TRIGGERnometry - Britain Isn't Ready For A Real War - Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

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What is the state of Britain's national defence? When I joined the army, there are 150,000 people and 1,000 tanks. At the moment, it's about 70,000 and 148 tanks. What he has done is stirred up European militaries and made people realise that actually we cannot rely on the US. We must produce our own military capabilities so that when the Russian president looks west, he sees a credible defence.

We are learning for the lessons of Ukraine, 80% lethality from drones, 20% from conventional. We now know that certainly for the foreseeable future the next decade or so, it's going to be an autonomous-type battle. And unless we can operate in that, we're going to struggle. Hey, Mr. Breton-Gordon, welcome to Trigonometry. Well, thank you very much indeed for having me. It's been a great ambition to come and do your pod at some stage.

Pleasure to have you. We want to talk about the British Army and also the evolution of warfare, the war in Ukraine, perhaps we'll touch on Syria, which is an era of great expertise. Before we do all that, tell us a little bit about your story, your journey, your background.

Well, I come from a real military family. I think I'm the fourth generation who've been through the Academy at Sandhurst, a fairly sort of ordinary academic life at school. I didn't really get many A-levels. I did agriculture at the University of, of Reading and just scraped through, and then went into the army, which a regular officer for 23 years. I was lucky in inverted commas. I sort of hit all the big matches, as it were. So I was a young

tank commander in the first Gulf War, and then did Bosnia War, Kosovo War, did a few UN trips in Cyprus, then was involved in the Second Gulf War as well. And did a number of tours in Iraq when I was commanding my regiment, a number of tours in Afghanistan as well. And when I left the army after 23 years, I then got involved in Syria for sort of 10 years in and out of there and to see Assad gone and a lot of happy faces in Syria is great. And after I left the army, I sort of got into a whole host things, sort of journal as well and writing books. So yeah, I've had a very fortunate life, I think, from a military perspective and quite a lucky one. You know, I've survived a few scrapes. So, and now, and the irony having somebody who did so badly at school, I'm also

now Don at Mordland College, Cambridge, which, when they asked me if I would do it, I said, hang on, you got the wrong man here. You know, I've got one A level, you know, hardly any academics, and a third class degree in agriculture. They said, Hamish, you got a lot of very clever people here at Cambridge, we just need a few with a bit of experience. That's where you come in. So that's, that's sort of my story in a nutshell. Well, it's great to have you. One of the things that we've been covering and talking about a lot, and it's been a big discussion point in our countries, I'm sure you're well aware, which is the state of Britain's defense, the armed forces, the lack of funding and other issues that this country has been dealing with for a long time.

What is the state of Britain's national defense? Well, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, It's a very easy one to decry and put down. I think like a lot of NATO countries, European NATO countries, our government so overspent the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War that actually a lot of capability was denuded. A lot of people thought at the end of the Cold War, that was it. Then we got into all the counter-insurgency with al-Qaeda in Iraq and then the Taliban in Afghanistan that we focus very much on there.

and we sort of lost the ability to do war fighting, as it were. And as part of that, what it meant is we diminished our skills. So where we find ourselves at the moment is a very small military. I mean, when I join the army, there are 150,000 people and 1,000 tanks. At the moment, it's about 70,000 and 148 tanks. Now, not they're saying that that is a metric, but I think it just gives people an idea of what the contraction has been. been, and the disinvestment, and it's not one individual governments, it's been all of them

over the last 20 or so years, have disinvested. We invested in what we call urgent operational requirements for Iraq and Afghanistan, but counterinsurgency is a very different type of warfare. In the olden days, like our allies, like the Americans and others, the Australians, we could do it all, but we just focused on counterinsurgency. And I think morale in the British military also dipped. Now, I talk about my life up until 2012, where pretty much every year I was doing some sort of operational tour somewhere. And some people were thought, you know, that's hard yards. And certainly my family and my wife were completely hacked off with it. But actually as a professional in whatever guys it is, as a professional soldier doing your thing every day, what keeps you

sharp and keeps you going. Now, 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. So they weren't getting that excitement. And I think morale dipped. And when morale dips and you're not being funding, you then reach a place. It is only really since 24th of February 2022 when Putin invaded Ukraine, that suddenly countries are in Europe and Britain in particular realize, we don't have a credible conventional deterrence.

