It gives me great pleasure today to introduce you to Professor, also Lieutenant Colonel Alexandrovich Moorhouse,
who is an associate professor of international relations in Geneva and also
head of military intelligence on the first helmet brigade of the Swiss Army.
He's also the editor of a Swiss military review and is now on a visiting frontier of our changing world program.
And of course, the subject he's going to take us beyond coin introduction to Conventional Warfare.
So thank you very much for the introduction.
A year ago, I committed or edited a text on counterinsurgency.
We had a conference and these were the proceedings of this conference.
So not too long ago we had I heard you talk about drone strikes and information control and so on.
So here is the latest edition of these conferences on information warfare.
And as I said before, over lunch, I'm very happy to talk about the exact opposite of counterinsurgency and the opposite of information warfare,
essentially talking about the subject over here. Is there a future for conventional defence?
And if so, what will be that, that future?
Let me say a few things about what moved me in the direction of doing this research and study.
Well, very, very originally. My first Ph.D. was on the Technology and War, the impact of the Evolution of technology on the conduct of war.
This was quite some time ago. At the time, I became acquainted with a very now a very close friend of mine,
Martin van Creveld, and was very happy to to continue this journey with him.
And I'm very surprised, interested, enthusiastic to see that some of these ideas of of ten or 15,
perhaps even 20 years ago, are still being debated and discussed.
Man machine interface. I just heard those those words a few moments ago.
I went on to do a second Ph.D. dissertation on the history of the arms industry, and this, for quite some time has been my speciality.
So this is also an interest of mine to advise perhaps the industry and the economy about the future of conventional weapons and conventional defence.
Because of course we're talking about very substantial investments and very substantial markets.
We've talked about a number of other things.
Yes, I have a personal interest in particular with regards to land warfare because I commanded a tank battalion for the last four years.
And so what you are going to see is really the results of a preliminary study that I did for the Swiss Ministry of Defence.
And what I have done or what I am doing, I am in the process of doing these next few months is expanding this from land
warfare to also include air and sea warfare in the in the months to come.
Since I work for an American company industry educational facility, Webster University, of course I need a disclaimer.
And none of the people, institutions, journals, universities,
ministries that have been evoked before have are going to necessarily adhere to the
discussions and and principles and conclusions that are going to be presented in this survey.
And I will move on perhaps to ask the question of how contemporary and how important is this question of the future of conventional defence today?
Well, I would say it is an extremely hot topical issue just about everywhere around the world if you're talking about the United States of America.
It is a hot, highly topical issue just because of what this is from yesterday, the Army Times.
I'm not talking about the raise in pay for those, of course, who were attracted to that.
But I am talking about the downsizing of the US military.
I'm not going to talk about that in specifics, but you know that the level is going down.
How far is it going down? This is something that that I'm going to to talk about in just a few moments time.
The US Army is actually the loser out of the three, four, five, now six branches of the US Department of Defence.
The US Army will see its numbers shrunk by more than 13%.
The number of brigades is going to be reduced from 45 to 33.
Recall those numbers in just a little while and definitely out of the different
branches of the US Navy is going to secure definitely its its position,
its procurement. The US Air Force definitely has its foot in the in the door.
But since the US Department of Defence is moving away from stabilisation, long term operations, from nation building,
from counterinsurgency, all of those things that we've talked about and moving into more decisive sea air warfare,
especially with regards to a pivot to Asia and shifting a focus from the European Theatre of War
to the Pacific Theatre of War will definitely the U.S. Army is going to feel these these losses,
and definitely it is requesting it is defending its position, rightfully so, to maintain certain capacities.
And I'm interested, of course, in trying to define determine which of these capacities should be the ones to be rescued or salvaged.
At the same time, we talked about information warfare just a few seconds ago.
At the same time, there's very conflicting signals, conflicting signals because in the news, this is literally a week ago,
a week and a half ago, you see these two articles, one that is showing armoured vehicles in malls.
Has anyone been to mom's beautiful town, Belgium?
Eat very well. Well, it has a dark side as everything, I'm sure.
But you see this picture which looks like it is brought back from the past, from the 1970s and 1980s at almost the same time.
This is almost an information operation. You see these Abrams tanks being moved back for an exercise in South Korea.
