.280Now, after 2012, when we sort of downscaled in Iraq and Afghanistan, young men and girls in the British military were not going on operational tours.
00:05:27.040So they weren't getting that excitement.
00:05:30.580And when morale dips and you're not being funded, you then reach a place.
00:05:34.240It is only really since 24th of February 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine, that suddenly countries like in Europe and Britain in particular realise, crikey, we don't have a credible conventional deterrence.
00:05:47.560So started to reinvest in it. But when you drop so low, it takes a heck of a long time to get back there.
00:05:54.320So a very long answer to your question. At the moment, the British military and the British army, and same within Royal Navy and Air Force, are trying to recover from 20 years of disinvestment and low morale to get back to where we should be.
00:06:08.180And I think what we're learning in Ukraine and what the Ukraine military is showing us,
00:06:12.100you can get there and you can get there quickly, but it takes funding.
00:06:15.940And I suppose the final thing I'll say on this morale,
00:06:18.880we recruiting for the British military has, until quite recently, been dire.
00:06:24.840And there are a whole lot of reasons for this.
00:06:28.460But unless you can recruit the right people at the right time, you are going to suffer.
00:06:35.180And that's what happened in the British Army.
00:06:36.460There's so many great boys and girls who wanted to join the military
00:06:59.000so I see these young men and women on a regular basis.
00:07:03.220And I think now we're getting back to where we should.
00:07:05.120really talented young men and women, really driven, really motivated. And they're starting
00:07:10.400to see the right kit coming through. They're starting to see the stuff they see on the TV
00:07:15.280and the stuff that you talk about in your podcast about how Ukraine is doing so well. They're
00:07:19.720starting to see that flow back into the British military. But it's been really slow. And I know
00:07:26.020a cavalry regiment, reconnaissance regiment, it's all about drones now and integrating it with
00:07:32.240platforms are having to buy their own drones with their own money to train on, which is absolutely
00:07:38.120bonkers, which is why people like me and other military analysts who have columns like I do in
00:07:44.360a national newspaper, you know, decry this position. You know, we must give our men and
00:07:50.020women the right tools to do the job. And if they can, we can be as effective as the Ukrainian
00:07:55.440military and become a credible conventional deterrent. So it's dropped low. We're getting
00:08:00.700back there. But actually, even the funding that we've heard about in the defense investment plan
00:08:06.040is not going to be enough to realize the strategic defense review, which I think was the review of
00:08:12.520the British military on how we should provide a credible capability going forward. I don't think
00:08:18.420there is enough funding for that at the moment. But we are learning from the lessons of Ukraine,
00:08:23.52080% lethality from drones, 25% from conventional. But lest you fund it, it's a waste of time. And
00:08:31.120I'd say, not a waste of time. Now, that's wrong. But at the moment, we're sort of funding to about
00:08:35.30080%. And the great president of the United States, who I don't agree with a lot of the things he
00:08:41.680says, what he has done is stirred up European militaries and made people realize that actually,
00:08:47.920We cannot rely on the US. We must produce our own military capabilities so that when Putin or whoever replaces him looks West in future, he, I say she, there is no way in the world that a woman would ever run Russia.
00:09:03.400So that's another story. But when the Russian president looks West, he sees a credible defense and doesn't invade countries like Ukraine in future.
00:09:11.520Well, right. And actually, just to your point about President Trump, he may have stirred up people into realizing that you can't rely on America. But actually, you're also going to be in a much more powerful position in relation to America if you're negotiating things or trying to do things together to be able to argue your case if you have a strong military, which, as you say, we've run down. And is your assessment that the reason that's happened is we basically got very comfortable for a long time? Is that fair?
00:09:40.720Well, I think priorities for the government have changed. And although you hear every prime minister since Winston Churchill say that defence and security is the number one priority for a nation, it's probably not since Churchill that we actually believed our leaders when they said that.