So started to reinvest in it. But when you drop so low, it takes a heck of a long time to get back there. So a very long answer to your question. At the moment, the British military and the British Army and the 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. And I think what we're learning in Ukraine and what the Ukraine military is showing us, you can get there and you can get there quickly. But it takes funding.

And I suppose the final thing I'll say on this, morale, we, recruiting for the British military has, until quite recently, been dire and you know, a whole lot of reasons for this. But, you know, unless you can recruit the right people at the right time, you are going to suffer. And that's what happened, the British Army. There's so many great boys and girls who wanted to join the military, but couldn't because of bureaucracy. Pathetic little medical issues that the computer said no. So in effect, we, a lot of the very very very best of British young boys and girls, we're not joining the military. Almost the second 11 were. I think that's sorted out now.

And I'm still an active reservist, so I see these young men and women on a regular basis. And I think now we're getting back to where we should. Really talented young men and women, really driven, really motivated. And they're starting to see the right kit coming through. They're starting to see the stuff they see on the TV and the stuff that you talk about in your podcast, about how Ukraine is doing so well. They're starting to see that flow back into the British military. But it's been really slow.

And I know a cavalry regiment, who, yeah, reconnaissance regiment, it's all about drones now and integrating it with platforms are having to buy their own drones with their own money to train on, which is absolutely bonkers, which is why people like me

and another military analysts who have columns like I do in a national newspaper you know, decry this position. You know, we must give our men and women the right tools to do the job. And if they can, we can be as effective as the Ukrainian military and become a credible conventional deterrent. So it's dropped low. We're getting back there.

But actually, even the funding that we've heard about in the defence investment plan is not going to be enough to realize the strategic defence review, which I think, which was the review of the British military on how we should provide a credible capability going forward. I don't think there is enough funding for that at the moment. But we are learning for the lessons of Ukraine, 80% lethality from drones, 20% from conventional. But unless you fund it, you know, it's a waste of time.

And I'd say, not a waste of time, now that's wrong. But at the moment, we're sort of funding to about 80%. And the great president of the United States, so I don't agree with a lot of the things he says, what he has done is stirred up European militaries and made people realize that actually we cannot rely on the US we must produce our own military capability so that when Putin or whoever replaces him looks west and future

he I say she there is no way in the world that a woman would ever run Russia that's another story but when the Russian president looks west he sees a credible defense and doesn't invade countries like Ukraine and future Well, 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? Well, 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. So 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. So I think that has really been the case that it's been focusing on other things. And, yeah, to a degree relying on others, good old Uncle Sam, he'll always come steaming over the Atlantic to help us out. Well, actually, we now know that that might not be the case. I say might not be the case. And when you compound it with our European partners who have done the same or even worse, I mean, the Germans who have taken a lot of criticism for a whole host of historical reasons, obviously, but they were the worst.

They're hugely wealthy country, massive potential, and actually had a large army, but, you know, they just didn't really bother. It's only recently 300 billion euros invested in German defence in the next couple of years. I mean, that is a real, you know, you can just see people in the Kremlin and say they're going, flip an egg, yeah, they are serious. and that's the sort of thing that we should do. So I think it's been collective responsibility in European NATO countries and its focus. And the defence investment plan, although I've criticised it, it is at least going in the right direction.

We're at 2.6% of gross domestic product now, allegedly going to 3.5 by 2035. If we were going to 3.5 by the 2030, I'd say we're on track. But we are going in the right direction. And one can see, I mean, politicians, you know, sitting outside Parliament, you almost feel the, the heat of their breath on the back of your neck. You know, unfortunately, their big focus is on the next election, which is two years time. What's going to get them re-elected? And my experience of politicians, most of them are pretty insular and pretty selfish.

So at the moment, well, possibly at the moment, defence might get them elected. But until now, that hasn't been the case. It's not until, you know, the security service, the MI6 and others say, we're in a hybrid war with Russia. We see Russian jets dropping sensors around British Navy ships this week. We see Russian proxy GRU agents barbombing the Prime Minister's House. We see cyber attacks, shadow fleet tankers. Suddenly people are going, hang on, maybe there is a thing about this. So I think we're getting there.

Are we doing it fast enough? we shall see. But I know, I think going back to your first question, morale in the military is on the up. And certainly the young boys and girls who I see on a fairly regular basis are really up for it. And as long as we make sure that they get what they require. I mean, one final thing I'll say, I find the irony about Russia. Because Russia is losing 30,000 people a month in Ukraine, only replacing about 25 to 30 percent of them. But the latest thing, is pay. A Russian soldier gets paid $80,000 a year, which is twice what a British soldier gets. And you sort of think, you know, there is a balance here that, again, we need to get it right.