And, of course, all of this recalls to those people who have loved these moments and times and experiences,
the reforms are exercises of the 1970s and 1980s.
Well, just how far is there a recollection of this Cold War period?
Well, not very much, because a closer examination in both of these deployments here in Belgium and the lower one here in South Korea,
if you read the small characters who come to the conclusion that essentially we're talking about 55 armoured vehicles,
this has absolutely nothing to do with the order of scale of the military exercises,
the field training exercises that were conducted in the 1970s and 1980s where literally we were talking about this,
we were airlifting sea, lifting hundreds of armoured vehicles across the Atlantic.
And this was a naval, a logistical, an air transport exercise.
And what you see here in the German countryside was only the how shall I say, the the last stage of the exercise itself.
So we're talking a definitely not of this period.
We're talking about something very different than this Cold War period.
At the in the in the in the years of the reporter exercises,
we're talking about the strength of about 15,000 armoured fighting vehicles on the Naito
side and something like 35,000 armoured fighting vehicles on the Warsaw Pact side.
So these numbers that I just presented 55 is something quite, quite modest in comparison.
I'd like to explain explicit this problematic or this research question that I mentioned before,
is there going to be a future of conventional defence?
Of course there might be some people from the mindset that no conventional defence is no longer necessary.
Excuse me for not talking about that, because we have I mean, there's a there's a lot of discussion that has taken place in the 1990s,
in the years 2000 in the United States, whether you call them legacy or or otherwise, these forces are here to stay for at least some time.
And now it's no longer a question of determining whether these forces will stay,
but what will they what will be their main relative importance and what will be their focus in terms of missions?
And so looking at it from perhaps, yes, a modest Swiss experience, I would say there's pretty much three choices.
There's three choices. The first is to have those ground forces essentially as a a mopping up, as a civil defence.
And this is not only the case for Switzerland, by the way,
but many other countries would actually require or need the military to perform operations other than war.
Let's put it this. This way. So security, safety, disaster relief operations.
We had this talk where I think speaking about the weather was an important theme over here.
Well, you never know.
Maybe thinking about the weather and climate change is going to be an important subject or topic these next few years and generations.
I don't know. The second possibility would be to have a very high tech army, a high tech land force here with many different gadgets,
definitely capable of doing what the conventional armed forces are doing today,
but bigger, better with more range, with more accuracy and so on and so forth, with more discrimination perhaps as well.
And the third option would be this French concept.
But today, everybody or just about every country has its own name for the dual operative,
I would ask, and this would be a very comprehensive sea, air, land battle.
If I say sea for I start, some people in the room will probably understand what I mean by that.
But essentially the the working in the form of a very comprehensive network where the land forces are really a component of a very deep materialised,
if you will, system.
So this will be my my problematic my my question will try to give a few, a few hints as to where we are going with regards to to these three options.
But now what I would like to do is to talk about the arguments against the development of,
of conventional defence, of conventional land forces, and of course, give a few arguments in in favour.
Well, my first argument I'm going to be very quick on this, because, of course, there are some people who believe that war is a thing of the past.
It's no longer relevant. It's no longer relevant to have boots on the ground.
And I found I'm quoting my sources, this is The Economist.
This is a chart which basically shows all of the different conflicts since the end of the Second World War.
And as you see towards the right hand side, I don't see the number of conflicts worldwide shrinking in any in any way, perhaps in numbers of casualty.
But for the rest, pretty much there's the same number of conflicts before the Second World War, after the Second World War, after even the Cold War.
So conflicts are definitely still an actual and present occurrence and and situation, but the needs or situations that need to be resolved.
Second argument comes from the coin school of thought.
Let's put it this way. People will talk about asymmetric warfare.
We'll talk about counterinsurgency. We'll talk about anti-terrorist operations.
We'll talk about military operations other than war. And a lot of proponents of this school of thought will challenge the need and
especially the resources that are going into the conventional heavy forces,
because, of course, these forces, these heavy, high tech forces are extremely costly.
Now, without going into all sorts of details, I can point you to a certain number of articles and references to this.
But I would give two arguments against this vision of things.
