Thin Pinstriped Line

The Prime Minister has confirmed that the Ministry of Defence will receive a very substantial budget uplift over the next four years to fund national defence and security objectives. This will see some £16bn extra funding, beyond previously agreed spending going into Defence in order to set the conditions to transform the force. Good news – surely? On paper this is an extremely welcome development, and one that will be warmly welcomed across the MOD and wider defence industry. It provides additional funding, and helps provide certainty across several years – making it easier for industry to plan and price projects, knowing there is much greater certainty than there has been for years. The first point to consider is ‘where is the money coming from’? Its unclear yet where the money will come from to support this extra spending. There seem to be several options, which include is it genuinely entirely new money, added without preconditions to the budget to help MOD out of a difficult...

  The British Army is looking to significantly increase the number of robots in its force by 2030. This news , announced last week by the Chief of the Defence Staff highlights the way that the Army wants to change and transform over the next 10 years to take best advantage of new technology. On paper this seems a fairly punchy timeline, and it also raises a number of fascinating questions about what this means for the Army as a whole. For starters, what does an army where robots make up a quarter of its fighting strength actually look like? The move to increased automation and use of technology is not new, armed forces around the world have, throughout history, relied on the power of new technology to change how they do business. Navies in particular have benefitted from new technology to drive down head counts, with crews today often being significantly smaller than 40 or 50 years ago. The challenge for armies though is that while technology can increase manoeuvrability, or ...

  The news that Joe Biden will become the next President of the United States has led to deep analysis in the UK about what this means for the ‘Special Relationship’. Some focus on whether the personal links between the Prime Minister and the President will work, others worry that there appears to be no link between the Biden camp and UK officials. The reality is that every four – eight years the UK press has an outpouring of worry, largely unreciprocated by its US equivalents, about whether the new Administration will be good or bad for Anglo-American relations. It seems to worry people far more than it should for what is a fundamentally mature relationship in reasonable state. Much of Humphrey’s career has been spent working with different parts of the US Government, from visiting the White House (under both Republican and Democrat Administrations), liaison work in the Pentagon and State, working in multilateral arms control negotiations in Brussels and Vienna, to serving emb...