And to contradict myself, I actually think the pay for the military in the UK now is pretty good. So we are moving forward there. Yeah. And I wanted to just, you mentioned about recruitment. One of the stories I read a long time ago, I think this was in the, this might have, been in the Navy or in the Air Force, or whichever one. I think it was the Air Force. Maybe it was the Air Force. Where there was a woman who was forced to leave because she refused to comply with

instructions from above, which said, we don't want to hire any more useless white pilots. And this sort of fits into the broader theme of DEI and sort of anti-meritocratic initiatives, which are about inclusion, which, you know, maybe there's areas where you might want to do a little bit of that, I don't know, but the armed forces don't strike me as the place that you want to be doing that. Has that played a role in recruitment issues and more broadly in the armed forces? I mean, that's, yeah, I mean, that that was very well documented. And I, you know, I'm sure it was an error. But again, it's the sort of, it's politicians forcing, you know, their own agendas onto the military. Right. So in my guys, and I've, I've served with every time.

of person on the front line, you know, whatever color, creed or whatever else. And on the front line, we're all color blind. We're all blind to whatever your sexual orientation is. It's all about the ability to fight. And I fought with them all, and quite frankly, it makes no difference. Absolutely makes a difference whether somebody is good or brave or whatever, those sort of background. So I think that that is that is really dangerous. What is critical is that when people are recruited, they pass the test. You know, if you're going to be an officer, you pass the

all our army selection board, fine, you're through. Same in the Navy, same in the Air Force. There shouldn't be a different level for a different part of society. And I think, I think people realize that. And it's ridiculous because it's actually what's in here, not what's on your, on your skin that's important. But I think recruitment has been an issue. I mean, I could real off many stories of people who should be in the military, who are not. In fact, I sat next to a lady the other night whose daughter was a consultant surgeon in the NHS. She wanted, she's always wanted to join the army, absolutely desperate. But because she took some mental health drug, and I had a clue what it was, when she was 10 years old, she has been precluded from joining the military, which is,

completely bonkers. Some of the doctors, British doctors and American and others that I charged around Syria with had some massive issues, psychological issues, but by God, could they do their job? So I think, again, we're learning how to get around that. But I think the whole diversity thing is something that we're trying to swim through that sea, but because there's such a political bow wave in front of it, sometimes it's really difficult. But I'm hoping that people realize that it doesn't matter. It's all what's in here that's important to be a soldier or fighter or a Navy guy or whatever. I was reading one of your articles that the armed forces have been underfunded to the tune of 28 billion pounds. That is a mind-boggling amount of money. What effect has that had on

the army, the personnel, the equipment in real terms? Well, it's difficult to say that $28 billion is the shortfall from the Strategic Defense Review last year, which said what we need, 80% drones, 20% whatever, and what the defense investment plan. So there's a 28 billion gap. Now, that manifests itself in, as I said, cavalry regiments having to buy their own drones. It manifests itself. I've just test-driven Challenger 3, the new British tank, that has what we call hard-key. kill defensive aid suites against drones. And in order to operate in a drone-infested battlefield,

you need these defensive aid suites. But currently, they're only going to fund something at one or two per tank, as it were, whereas you need four or five. So it's almost, so again, psychologically, and when you've been into battle, you know, I was always confident the tanks that I were in, you know, you knew that they, whatever you hit them, they'd take it up. So I can see, in it from a morale perspective to your point, you know, if you're going into an environment where rather than being 100% certainly you're going to survive whatever attack, you're 50%. That makes it really, really challenging. I was trying to explain to people about the whole medical issue, and I'm sure a lot of other your guests have talked about it. When you,

I think when we're professional soldiers, we're all happy to go and do what we're asked to do. But one of the key things is you want to know that if you're shot or blown up, you can, somebody is going to come and sort you out. And that medical side, and certainly the British Army and the American Army and others were really, really good at that. So, you know, we had some horrific times in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you always knew.