The first argument is that today, any use of force or any interference, any peacekeeping operation,
any intervention that takes place in a developing country anywhere in the world
probably is going to be confronted to some heavy weapons of one kind or another,
because just about every country in the world today has some measure of heavy weapons or heavy firepower.
And so this asymmetric school of thought, I would say today, can definitely be challenged.
The second principle that I would I would object to that is the fact that certainly in the 1990s, in the years of dividends,
of peace, there has been a trend to lighten up the forces, especially peacekeeping or peace support operation forces.
There has been a trend to employ lighter and lighter forces.
Well, probably Canada was the was the trigger for that in Afghanistan.
We have moved since pretty much in the opposite direction.
And many forces have, rather, whether we're talking about this was my experience in the Balkans with regards to France,
with regards to even the United Kingdom.
There's pretty much a trend to bring back heavier forces and heavier weapons just in order to demonstrate a willingness of political will.
To the to the countries that that needs this stabilisation.
Again, I could I could point you to to a certain number of examples for that.
There are those people who say that peacekeeping operations do not necessitate heavy weapons.
And I have a background with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Without going into all sorts of details of how I would call this very much a misinterpretation of the Geneva Conventions,
proportionality does not mean and most people in the room acquiesce to this does not mean
that you should not bring in a heavier weapon than the opponents or parties to the conflict.
But proportionality in the sense of international humanitarian law actually really
means you should try and avoid unnecessary casualties and collateral damage.
So I think that there is no longer this much of a discussion with regards to, as was my experience in Sarajevo,
bringing in only very lightly armoured vehicle or vehicles that were not armoured at all.
Today we have we have moved away from this, from this policy, from, from this vision.
And today more and more we are moving into a vision where we want decision.
Relatively quick decision on the on the ground.
And we want to avoid casualties. And of course, this requires the use of relatively heavy state of the art equipment.
Another school of thought will challenge conventional weapons in the sense that so many revolutions in military affairs have taken place,
that today one could say those heavy forces, those legacy forces that I talked about earlier,
those that you saw in my first slide, the Challenger tanks,
the 60 plus ton vehicles are or will become very rapidly obsolete because of advanced detection devices,
because of strikes, a stand off strikes from the air and so on and so forth.
I'm not going to quote Martin Van Crutchfield here, but there's an absolutely fantastic passage in his book on war.
And what is it? We're in the. From 2000 B.C. to the present war in history, I believe.
Essentially saying the following, the fact that we still have heavy platforms and heavy weapons, those to two things.
Number one, the relative imprecision of strikes, despite what the retailers want to want to make you believe and and sell you.
And number two, because if you look at things on the long term, medium to long term, ten years or more,
these platforms, these heavy platforms are actually more durable than the lighter platforms.
I'll try and explain that in just a little while.
So all of these revolutions in military affairs have actually not managed to contradict the need for bigger and better platforms.
There's more room for improvement.
You can add more gadgets, you can add more countermeasure devices in a larger boat than you can in a in a small boat.
The same is true for land platforms. There's another school of thought that will challenge conventional warfare, saying conventional weapons,
saying it is essentially irrelevant and it is irrelevant because there are new threats and these threats are terrorism.
On one side, they are information warfare. On the other, they are cyber warfare.
For some people, yes and no, because as you as you perhaps know,
the military is engaged in crisis management essentially through the lens of crisis being defined by their effects and not so much by their causes.
So you will need a relatively large amount of manpower in order to diffuse and to care for the concerns,
the consequences of technological disasters, of crisis, of the movement of populations, for example.
And so that school of thought basically saying the threats and the needs of the past have been superseded by these new threats, I would say is untrue.
Probably these new threats have added themselves to the to the earlier threats,
to the more conventional threats, but have not superseded these in any in any way.
There are other people who say that network enabled operations remember this brutal operative.
I hope they had a design that I presented before.
There are other doctrines that that talk about a network enabled operations.
A lot of people will say the importance, the relative importance of the land component is going to diminish within this,
because we are going to divide sensors and shooters, because we're going to use more unmanned aerial land, sea vehicles, and therefore,
the relative importance of these conventional forces is going to go away.
Once again, if you are going to want to demonstrate a presence or guard or secure something,
tele presence is not quite the same as being present physically on the ground with heavy weapons.