00:09:59.140So I think that has become an issue. And so much spending. When we're spending six times the amount on welfare that we are on defence, you sort of think we've got the balance wrong here.
00:10:10.720So I think that has really been the case, that it's been focusing on other things.
00:10:17.560And yeah, to a degree, relying on others.
00:10:20.440Good old Uncle Sam, he'll always come steaming over the Atlantic to help us out.
00:10:24.680Well, actually, we now know that that might not be the case.
00:14:44.460And I fought with them all, and quite frankly, it makes no difference.
00:14:49.740absolutely makes a difference whether somebody is good or brave or whatever, those sort of
00:14:56.140backgrounds. So I think that is really dangerous. What is critical is that when people are recruited,
00:15:03.100they pass the test. If you're going to be an officer, you pass the Army Selection Board,
00:15:09.720fine, you're through. Same in the Navy, same in the Air Force. There shouldn't be a different
00:15:14.480level for a different part of society. And I think people realise that. And it's ridiculous,
00:15:20.880because it's actually what's in here, not what's on your skin that's important.
00:15:26.160But I think recruitment has been an issue. I could reel off many stories of people who
00:15:32.480should be in the military who are not. In fact, I sat next to a lady the other night whose daughter
00:15:37.600was a consultant surgeon in the NHS. She's always wanted to join the army,
00:15:43.600absolutely desperate. But because she took some mental health drug, and I haven't a clue what it
00:15:48.560was when she was 10 years old, she has been precluded from joining the military, which is
00:15:54.520completely bonkers. Some of the doctors, British doctors and American and others that I charged
00:16:01.660around Syria with, had some massive issues, psychological issues. But by God, could they do
00:16:08.360their job. So I think, again, we're learning how to get around that. But I think the whole
00:16:15.980diversity thing is something that we're trying to swim through that sea. But because there's such
00:16:23.520a political bow wave in front of it, sometimes it's really difficult. But I'm hoping that people
00:16:29.540realize that it doesn't matter. It's all what's in here that's important to be a soldier or
00:16:34.460fighter pilot or a Navy guy or whatever. I was reading in one of your articles that
00:16:38.840the armed forces have been underfunded to the tune of £28 billion. That is a mind-boggling
00:16:47.100amount of money. What effect has that had on the army, the personnel, the equipment in real terms?
00:16:54.580Well, it's difficult to say that £28 billion is the shortfall from the Strategic Defence Review
00:16:59.700last year, which said what we need, 80% drones, 20% whatever, and what the defense investment
00:17:06.780plan. So there's a 28 billion gap. Now, that manifests itself in, as I said,
00:17:14.080cavalry regiments having to buy their own drones. It manifests itself. I've just test-driven
00:17:19.460Challenger 3, the new British tank, that has what we call hard-kill defensive aid suites against
00:17:26.460drones. And in order to operate in a drone-infested battlefield, you need these defensive
00:17:31.540aid suites. But currently, they're only going to fund something like one or two per tank,
00:17:37.240as it were, whereas you need four or five. So again, psychologically, when you've been
00:17:45.000into battle, I was always confident the tanks that I were in, you knew that whatever you
00:17:50.700hit them, they'd take it up. So I can see in it from a morale perspective, to your point,
00:17:57.000you know, if you're going into an environment where rather than being 100% certain you're going
00:18:01.580to survive whatever attack, you're 50%, that makes it really, really challenging. I was trying to
00:18:08.640explain to people about the whole medical issue, and I'm sure a lot of other your guests have
00:18:12.440talked about it. I think when we're professional soldiers, we're all happy to go and do what we're
00:18:17.980asked to do. But one of the key things is you want to know that if you're shot or blown up,
00:18:23.880somebody is going to come and sort you out. And that medical side, and certainly the British
00:18:29.400Army and the American Army and others were really, really good at that. So we had some horrific
00:18:34.180times in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you always knew. Conversely, when I was in Syria, it was
00:18:39.460a different issue here. And that's what people used to say to me. They said, you realize if you
00:18:45.300get into trouble. There's no MERT, there's no helicopter with medics flying over the hill to
00:18:51.100come and get you. There's no recon platoon or whatever who's going to come and get you.