Conversely, when I was in Syria, it was a different issue here. And that's what people used to say to me. You said, you realize, if you get into trouble, you know, there's no Mert, there's no helicopter with medics flying over the hill to come and get you. There's no, you know, recon platoon or whatever he's going to come and get you. And actually psychologically, that was quite a, quite a challenging thing. And unless, I think unless we thought we were doing such a good, you know, such an important job, we might have gone,

okay, maybe not. But so very long answer to your question. I think that's where it manifests itself. We're not, the British, I served with the Australian army for a while. And they had a sort of phrase of fitted for, but not with. You know, it's great. The Australians always had some Gucci kit, but didn't necessarily have the really top end of it, although there were sort of brackets on your vehicle or whatever else that were empty because we couldn't afford it. So I think that that is where it sort of fits in. That's where the gap is, which is why we need it funded,

because a lot of that $28 billion is this sort of anti-dron stuff. And we now know that certainly for the foreseeable future the next decade or so, it's going to be an autonomous-type battle. And unless we can operate in that, we're going to struggle. When you buy seafood, what do you worry about most? Nutrition, sustainability, taste? I've asked all of those questions. This is why Wild Alaskan Company caught my attention. It is the best way to get Wildcourt,

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Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. I'm going to ask a very layman question, which might seem ridiculous, but I think a lot of people wouldn't really understand this. But how important is morale to the army? Because we've already talked about it a number of times. And what happens when you have low morale as opposed to high morale? Moral is to the physical tenets to one.

I mean you, and what I mean there is morale is a sense. essential, absolutely essential. If, you know, some of the stuff you do in the military is pretty difficult. You know, it's not not stuff that you would naturally do. So in order to do it, you need to have really high morale and leadership. And I think, you know, that's something that the British military and, you know, a lot of European, American military and others are really good at. That there's the moral component, you know, are you doing the right thing? and then morale, you know, having the right attitude to do it.

So it is absolutely essential, and it's something that we focus so much time on to make sure that morale is best. And I think, you know, there are so many sort of historical examples of where good morale has seen through. And undoubtedly, when you see some great acts of bravery and all the rest of it, it is all about morale. It's the thing that keeps you going forward. Everything else is telling you not to.

And it's also a collective thing. I think it's about really strong leadership. And in the British, in most Western armies, you know, the officers lead. They go first. It's follow me. You know, conversing in the Russian army, the officers actually lead from the back. You know, you go forward, chaps. And by the way, if you turn around, we're going to shoot you.

Which is why, again, looking at Ukraine, one of the main reasons Russia is losing 30,000 people a month, 10 times what Ukraine's doing, is about. morale, it's also about training. But it is something that is built over time, but is absolutely essential to be a successful, not necessarily individual, but a successful group. And that's where leadership comes in. Because 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 become friends, die, and you think to yourself, well, if we've been funded properly, that wouldn't have happened. I mean, that's going to lead to resentment, and then that's going to

lead to very serious problems within regiments. Well, absolutely. But at the moment, we are not at war. So you're absolutely right. In the early days of Iraq and early days of Afghanistan, that was a problem. You know, I still the most fighting thing I've ever done is driven around Iraq and in what's called a snatch land rover, basically an unarmed land rover. Wow. When you know that people were dying, but in, you know, lots of British soldiers are killed in these land rovers. And that was really tricky, you know, when people were saying, right, you go out and patrol

and you're sitting in bloody hell, but if I go over an improvised explosive device, I am toast. Now, by the time we got well into the Afghan campaign, we were getting protected mobility vehicles. I mean, I still do remember sitting in the back of a warrior driving from Lashgagar up to Sangan when you're just thinking, you know, at any moment this thing's going to go pop. But because it had the right kit on it, you sort of knew that you've got a good chance surviving. So to answer your direct question, because we are not at war now, that is what people like me are trying to beat the drum of people over there to fund. But, but, but, you know, but, you know, whether we can get them to understand that.

That is the key thing. But if next year we are at war, then absolutely. Nobody wants to go down that road in a vehicle they think is going to explode under whatever sort of attack. And you won't survive. So it's essential. And what we're learning, and we're discussing it earlier, you know, the great thing about Ukraine is the pace of innovation, spinning so quickly. And I'm sure we'll talk about the dreadfulness of the British Army and military procurement system. In peacetime, it's a flipping nightmare.