I wanted to also talk about this light versus medium versus heavy weapons and their relative or respective durability, if you are interested.
I have a few articles as references to this.
This is a very old story between the wheel and the track.
I'm sure that some of you have read quite a bit of literature already, 50 years dating back to 50 or more years on this topic.
Well, I think it's probably time to end this debate once and for all, essentially.
Wheels have limitations. Wheeled vehicles, wheeled or light armoured vehicles have limitations.
I can even tell you which limitation this is. It is weight.
Each axle has a technical technical limitation of two and a half tons per axle.
So if you're going to have a six by six or an eight by eight vehicle,
it will not be able to be heavier than the number of axles multiplied by this two and a half ton figure.
And as I said, I'm very happy to point you to these articles, especially since a lot of these vehicles have been designed in my country,
the Parana series of vehicles, you see the problematic that is being posed today.
A lot of these vehicles have been built originally to be relatively cheap, to be air transportable within the ten, 12, maybe 14 tonne range.
Well, unfortunately, these vehicles have grown and this is the first this is now the third generation of the piranha or the Stryker,
if you want to call it that vehicle.
And those vehicles that are now being operated in countries like or used to be operated in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan,
have grown to the point that they are now weighing over 20 tons.
This is, of course, with. The same engine, the same suspension mechanism, the same brakes.
And this is leading to a lot of questions.
Also, the with the size of the vehicles has grown considerably to the point where these vehicles are almost unable to go into heavy terrain because,
of course, they will they will tip to the side. This is quite problematic.
It's one of the limitations of these vehicles, another limitation.
But this will get us into the very technical nitty gritty,
is the fact that these vehicles essentially are made out structurally of the the armour that they that they possess.
It's very difficult. It's very hard to add on a lot of armour on these vehicles, as would be the case on heavier systems,
heavier weapons, where essentially the the chassis is is one component and armour can be added on at a later stage.
It's not really possible. It's not really feasible. It's not very workable on these types of vehicles.
And we are now seeing vehicles are just this is actually from the British competition, the French competition.
I'll just talk about this vehicle right here, the boxer vehicle.
We are now seeing vehicles for the transport of infantry.
I don't know if you have ever stood next to one of these vehicles, because that is the same experience as a John Deere tractor in the Midwest.
These vehicles are basically rolling cathedrals.
This vehicle now weighs 42 tons and it is as absolutely gigantic and huge as the largest semi-trailers that you can possibly imagine.
So imagining those vehicles now moving on the battlefield that have the ground clearance to protect them from mines,
that have all of the applications and plugs for the personal equipment that needs batteries.
We're talking about the dependency on on high tech and electrical output.
Just a few moments ago raises many questions as to how survivable these vehicles actually are.
So I would say there's probably a limitation, an intrinsic limitation to the light armoured vehicles and probably more of a shift.
I'll come back to that to the heavier weapons on the process, side or side,
that is reasserting the need for conventional warfare and conventional weapons systems and equipment.
One of the people that I can could quote is Joseph Nye,
because anyone who comes out with a bestseller talking about soft power in
the 1990 and ten years later comes back with another book called Smart Power.
This is just I'll interpret the subtitles for you.
It just means I was wrong ten years ago. Soft power, perhaps.
Works may work. But then what is the cost of that soft power?
You may have to wait for years, for years on end to influence the situation.
And, you know, at the end of the day, there's no guarantee after waiting for ten years.
Saddam Hussein did not one day get up, go to in front of national television to say,
well, I've had it, folks, you know, I'm ceding power to somebody else.
It doesn't work that way. There's no guarantee that soft power works.
So today there's I would say in the literature, at least more of an understanding for the need, for a combination of the soft power,
the influence, but also of the dedicated, punctual, decisive, hard actions and intervention in some cases.
I'll just take out the Joker card if I if I need to, I will just use the word genocide.
There are some situations where an intervention is absolutely,
dreadfully needed and and you cannot afford to wait for ten or 15 years for a possible reaction on the on the ground.
I'm moving forward to talk about the evolution of conflicts, because this is very much a topic here in this centre.
And I'm bringing back my ICRC hat here for just 30 seconds.
You, I am sure, are familiar with this chart. Definitely.
You can read this chart in different ways. You can say today inter-state conflicts are a thing of the past.