00:18:57.180And actually, psychologically, that was quite a challenging thing. And I think unless we thought
00:19:03.280we were doing such an important job, we might have gone, okay, maybe not. So very long answer
00:19:10.480you a question. I think that's where it manifests itself. I served with the Australian army for a
00:19:17.740while and they had a sort of phrase of fitted for, but not with. It's great. The Australians
00:19:23.120always had some Gucci kit, but didn't necessarily have the really top end of it. Although there
00:19:29.620were sort of brackets on your vehicle or whatever else that were empty because we couldn't afford
00:19:35.100it. So I think that is where it sort of fits in. That's where the gap is, which is why we need it
00:19:40.520funded, because a lot of that 28 billion is this sort of anti-drone stuff. And we now know that
00:19:45.980certainly for the foreseeable future, the next decade or so, it's going to be an autonomous
00:19:51.980type battle. And unless we can operate in that, we're going to struggle.
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00:21:23.740this episode. I'm going to ask a very layman question, which might seem ridiculous, but I think
00:21:30.040a lot of people wouldn't really understand it. But how important is morale to the army? Because
00:21:36.620we've already talked about it a number of times. And what happens when you have low morale as
00:21:40.980opposed to high morale? Morale is to the physical tenets to one. I mean, what I mean there is morale
00:21:48.740is essential. Absolutely essential. Some of the stuff you do in the military is pretty difficult.
00:21:55.980It's not stuff that you would naturally do. So in order to do it, you need to have really high
00:22:02.220morale and leadership. And I think that's something that the British military and a lot of European,
00:22:08.460American military and others are really good at. There's the moral component, are you doing the
00:22:15.860right thing. And then morale, you know, having the right attitude to do it. So it is absolutely
00:22:22.720essential. And it's something that we focus so much time on to make sure that morale is best.
00:22:29.260And I think, you know, there are so many sort of historical examples of where good morale has
00:22:36.320seen through. And undoubtedly, when you see some great acts of bravery and all the rest of it,
00:22:41.000it is all about morale. It's the thing that keeps you going forward when everything else
00:22:46.960is telling you not to. And it's also a collective thing. I think it's about really strong leadership.
00:22:52.620And in the British, in most Western armies, the officers lead. They go first. It's follow me.
00:22:59.100Conversely, in the Russian army, the officers actually lead from the back.
00:23:02.300You go forward, chaps. And by the way, if you turn around, we're going to shoot you.
00:23:05.700which is why, again, looking at Ukraine, one of the main reasons Russia is losing 30,000 people
00:23:13.200a month, 10 times what Ukraine's doing, is about morale. It's also about training. But it is
00:23:19.940something that is built over time, but is absolutely essential to be a successful,
00:23:26.520not necessarily individual, but a successful group. And that's where leadership comes in.
00:23:31.320Because if you're thinking about this underfunding by this huge amount, if you're getting kit that, quite frankly, isn't up to it, if you see friends of yours, because they've become friends, die, and you think to yourself, well, if we'd been funded properly, that wouldn't have happened.
00:23:50.620I mean, that's going to lead to resentment, and then that's going to lead to very serious problems within regiments.
00:24:16.100When you know that people were dying, lots of British soldiers were killed in these Land
00:24:22.420Rovers. That was really tricky when people were saying, right, you go out on patrol and you're
00:24:28.340or something, bloody hell. But if I go over an improvised explosive device, I am toast.
00:24:34.020Now, by the time we got well into the Afghan campaign, we were getting protected mobility
00:24:38.740vehicles. I mean, I still do remember sitting in the back of a warrior driving from Lashkagar
00:24:44.260up to Sangin when you're just thinking, at any moment, this thing's going to go pop.