In warfare, as we saw in the Second World War, and I'm sure Jim Holland and others have talked you through it, and you'll be aware. Everything works so much more quickly. In Ukraine, if you've got a good idea, it can be on the front line in weeks, maybe a month. In the British military, you know, Ajax, the Recky vehicle that's had. had a lot of issues, which again, I tested over a few months ago, you know, it's 10 years in the make it, still not on the front line. Had this been Ukraine, it would have been in the front line after a few months or so. So I think, so I'm probably not a good answer. You've got, you've absolutely put your finger on the issue here. But, but I am confident that certainly,

because, you know, if we were at war, those situations would, would sort themselves out. Because once you're at war, then it is the number one priority. At the moment, it's not. But I think we've got the basis of a plan to get there. And let's hope it's not us going to war that gets us there more quickly. Because there's going to be people listening to this interview, Hamish, you're thinking to themselves, look, all right, you make some good points. But if you look at our country, everything is underfunded, we're in huge amounts of debt. Quite frankly, are we even going to be able to service that debt? I mean, there's a discussion around. that. Can we really afford to fund the armed forces more from 2.8 to 3.5? Isn't that fundamentally

unrealistic when you look at the current economic climate? Well, it is, no, I don't think so. Absolutely not. I think it is the number one priority. Other things have got to give. We know we know that we've got a lot of net zero projects, which, yeah, I'm as keen as the next person, Norman. on climate change. But, you know, I don't see why we're spending billions on that when we haven't got our fundamentals like Defence and Security pointed out. I think, and the fact that when it came to try and bridge that 28 billion gap that we've been talked about, defense, first of all, was told you find 10 billion. You know, and to find 10 billion out of a 60 billion annual spend is challenging. I didn't hear the welfare budget, which is six times the amount being asked to save

any money. So if we can't get $5 billion out of the welfare budget, then yeah, I think we need to get somebody in who can do it. So it's about priorities, and I think this funding has to be. And I, you know, I suppose like most taxpayers, I don't want to pay any more tax. But quite frankly, if it's a difference between, you know, the men and women in the British Army getting the right drone or not, then, you know, I'm happy to do that, although, you know, I'm sure a lot of others wouldn't. I think there is definitely the money there. The other element to it, of course, we keep hearing about growth. Now, one of the great industries in Britain is its defence industry. And, you know, if we spend our money there, that will generate growth. We just look at the Germans. And, you know, The new British tank is being built by a German company. I mean, that must be bonkers. But having said that, you know, some of the British companies have the potential to do stuff all over Europe.

Now, I know there are a few issues with the EU and Brexit and all the rest of it. But the fact we're making summaries with the Americans and the Australians, I mean, there is a real opportunity. Now, one is hoping that with Andy Burnham coming in and Prime Minister, We don't swing too far to the left. You traditionally have not seen the defence industry as an area they want to go to growth. But at the moment, it is a bit of a gold, you know, a golden goose for Britain. And, you know, if we spend our money on defence, it should increase the money within the government.

And if we make sure that we sell our capabilities appropriately again. So, yeah, I think whatever else, we have got to. fund defense first, whatever that means to other projects or even if that means increase in tax. That's why your point about net zero is so important because if you have the highest industrial electricity prices and a developed world, it's kind of hard to manufacture anything, right? I'm just not an expert, but that seems reasonable to me. But I wanted to ask you about the technological side of things as they're developing. You've talked a number of times already about what's happening in Ukraine, drone warfare,

in particular. And if anyone's been paying any attention, at all, and I obviously have family in the region. Even in this four-year period, you've seen the technological transformation of the conflict. I mean, it's a different war to what it was four years ago, completely. And one of the reasons the high casualty numbers on the Russian side, as you say, Russians are sending their troops in carelessly, but also they're being taken out by drones. I mean, you see videos of people, literally individual soldiers being hunted down. It's actually terrifying to think about being on the ground in that kind of environment. But what is happening with the technological side of warfare at the moment in your assessment?

Well, I think we all talk about drains. I had an experience of drains myself. I was, for two years between 2015 and 2017, I was the Peshmerger's chemical weapons advisor, the Peshmerga or the Iraqi military who were fighting ISIS. And I remember we were near-Mirmerger. One day in, I think it was April 2016, and this ISIS drone flew over. And you can see it with a hand grenade on and they were trying to drop it on us. We fired thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Didn't hit it. Anyway, the thing couldn't drop its thing. But that was 11 years ago, or 10 years ago. You wind forward to now and what we're seeing. And 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, you know, when

Iran started firing drones and missiles at the Arab States, Zolensky and the Ukrainians were over there, showing them how to defend against them, selling them Ukraine. Ukraine now makes 50% more drones than it needs, which is unbelievable. Ukraine has developed its own cruise missiles. You might have heard of the Flamingo,

which has a range of over 1,000 kilometers, a warhead of about 50 to 100 kilograms, not dissimilar from a Tomahawk cruise missile. Oh, by the way, it costs $500,000, not $10.5 million. And when you can do that sort of stuff, now, I am sure people might argue that a cruise missile is more effective than a flamingo missile, but 10 flamingo missiles.

