The Royal Australian Navy will operate nuclear submarines provided initially by the United States and then in a joint design with the Royal Navy. This extremely positive and very exciting news was the upshot of the meeting between leaders from all three nations in San Diego this week, confirming that the AUKUS security arrangement is one of the most forward leaning and exciting developments of recent years. Much will be written on this topic for many years to come, but the overall plan seems to boil down into three core phases. Joint presence and operations in Australia by US and Britis ..read more

  It has been an extremely odd week in the UK. Much of the political agenda has been dominated by the decision by a very senior Civil Servant (Sue Gray) to leave her role and take up employment as the Chief of Staff to the main political opposition party. Ms Gray is mostly known for her conducting of an enquiry into lawbreaking and conduct in No10 during lockdown, and ended up in the post mostly because her boss, the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, had to recuse himself from doing it on the grounds that he’d also been at these parties. The response has been an attack on the impartiality of ..read more

  The newspapers in the UK have been full of news of shortages of fresh fruit and vegetables in recent days. To some this is a fact caused by climate change and events beyond our control, while to others the fact that the UK is experiencing shortfalls while EU nations remain well supplied is yet another tangible reminder of the toxic legacy of Brexit. There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, little consensus on the issue on social media. But whatever the cause of the problem, the issue highlights the reality of the interdependent world that we live in, and raises questions about what this means ..read more

  Is the military an organisation capable of change, constantly reinventing itself to face the challenges of new threats and problems, or is it a static organisation that talks a good talk about change, but finds itself unable to do so? The question is one that has been asked probably since armed forces evolved, and is one that will continue well into the future – the same questions asked of the Roman Legions will be asked of the Space Marine Legions (and their trusty FV432 ‘Rhino’ steeds). This issue came to mind when the author was reflecting the other day that of his peer group who cho ..read more

  The Labour Party has declared war on Civil Service expenditure, launching a dossier alleging that £145m has been spent on Government Procurement Cards (GPC) in 2021-22, up from £84.9m in 2010. This is apparently a bad thing – or is it? Lets park for the moment that according to RPI inflation calculators, £84.9m in 2010 is worth roughly £133m today, implying in real terms that spending has gone up by only £13m across the whole of government in that time. The GPC is a very simple idea in theory. It is a credit card issued to some civil servants who are then authorised to use it for spen ..read more

  The Public Accounts Committee has issued a damning report on the MOD efforts to digitalise, stating that the Department must fundamentally change the way it is trying to deliver digital transformation. While not a hugely glamorous subject, nor one that attracts much attention online when you could be arguing over how many anti-ship missiles a Batch 2 RIVER class should have (the correct answer is, of course, none), this is probably one of the most critical parts of the defence portfolio. Failure to get this right could leave the armed forces trailing behind their peers and foes. At its ..read more

  The British Army is in trouble. Equipped with increasingly obsolete capabilities, suffering from a chronic lack of new vehicles, struggling to deliver an ever changing vision of its role and with an elderly estate that is starting to be as dangerous to troops as enemy fire is, the Army is, in the eyes of its critics no longer first rate, and struggling to be second rate. Is this a fair characterisation of a complex problem? There has been growing coverage in the media and disquiet in many corners about the state of the Army recently. The seemingly endless saga of Ajax, a program that fe ..read more

  On Friday 27 January, the BBC Arabic radio network shut down after 85 years broadcasting Arabic language services to the world. Part of the BBC World Service, the network reached around 8 million radio listeners per week. In order to save money, around 380 jobs are being lost as the radio broadcast (but not the online version) is shut down as part of wider swingeing cuts to the World Service. It is hard not to see this as anything other than a strategic miscalculation, creating an influence vacuum that can be filled by others. The BBC World Service is one of the absolute jewels in the c ..read more

  The National Audit Office (NAO) has released a deeply uncomfortable report into the state of national security vetting in the UK, which is predominantly carried out by the UK Security Vetting Organisation. This report highlights delays to clearances, failures to process aftercare and significant staff and skilled worker shortfalls impacting on the ability to issue and maintain security clearances for government and the armed forces. Why does this matter? Vetting is a process by which background checks are conducted into an individual to determine the level of risk that they may pose. In ..read more

  The British Government will be donating 14 Challenger 2 Main Battle Tanks (MBTs) to Ukraine to assist in the ongoing fight against Russian fascist invaders. This is the latest donation by the UK and forms part of a wider package likely to also include AS90 howitzers. Over the past year, there has been an enormous influx of military support from Britain to Ukraine, arguably second only to the USA in terms of mass and capability. It has made a significant difference in the ability of Ukraine to defend against Russian hostility and help turn the battle around, and will, in time, likely hel ..read more