00:24:49.060But because it had the right kit on it, you sort of knew that you've got a good chance surviving.
00:24:55.540So to answer your direct question, because we are not at war now, that is what people like me
00:25:03.460are trying to beat the drum of people over there to fund. But whether we can get them to understand
00:25:10.340that, that is the key thing. But if next year we are at war, then absolutely. Nobody wants to go
00:25:18.260down that road in a vehicle they think is going to explode under whatever sort of attack.
00:25:24.580and you won't survive. So it's essential. And what we're learning, and we were discussing it
00:25:30.240earlier, the great thing about Ukraine is the pace of innovation spinning so quickly. And I'm
00:25:36.980sure we'll talk about the dreadfulness of the British army and military procurement system.
00:25:43.800In peacetime, it's a flipping nightmare. In warfare, as we saw in the Second World War,
00:25:48.600and I'm sure Jim Holland and others have talked you through it, and you'll be aware,
00:25:53.880everything works so much more quickly. In Ukraine, if you've got a good idea,
00:25:58.360it can be on the front line in weeks, maybe a month. In the British military,
00:26:04.120Ajax, the recce vehicle that's had a lot of issues, which again, I test drove a few months
00:26:09.320ago. It's 10 years in the making. It's still not on the front line. Had this been Ukraine,
00:26:14.760it would have been in the front line after a few months or so. So I think probably not a good
00:26:20.600answer you've got you've absolutely put your your finger on the issue here but but i i am confident
00:26:27.080that certainly because you know if we were at war those situations would would would sort
00:26:33.520themselves out because once you're at war then it is the number one priority at the moment it's not
00:26:38.800but i think i think we've got the basis of a plan to get there um and let's hope it's it's not us
00:26:45.000going to war that gets us there more quickly because there's going to be people listening
00:26:48.800to this interview, Hamish, you're thinking to themselves, look, all right, you make some good
00:26:53.540points. But if you look at our country, everything is underfunded. We're in huge amounts of debt.
00:27:00.000Quite frankly, are we even going to be able to service that debt? I mean, there's a discussion
00:27:04.300around that. Can we really afford to fund the armed forces more from 2.8 to 3.5? Isn't that
00:27:13.100fundamentally unrealistic when you look at the current economic climate well it is no i don't
00:27:20.900think so absolutely not i i think you know it is the number one priority other things have got to
00:27:25.700give um you know we know we know that uh you know we've got a lot of net zero projects which
00:27:31.420yeah i'm i'm as keen as the next person almost on climate change but you know i don't see why
00:27:37.580we're spending billions on that when we haven't got our fundamentals like defense and security
00:27:41.880pointed out. And the fact that when it came to try and bridge that $28 billion gap that we've
00:27:49.160been talked about, Defence, first of all, was told, you find $10 billion. And to find $10 billion out
00:27:56.080of a $60 billion annual spend is challenging. I didn't hear the welfare budget, which is six times
00:28:05.460the amount being asked to save any money. So if we can't get $5 billion out of the welfare budget,
00:28:11.100then, yeah, I think we need to get somebody in who can do it. So it's about priorities.
00:28:18.060And I think this funding has to be. And I suppose like most taxpayers, I don't want to pay any more
00:28:24.220tax. But quite frankly, if it's the difference between the men and women in the British army
00:28:31.660getting the right drone or not, then I'm happy to do that. Although I'm sure a lot of others wouldn't.
00:28:38.300I think there is definitely the money there. The other element to it, of course,
00:28:42.540we keep hearing about growth. Now, one of the great industries in Britain is its defense industry.