They're no longer relevant in international affairs. There's almost no true inter-state conflict in the world.
I said, almost. But at the same time, all of these intrastate conflict, internal conflict,
I would say we have a bit of a legal myopia in this sense that many of these internal conflicts are, in fact interstate.
Aid or proxy conflicts in disguise. I can give you numerous examples, but I'll just quote two.
One obviously is the Darfur conflict, where you have essentially an insurrection in the south of Sudan.
But on the other side of the border, you also have pretty much an insurrection against the Chad government.
And of course, if you go into the detail where you understand that all of these insurrections are supported,
promoted, helped by the by the rival country, the rival state.
The other example, of course, in many ways would be Syria.
That's opening a can of worms. I am cognisant of that. But definitely it can be said that there were there have been two distinct conflicts in Syria.
There is a conflict in Syria before May or June of 2012, I would say.
And then the scale has the scale of this conflict has expanded tremendously since outside
powers are really sending in troops by the tens of thousands with a lot of equipment.
That is something I'm happy to discuss with you if you want.
But essentially we're talking about a conflict which has internationalised in many different ways.
Another factor of the renewal or possible renewal of conventional warfare is this graph.
This is actually an extract from a McKinsey study on the evolution of the situation and evolution prospects for the arms industry in Europe.
And this is a very interesting 17 page survey and study, and it points to the fact that, yes,
definitely the funding in terms of procurement are going down at an almost unprecedented, unprecedented level.
We're talking about essentially in the United States, a lowering of the procurement budget by almost 50% over three years.
This is very, very substantial. But, of course, if you believe that there are these economic cycles and cycles in procurement,
you are seeing people like McKinsey essentially advising the CEOs of of arms firms and
also the procurement officials that this is actually a fantastic time to do what?
It's a fantastic time for mergers and acquisitions. And there's a name for this.
It's consolidation. Well, this is pretty much the consolidation of the arms sector that has taken place in the mid
1990s that has essentially led the United States to launch some very ambitious programs.
Well, yes. Half a generation, 5 to 7 years later.
So, of course, this is all futuristic predictions and it can be argued,
but in many ways you see a lot of sharks, a lot of investors, a lot of technology enthusiasts here,
and perhaps also a lot of policy advisers in the United States of America looking at
these graphs and seeing this not so much as a lethal downfall of US procurement,
but true opportunities for the defence sector.
And there are different this is actually definitely being piloted in the United States.
You're perhaps familiar that last year there was a the signature of a of the 80 an arms trade treaty.
I happened to be involved in that because in Geneva, arms limitation disarmament is very much a hot topic.
What I will say with this is that there's usually a confusion when it comes to the arms industry and arms technology.
Everyone wants to put everything in the same bag. I'll just put this forward for your consideration.
There's, in fact, three very distinct arms industries or arms sectors.
And each one of these arms industries or sectors has their own regulatory how should I say, regime?
You have the strategic arms on the left, you have the conventional arms in the centre, and you have these so-called small arms on the right.
What I would like to say here is that definitely a lot of the attention has been
focussed and for correct reasons on small arms these last ten or 15 years.
But in fact we're seeing more of a shift today in terms of investment in the conventional and the heavier forces.
And of course, if we mention proliferation into the strategic forces, why do you think that is?
I'll come to that in just a second.
But because of the BRICS and today, this is no longer so much a market and a, how should I say, an interest for Middle Eastern?
Countries because the Middle East has been essentially taken over by Asia as the first region that procures massive amounts of of military equipment.
I'm not going to detail all of this, but you have here two countries that are worthy of interest.
We talked about Japan, and of course, I could also have mentioned Japan plus 50% in defence spending, spending over two years.
This has, of course, to be mitigated by the fact that the yen has decreased in value by about 30%.
But still, this is this is extremely sizeable.
I can give you another number of examples with regards to very large defence
acquisition projects in China or other countries in the Indo-Pacific region.
I'll just throw one word out at this point and I will say that these weapons here on the left of these weapons here on the right,
these are the weapons traditionally of guerrilla warfare, insurrection, I'll call it liberation.
These weapons here in the centre and to the to the left of this graph are the sovereignty weapons.