It's a bit like when I talk about tanks in the Second World War, There's a great scene where Patton, who was commanding the Allied forces at Salerno in Italy, came up against the German general whose name escapes me. And the German general say, you know, Patton, you know, you're struggling, aren't you? You're losing 10 Shermans for every one of my tigers. And Patton said, no, I'm not struggling. I've got so many more Shermans than your tigers that ultimately we will win, which, of course, they did. So it goes back to my point about flamingos.

And the way at the moment, Ukraine is using drones are just swamping, absolutely swamping. And what is brilliant, again, without wanting to go too much detail, they're also tying drones to weather balloons that fly at 10,000 feet. 10,000 kilometers, yeah, 10,000 feet. And these drones are above the range of most of the Russian air defense, except the S-300s and S-400s. These drones electronically look like big Reaper drones or small aircraft. So Russia is firing these $10 million or $5 million missiles from S300 and 400 at a balloon. So, and while they're firing at a balloon, the real drones are sort of sneaking through, which is why, you know, Ukraine has pretty much destroyed 50% I think it is of the Russian oil industry.

But on the technical side. The refining side of it, not the entire industry. Refined. Sorry, you're right, the petrol. But when you come to the elite evolution of drones, when it first started, it was all about the electromagnetic spectrum. You know, if you could control that, you could control the battlefield. Then we saw fiber optic drones, which seemed bonkers.

You know, I remember the first Gulf War, the Iraqis fired a lot of anti-tank guided weapons at us. And the whole battlefield was strewn with these sort of cables, which were doing these anti-tank guided weapons. And then we overcame that. So now Ukraine is the use of AI and the use of mother drones that sort of get a fly lots of smaller drones, thousands of kilometers, and then through AI, they light up and then hit targets. Now, you know, this is something completely unenvisaged four or five years ago. And, you know, how can such a small country, small military like the Ukrainians be defeating the great red army as it were because of innovation and and the the other element

this is training the other reason the Russians are losing so many people at an infantry guy recruit conscript is getting about a week's training a lot of them don't even know how to clean their rifles and when you've got a rifle once you fired a couple of hundred rounds through it it clogs up with carbon and you can't use it so these guys I mean if they had a couple of a hundred rounds to use. So again, but that sort of perpetuates through the whole thing. You've got, you've got these Ukrainian drone units, a lot of them sitting back, a lot of them with very untraditional military people in there. We go back to the whole diversity issue and all the rest of it. You know, if you can fly a drone, then, you know, it doesn't matter, you know, even if you've only got

one arm or, you know, one leg or whatever, you can do it. And I think, and actually in recent writing, I've been saying to the British military, we don't all need to be able to lift heavy weights and run fast. You know, that's, we need a few of them. The rest need to be good of call a duty, right? Entirely, entirely. And I, in the video I made for the telegraph about Challenger 3, you've got a sort of PlayStation handstick that, I mean, luckily, because it wasn't too different from Challenger 2 that

I last fired about 10 years ago, it took me about two or three minutes to familiarize. And then in the simulator to get a first round hit. But actually, had you been a kid who PlayStation, you would have just got in there and you wouldn't need any training at all. You know, it says lays the line fire. I mean, deadies. Yeah, and I imagine AI is going to be another huge area where, like, if this walkie's gone in another four years, there might not be any humans on the battlefield,

perhaps exaggerating, but you know what I'm getting there. No, yeah. I mean, or I think, as I talk about in the last, last chapter, where we're going, it's about autonomy, autonomous vehicles, land, sea and air. We still need the human in the loop. And 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. And that creates the combat power. So although at the beginning I've decried the fact we're only getting 148 Challenger 3s, if we have several thousand