00:28:50.780If we spend our money there, that will generate growth. We just look at the Germans and the new
00:28:56.380British tank has been built by a German company. I mean, that must be bonkers. But having said that,
00:29:04.300some of the British companies have the potential to do stuff all over Europe. Now, I know there
00:29:09.260are a few issues with the EU and Brexit and all the rest of it, but the fact we're making summaries
00:29:13.580for the Americans and the Australians, I mean, there is a real opportunity. Now, one is hoping
00:29:21.760that with Andy Burnham coming in as Prime Minister, we don't swing too far to the left,
00:29:26.140who traditionally have not seen the defence industry as an area they want to go to growth.
00:29:31.560But at the moment, it is a bit of a golden goose for Britain.
00:29:38.260And if we spend our money on defence, it should increase the money within the government.
00:29:45.300And if we make sure that we sell our capabilities appropriately, again.
00:29:50.440So, yeah, I think whatever else, we have got to fund defence first,
00:29:55.540whatever that means to other projects, or even if that means increase in tax.
00:29:59.480That's why your point about net zero is so important, because if you have the highest industrial electricity prices in a developed world, it's kind of hard to manufacture anything, right?
00:30:07.880I'm just not an expert, but that seems reasonable to me.
00:30:11.280But I wanted to ask you about the technological side of things as they're developing.
00:30:16.780You've talked a number of times already about what's happening in Ukraine, drone warfare in particular.
00:30:21.840And if anyone's been paying any attention at all, and I obviously have family in the
00:30:26.280region, even in this four-year period, you've seen the technological transformation of the
00:31:27.620And you could see it with a hand grenade on,
00:31:29.280and they were trying to drop it on us.
00:31:31.520We fired thousands of rounds of ammunition and didn't hit it.
00:31:35.580Anyway, the thing couldn't drop its thing.
00:31:38.900But that was 11 years ago, or 10 years ago.
00:31:42.900You wind forward to now and what we're seeing,
00:31:45.060And what has really kept Ukraine actually in the game is the way that they have developed drone technology to an area where, you know, I found it really significant.
00:31:57.940You know, when Iran started firing drones and missiles at the Arab states, Zelensky and the Ukrainians were over there showing them how to defend against them, selling them Ukraine.
00:32:09.960drones. Ukraine now makes 50% more drones than it needs, which is unbelievable. Ukraine has
00:32:16.240developed its own cruise missiles. You might have heard of the Flamingo, which has a range of over
00:32:21.6601,000 kilometers, a warhead of about 50 to 100 kilograms, not dissimilar from a Tomahawk cruise
00:32:28.960missile. Oh, by the way, it costs $500,000, not $10.5 million. And when you can do that sort of
00:32:36.340stuff. Now, I'm sure people might argue that a cruise missile is more effective than a Flamingo
00:32:42.340missile, but, you know, 10 Flamingo missiles. It's a bit like when I talk about tanks in the
00:32:48.940Second World War. There's a great scene where Patton, who was commanding the Allied forces
00:32:54.340at Salerno in Italy, came up against the German general, whose name escapes me, and
00:33:00.900German generals say, Patton, you're struggling, aren't you? You're losing 10 Shermans for every
00:33:07.180one of my tigers. And Patton said, no, I'm not struggling. I've got so many more Shermans than
00:33:12.760your tigers that ultimately we will win, which of course they did. So it goes back to my point
00:33:17.820about flamingos and the way at the moment Ukraine is using drones. They're just swamping,
00:33:23.940absolutely swamping. And what is brilliant, again, without wanting to go too much detail,
00:33:29.680They're also tying drones to weather balloons that fly at 10,000 feet, 10,000 kilometers,
00:34:19.660evolution of drones, when it first started, it was all about the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:34:26.300If you could control that, you could control the battlefield. Then we saw fiber optic drones,
00:34:32.460which seemed bonkers. I remember the first Gulf War, the Iraqis fired a lot of anti-tank guided
00:34:38.860weapons at us. The whole battlefield was strewn with these sort of cables, which were
00:34:43.180doing these anti-tank guided weapons. And then we overcame that. So now, Ukraine is the use of AI
00:34:53.640and the use of mother drones that fly lots of smaller drones, thousands of kilometers,
00:35:01.580and then through AI, they light up and then hit targets. Now, this is something completely
00:35:07.860unenvisaged four or five years ago. And how can such a small military like the Ukrainians
00:35:14.420be defeating the Great Red Army, as it were, because of innovation? And the other element
00:35:22.180to this is training. The other reason the Russians are losing so many people, an infantry guy,
00:35:28.420recruit, conscript, is getting about a week's training. A lot of them don't even know how to
00:35:33.560clean their rifles. And when you've got a rifle, once you've fired a couple of hundred rounds
00:35:38.080through it, it clogs up with carbon and you can't use it. So these guys, I mean, if they had a couple
00:35:43.420of hundred rounds to use. So again, but that sort of perpetuates through the whole thing.