And I like this word because and this is a very bold statement on my part,
but I would say that if you look at the true power or where the true power is going to be in 15 and 20 and 25 years from now,
perhaps we will be speaking a lot less in the UN about human rights and we will be speaking a lot more about sovereignty.
I'll just leave this for your for your thought.
Another factor of that is putting wind into the sails of conventional defence is the American pivot to Asia.
Some people will say that it has.
It still remains to be seen just how effective and how pertinent, how visible this this evolution in in strategy is, is going to be.
This is not the the topic for today. But as I mentioned before, the effects that are extremely visible is that the naval assets,
the air assets, the standoff assets and the coalition partnering partner,
partner fearing efforts of the United States of America are very visible in this region of the world today.
So the losers in many ways are the U.S. Army versus other branches of services for time constraints.
Unless you really ask me to, I'm not going to go into the detail of the conventional forces still available today.
But I will just outline this fact. We're seeing here a reduction.
This is the announcement that was made. Was it yesterday or two days ago?
Already we're seeing the reduction from 17 heavy brigades or armoured brigades to ten.
So that's almost shrinking this in half. And the Stryker Brigade combat teams, intermediary forces are going to remain pretty much the same.
What this number here doesn't really tell you is that there has already been a cut in half in the heavy U.S. forces because these U.S. forces,
these heavy U.S. forces used to have pretty much double the number of armoured fighting vehicles than they have today.
So we're seeing essentially a shrinking within a decade or so to about 25% of the of the post the immediate post-Cold War levels.
This is the situation of France. Unless there are some specific questions, I won't go into the details.
But essentially France is maintaining the capacity to project up to two brigade combat teams for a very short duration.
We're talking about 1 to 2 months. Of course, most people in the room will know the British example.
The German example follows pretty much those same trends.
And if we look at a parallel in the air, the third dimension you see here,
the very substantial reduction in available air forces or readiness air forces in Europe.
I like to point out next to this graph that today the largest conventional military force in Europe is, of course, as everybody knows, Turkey.
Turkey has over 800, I would say, state of the art fighters at 16.
If we're talking about land warfare, we're talking about close to a thousand armoured fighting vehicles.
And these are not obsolete vehicles in any shape or form.
So this definitely leads us to rethink the defence capacities in in Europe.
You may have heard encountered even read this paper.
Yes. No, I like the term bonsai armies because this is very much what it is becoming.
And with the reduction in budgets, the reduction in the size of armed forces.
Well, very quickly. The question now is becoming, what are we going to simply abandon in terms of capacities,
in terms of tools and equipment, and what are the core skills or competencies that we want to maintain?
When I was here in in Oxford the last time. This is very much what I heard actually from British embassy officials.
I was actually surprised that this is not only a Swiss question,
how far can you reduce while maintaining a certain knowhow and a certain ability to project forces?
This is very much the case also in Switzerland. And I would I would say that also in the United States, those exact same questions are being asked.
How far can you scale down and what are the skills, competencies and tools that you want to keep in the in the toolbox?
This problematic is in many ways compounded by the fact that Europe or many European countries are facing a technological I don't want to say crisis,
but an obsolescence crisis.
There is right now the need to refurbish the House because many of the weapon systems that are being employed today are I'm not going to say mid-life,
because you're going to think that I'm selling you a nuclear reactor because the midlife has been passed a long, long time ago.
So now we're talking about the extension of service life of many of the weapon systems that we are seeing.
I talked about Martin Bryant Crawford earlier on.
And, you know, of course, what what his answer to the problem is, well, bigger and heavier is going to be the solution.
So pretty much everything is going to indulge with an extra ten, 15 or 20 tons.
The vessels are becoming larger, the tanks are becoming heavier and so on and so forth.
And we're adding all sorts of of gadgets. But one has to realise that all of this is extremely costly.
It's not only extremely costly, but it raises quite a lot of of questions with regards to the renewal of this equipment for the industry.
I'll just let you know in one particular dossier mandates that I'm very familiar with.
One of the biggest difficulties or challenges for the industry is the fact that today there's about 2000 main battle tanks,
leopard two main battle tanks that are available for sale, second hand.
So it's very difficult for the industry to actually propose anything new,
to develop a new weapons system, a new main battle tank, a new artillery system.