and drones that can be controlled and manipulated by the Challenger 3s, then we can get there. And I sort of use Ajax, the Recky vehicle, as an explainer. When all throughout my military career, our Recky vehicle is something, the CVRT, the simeter, fairly small recic vehicle with a few sensors, but a troop, three or four simiters, would have cover a frontage about three kilometers. Now, one Ajax, with its digital turret, its sensors and its drones, one troop of three or four Ajax will cover 60 or 70 kilometers. So you've got, you know, massive increase sort of in capability there. So I think autonomous, the other element,

the other human you need in the loop, ground. So you'll hear people saying holding ground, you still need something physical there. And it's about endurance. I mean, things are getting better. You know, one of my reasons for saying that the tank will endure. You know, I've been on operations in tanks where we haven't refueled or anything or stopped for 48 hours. Now, at the moment, we don't have drones that have that endurance. I'm sure we will do. And we don't have other capabilities. So once you've held ground, you still need humans there.

But I think autonomy is exactly where it is going. And AI will enable it. But, you know, I'm no great expert on AI and all the highly-torned. technical things. And 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. But again, it's AI is, you know, anybody's used AI will just see the power of it. You know, I'm a writer. I write books. I try and not go near AI at all anywhere. But, you know, very occasionally. In fact, I had to write a eulogy for an uncle of mine who I

didn't really know, but served in the military for 40 years and a regiment that I didn't really know. And I reached at his regiment and said, tell me about him. And I'd only met him once my life, bizarrely. And I got 400 pages of stuff. And I had to do the eulogy in like two days time. And I just went, right, chat GPT, give me a 15-minute eulogy of all this stuff. And it did. And it was brilliant. And I suppose even more, after I gave the eulogy, a number of people, you know, some generals and others who serve with them said, Hamish, you've got him absolutely right. I can't believe you only met him once. I said, well, it's what people told me, but it was AI. Running a business for as long as I have, you start to notice a pattern. The businesses that lose the most money aren't necessarily the ones with a bad product. They're the ones where the phone rang or a message came in and nobody was there to answer. in time. Today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled QUO, the business phone system built

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Money is always on the line, always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off for your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash trig. That's QUO.com slash trig. We've been talking about technical innovation. There's a lot of people who are going to be listening to this Hamish, who are wondering, what is the existential threat that Russia poses to the UK? Because there have been talks about, I think it's Russian boats, in British waters, et cetera, et cetera, drones. What's the risk?

I think that is a great question. And what would I would say? I'm not sure it's existential, but it is certainly, something that we need to face up against. Now I live near Salisbury and on the 4th of March 2018 we had a chemical attack Novachot in Salisbury. Sergei Scripo, a double agent survived. Unfortunately an innocent civilian Dawn Sturg just died but that that type of hybrid asymmetric warfare is at the moment that we need to be most concerned about by the We are not going to see Russian paratroopers landing in the mail.

We are not going to see T90s driving up Constitution Hill. But what we know, 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. And 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. to test us out. So when it comes to a threat, one doesn't see that the current Russian military in the position it's in can really do much more than it's doing at the moment. But the tip of the Russian spear is not the Russian ground forces. The Air Force doesn't really exist and the Navy

doesn't really exist. It's everything else. What the Russians are really good at is the espionage, is the asymmetric warfare, the cyber. And that that is. That is. That is. the big threat to us. That's what we must be resilient against. And I mentioned the chemical attacks because, again, it's an area of my expertise that I dealt with. I commanded the UK's Sibir and NATO's defence forces. So I saw it at first hand. And I saw it with the Peshmerga, with ISIS. And I think not a lot of people know. It hasn't been widely reported. I've written about it quite a lot. Russia is using industrial amounts of chemical weapons on the front line in Ukraine, has been for a couple of years. Admittedly, it's something called chloropicrin,

which was one of the first chemical weapons used in the First World War. Most people were known as CS gas, riot control agent, but it is illegal under the Chemical Weapons Convention and has a similar effect. If you don't have a gas mask respirator, you know, anybody who's had any CS gas will know how really unpleasant it is. And what the Russians were doing is firing it into trenches. People were getting out and getting shot, and they were making a bit of ground, then through a whole host of various avenues, actually the British, funded by others, gave gas masks to every Ukraine soldier. So then it didn't become an issue. But that's something like Chloropikrin. So what am I concerned, you know, if they escalated, something like the

Novichok program that we saw in Salisbury. Now, you know, if Chloropikrin is toxicity one, Novichok is 40,000, 50,000. So it's on a, it's on a, it's on a, you know, it's on a, on a slightly different scale. So I think when it comes to what it's the threat from Russia, it is those sort of threats, the asymmetric and the hybrid that we need to. And we know the Russians will test all the time. And the Russian secret services, you know, GRU, etc., are still pretty good and still all over the place.