00:35:48.380You've got these Ukrainian drone units, a lot of them sitting back, a lot of them with very
00:35:54.360untraditional military people in there. We go back to the whole diversity issue and all the rest of
00:36:00.120it you know if you can fly a drone um then yeah it doesn't doesn't matter you know even if you've
00:36:06.780only got one arm or you know one leg or whatever you can do it and and i think i'm actually in
00:36:12.280recent writing i've been saying to the british military we don't all need to be able to lift
00:36:17.920heavy weights and run fast you know that's we need a few of them yeah but the rest need to be
00:36:23.240good at call of duty right entirely entirely and i in the video i made for the telegraph about
00:36:28.620challenger 3 you've got a sort of playstation handstick that um i mean luckily because it wasn't
00:36:34.860too different from challenger 2 that i last fired about 10 years ago it took me about two or three
00:36:41.300minutes to familiarize and then in the simulator to get a first round hit but actually had you
00:36:47.760been a kid who who playstation you would you just got in there and you wouldn't even need any training
00:36:54.300at all you know it says blaze the line fire i mean dead ease yeah and i imagine ai is going to be
00:37:00.440another huge area where like if this war keeps going another four years there might not be any
00:37:05.440humans on the battlefield perhaps exaggerating but you know what i'm getting there yeah i mean
00:37:10.500i think as i i talk about in the last chapter you know where we're going it's about autonomy
00:37:16.180autonomous vehicles right land sea and air we still need um we still need the human in the loop
00:37:23.380And certainly the way we've envisioned it with tanks, you'll have one Challenger 3 or one Abrams or whatever, but then tethered to it will be hundreds of autonomous vehicles.
00:37:34.920So, although at the beginning I've decried the fact we're only getting 148 Challenger 3s, if we have several thousand drones that can be controlled and manipulated by the Challenger 3s, then we can get there.
00:37:48.520And I sort of use Ajax, the recce vehicle, as an explainer.
00:37:52.300All throughout my military career, our recce vehicle was something, the CVRT, the scimitar,
00:37:58.640a fairly small recce vehicle with a few sensors, but a troop, three or four scimitars, would cover
00:38:06.220a frontage about three kilometers. Now, one Ajax with its digital turret, its sensors, and its
00:38:12.420drones, one troop of three or four Ajax will cover 60 or 70 kilometers. So you've got a massive
00:38:20.300increase in capability there. So I think autonomous, the other element, the other human
00:38:26.640you need in the loop, ground. So you'll hear people saying holding ground, you still need
00:38:32.940something physical there. And it's about endurance. I mean, things are getting better.
00:38:39.260One of my reasons for saying that the tank will endure, I've been on operations in tanks where
00:38:45.240haven't refueled or anything or stopped for 48 hours. Now, at the moment, we don't have drones
00:38:52.520that have that endurance. I'm sure we will do. And we don't have other capabilities. So
00:39:00.520once you've held ground, you still need humans there. But I think autonomy is exactly where it
00:39:06.200is going. And AI will enable it. But I'm no great expert on AI and all the highly technical things,
00:39:13.080And I'm sure there will be some, I hate to say nerd or whatever the politically correct term is, you know, sat in the back with his computer that can probably do a heck of a lot more damage than I could in my tank.