Today, when there are literally thousands of equipments that are still available.
Second hand relatively cheap is actually compounding the problem for the for the industry.
Yes, I'm nearing the conclusion so I can talk about three possible directions for solutions.
I'm not pretending that I have any solution, but this is food for thought at this stage.
There's probably three possible evolutions. One at the technical level, the other one at the tactical level, and the third at the strategic level.
The first would be the evolution of platforms.
And here we would be talking about, as I said, modernising these platforms to a great degree, to a great extent.
I have been asked to chair the what is called now the International Master Governors
Conference that is going to take place in my country in the month of September.
And this is an excellent international sharing and and cross-pollination, if you will, of of tankers or of officers in specialist in armoured warfare.
And one of the things that is coming out of this conference, at least of last year,
is that just about every country is maintaining an extremely limited number of platforms at the utmost state of the art level.
I'll give you the examples that I know quite well. Sweden, for example, today immediately deployable, has 14 tanks, and that's it.
Everything else that you read in the military balance or in SIPRI or in the Vienna document, well, all of these are sort of half, half.
And before they are actually engaged or deployed,
they would need some technical revisions or they would need an upgrade with electronic countermeasures of various kinds.
So there's a there's a diversification, if you will.
Presumably, there's a lot of people who are using these statistics and numbers.
So don't be fooled by what you see on paper. Definitely.
You have the overall declared armaments stocks on these documents that I that I noted before, the military balance and so on.
But don't be fooled. There's actually going to be less and less of these vehicles or platforms that are really immediately usable.
So that would be one trend to have only an extremely narrow and extremely limited number
of platforms available immediately and have the rest updated or upgraded as need be.
This has all sorts of consequences for the industry.
Another consequence coming from this Master Gunner conference, which I actually found extremely interesting,
was the fact that more and more there is pressure from just about every level,
from the soldier level to the head of state level, that each single platform become multipurpose.
It may sound counterintuitive,
but the idea would be that a platform be able and this is thinking out of the box but is able to carry wounded personnel,
is able to retransmit a TV broadcast, is able to employ a very specific type of munition for a very specific use, for example.
Well, all of this, if you are familiar with the industry, means, in other words,
this is going to cost a lot of money per single per unit, per per platform.
But we're seeing actually the trends moving towards these multipurpose and very high cost, high technology platforms.
The second area of evolution would be in tactics or in doctrine, and I'm not 100% familiar with the British armed forces I hope to become.
But definitely I can talk about my experience with with the French.
And this is to try and explore ways that tactically you can arrive at a more multipurpose platform.
One example would be, for example, the combination of light forces or even remotely piloted vehicles,
land vehicles and air vehicles very close to the combat troops.
This is I participated in a trial with essentially mixed platoons of locally made battle tanks,
along with reconnaissance units, so that essentially you have a light force that is able to explore ahead.
And essentially you have very, very close by.
You don't need to go through a whole hierarchy through through any kind of planning that you have the use of force with a heavy weapon very,
very close by when you when you need it. So very much this is one one dimension that that France is is leading.
I have no reason to believe that this is not the case in other forces as well.
And the third would be in the grand strategic scheme of things.
And this would be definitely to further develop this you can call it several names,
you can call it this sea air warfare as it is in the United States of America, or you can call it the British way of war.
This is what I learned from my short stay over here at at Oxford.
Actually, it's also called the U.S. Way of war in other places of the world.
But this is very much the expeditionary approach to things.
You come in. You are decisive. You do something. You you change the status quo.
And then you try to leave or you hand over the situation to somebody else.
And then the third would be very much what we were discussing before this conference coalition building and finding local stakeholders on the ground.
That will essentially help your efforts, as is the case, for example, today in Mali, where one is trying to stay,
trying to build capacity in order to be able to remove oneself from being committed to the to the region.
I'll just conclude with these three options or the three directions of of travel.
Just wondering, this is a personal thought. Just wondering whether these different ideas that you see here are too good to be true.
Because here is always the question. Everyone would like wars to be crashes, where everyone would like these wars to be extremely short,
neat, decisive, and then be able to pull out very quickly.
Is this not wishful thinking up to a certain degree, and are we not moving towards other surprises in this area?
Thank you very much.