00:39:26.020But again, it's AI is, you know, anybody who's used AI will just see the power of it.
00:39:32.460You know, I'm a writer, I write books, I try and not go near AI at all anyway.
00:39:37.060but very occasionally. In fact, I had to write a eulogy for an uncle of mine who I didn't really
00:39:41.460know, had served in the military for 40 years in a regiment that I didn't really know. And I reached
00:39:46.900out to his regiment and said, tell me about him. And I'd only met him once in my life, bizarrely.
00:39:52.660And I got 400 pages of stuff. And I had to do the eulogy in like two days' time. And I just went,
00:39:59.540right chat GPT give me a 15 minute eulogy of all this stuff and it did and it was brilliant and I
00:40:08.760suppose even more after I gave the eulogy a number of people you know some generals and others who
00:40:13.780served with him said Hamish you've got him absolutely right I can't believe you only met
00:40:18.380him once and I said well that's what people told me but it was it was AI. Running a business for as
00:40:25.340long as I have, you start to notice a pattern. The businesses that lose the most money aren't
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00:41:36.900So we've been talking about technical innovation. There's a lot of people going to be listening to
00:41:42.020this, Hamish, who are wondering, what is the existential threat that Russia poses to the UK?
00:41:48.200because there have been talks about, I think it's Russian boats in British waters, etc., etc.,
00:41:56.160drones. What's the risk? I think that is a great question. And what I would say,
00:42:04.640I'm not sure it's existential, but it is certainly something that we need to face up against.
00:42:10.180Now, I live near Salisbury. And on the 4th of March, 2018, we had a chemical attack, Novichok, in Salisbury.
00:42:20.060Sergei Skripal, a double agent, survived. Unfortunately, an innocent civilian, Dawn Sturgis, died.
00:42:27.760But that type of hybrid asymmetric warfare is at the moment that we need to be most concerned about by the Russians.
00:42:37.960We are not going to see Russian paratroopers landing in the mail.
00:42:42.760We are not going to see T-90s driving up Constitution Hill.
00:42:47.960But what we are, what we know, or what the Security Service tell us, and I have no reason to doubt them, is that all the other attacks that are happening and the tests.
00:42:58.200And you may have seen in the press last week the American government saying that the Russians were going to attack Poland or one of the Baltic states to test NATO.
00:43:07.960to test us out. So when it comes to a threat, one doesn't see that the current Russian military
00:43:15.080and the position it's in can really do much more than it's doing at the moment.
00:43:19.740But the tip of the Russian spear is not the Russian ground forces. The Air Force doesn't
00:43:27.200really exist and the Navy doesn't really exist. It's everything else. What the Russians are really
00:43:31.640good at is the espionage, is the asymmetric warfare, the cyber. And that is the big threat
00:43:38.700to us. That's what we must be resilient against. And I mentioned the chemical attacks because,
00:43:43.960again, it's an area of my expertise that I dealt with. I commanded the UK's cyber and NATO's
00:43:52.380defense forces. So I saw it firsthand and I saw it with the Peshmerga, with ISIS.
00:43:57.460and I think not a lot of people know it hasn't been widely reported though I've written about
00:44:03.000it quite a lot Russia is using industrial amounts of chemical weapons on the front line in Ukraine
00:44:07.900has been for a couple of years admittedly it's something called chloropicrin which was one of
00:44:12.600the first chemical weapons used in the first world war most people will know as CS gas riot
00:44:18.460control agent but it is illegal under the chemical weapons convention and has a similar effect if you
00:44:25.220don't have a gas mask respirator. Anybody who's had any CS gas will know how really unpleasant
00:44:31.300it is. And what the Russians were doing is firing it into trenches. People were getting out and
00:44:36.260getting shot, and they were making a bit of ground. Then, through a whole host of various avenues,
00:44:43.800actually, the British, funded by others, gave gas masks to every Ukraine soldier.
00:44:49.620So then it didn't become an issue. But that's with something like Clara Pickering.
00:44:53.100So, if they escalated, something like the Novichok program that we saw in Salisbury.
00:45:00.060Now, if chloropicrin is toxicity one, Novichok is 40,000, 50,000, so it's on a slightly different
00:45:17.860know the Russians will test all the time and the Russian secret services, you know, GRU, etc. are
00:45:25.020still pretty good and still all over the place. And they are the ones that we must protect against,
00:45:31.540certainly from the home base. And I expect it's the same throughout Europe and, you know, to a
00:45:36.660slightly lesser extent, the US as well. Because what's really fascinating, and you can talk about
00:45:42.400this obviously with your background in chemical warfare, is the idea of a dirty bomb.
00:45:48.420And what are the risks to the UK from that type of warfare?
00:45:53.060Whether it's, I doubt it would be the Russians,
00:45:54.980but it might be a terrorist organization or just a lone terrorist.
00:45:59.800Well, I think we sort of put them all together,
00:46:02.880CBRN, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear.
00:46:06.520I think the dirty bomb is the radiological piece.
00:46:09.680I actually think it's a bit of a chimera, as it were.
00:46:13.940It's never been used. It's never been successful because, actually, radiation is one of the good things about radiation. It's very easy to detect.
00:46:26.320I mean, I have been involved and no secret at all in helping the Ukrainians secure their nuclear power stations because there have been a number of occasions where the Russians have appeared to attack them to create an improvised nuclear device.
00:47:24.080It is our open source knowledge that every building in the City of London has to be insured against a dirty bomb.
00:47:30.780Because the only way you can decontaminate a building that has radiation in it is to remove it.
00:47:36.480And something like the shard, which I think costs five billion to build, if that became irradiated, you would have to take it down and build a new one, which presuming these prices would be double that.
00:53:08.120But a little bit like Annie Jacobson's book,
00:53:11.520There are so many what we call biosafe laboratories around. Biosafe laboratories go from
00:53:17.2801 to 4. Biosafe 3 and 4 is where the really nasty pathogens are kept. Places like Porton
00:53:25.200Down in the south of England, Edgewood in Maryland, and they were military research places.
00:53:31.440In the last 20 years, we've gone from about 10 of these labs around the world to about a couple
00:53:37.840of hundred. That's level four and level three. There are now thousands. There are thousands
00:53:45.040of laboratories around the world, a lot of them in some of the dodgiest places in the world,
00:53:50.320and there are millions of scientists, completely unregulated, who are dealing with these pathogens.
00:53:55.920Now, a lot of it is big pharma trying to make sure that we have the medical countermeasures to
00:54:00.800deal with them. But not all. But the opportunity for accident, and the way that things developed
00:54:08.080in Wuhan, it absolutely must have come from the laboratory. All this stuff about
00:54:16.800hemorrhagic fever coming from wet markets and eating bats, I don't get it. And I don't think
00:54:22.800anybody who understands the basic gets it at all. But the fact that it spread so readily,
00:54:31.760and the fact that it's a threat today because we move around so much. The plague, the Black Death
00:54:42.800in the Middle Ages, took ages because people were basically traveling at three kilometers an hour.
00:54:48.640We're now travelling at 600 kilometres an hour, whatever it is.
00:54:52.760So the ability to spread it around, they're in the issue.
00:54:56.880So I think there is, I agree with people like Matt Ridley that, yeah, it must have been an accident from Wuhan.
00:55:05.680And I think most people, except for the Chinese authorities, accept that, which is why going forward, we must make sure it doesn't happen again.
00:55:14.720and the answer to that for me are twofold.
00:55:18.200First of all, regulation that we haven't bothered with.