And they are the ones that we must protect against, certainly from the home base. And I expect it's the same throughout Europe. and, you know, to a slightly lesser extent, the US as well. Because what's really fascinating, and you can talk about this, obviously, with your background in chemical warfare, is the idea of a dirty bomb. And what are the risks to the UK from that type of warfare, whether it's, I doubt it would be the Russians, but it might be a terrorist organization or just a lone terrorist. Well, I think we sort of put them all together, CBRN, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear. I think the dirty bomb is the radiological piece. I actually think it's a bit of a chimera, as it were. It'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. I 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. And everybody knows about Chernobyl. There are still sheep farmers in North Wales who can't sell their sheep because their grounds infected were from Chernobyl. But having said that, if you can identify a threat, particularly radiation, you can avoid it. And without giving any secrets away, the United Kingdom, like the US and others, has a lot of monitoring capability around the place

to detect anybody trying to move radiological materials. And if you blew up a dirty bomb in Westminster, it wouldn't have a great impact. It would provide a bit of contamination. It would be hugely expensive. It is open-source knowledge that every building in the city of London has to be insured against a dirty bomb

because the only way you can decontaminate a building, that has radiation in it is to remove it. And something like the shard, which I think cost five billion to build. You know, if that became irradiated, you would have to take it down and build a new one, which presumably these prices would be double that. So I think it's a real issue. What concerns me, I mean, the chemical bit, I think, again, the chemical weapons we know are quite easy to identify and we know what to do, although Novichot was designed,

so that NATO sensors couldn't detect it, which is why it took us 18 months to clean up Salisbury, but things have moved on. I think to me the real concern in this area is biological weapons. And I am... Excuse my ignorance. What are biological weapons? Biological weapons are pathogens. People are plague, plague which... COVID, mate. COVID. Plague which killed half of Europe in the Middle Ages.

anthrax, the Amerihtrax, anthrax attacks in the US after 9-11. Some people think COVID. But COVID is, so COVID is very, until COVID happened, me as a biological weapons expert, I discarded that as an issue because biological weapons take quite a long time. What we call it the incubation period of most pathogens like anthrax or plague or whatever else or Ebola. About four days. So if you want a big bang, people are going to be able for four days. I always thought, well, yeah, it's not something a terrorist would want.

But COVID, a very, a not very virulent pathogen. You know, death rate less than 1% brought the world to a standstill for three or four years. Now, if you think, if you were a terrorist and you could do that, that's pretty good. Annie Jacobson wrote a brilliant book last year or the year before called Nuclear War, which goes through a scenario of how nuclear war can start. Now, I'm just reviewing her book that's published in two weeks time called Biological War, and a lot of it comes actually from COVID. A little bit of work I did at Cambridge.

We, with the explosion in synthetic biology enhanced by AI, and now that we know the genome, DNA so well, you can actually manipulate things. So we did a tabletop exercise at Cambridge of whether we could splice Lassa fever, which is a heartmurgic fever. And there was an outbreak in Suffolk a few years ago. Luckily, it only kills three people. Only three people caught it, and it killed them, 80% mortality rate. Could you splice that with COVID, which is very transmissible?

So you had a very transmissible, but 80% death rate. And you probably could, or you certainly could in the near future. So once you get into that sort of vector, now in Annie Jacobson's book, she talks, actually it's about plague that's been manipulated. And if anybody has not read the book, I Am Pilgrim, which after you bought my book, you must read it. I think it's the greatest book ever written. It is fiction, but it's about jihadists who manipulate actually the smallpox vaccine. And it, you know, potentially brings the world to a standstill. All these shock-hoge stories, the thing that would keep me awake at night is the biothreat.

Because of everything that's gone forward, it's a cheap person's nuclear weapon, if you like. And the reason that people like I are concerned is we spend virtually no money on trying to prevent it happening. So the Chemical Weapons Convention, which has done a great job and removed 90% of chemical weapons from the planet, it, we spend half a million, $500 million a year to make sure that it doesn't happen. The atomic energy agency, nonproliferation, we spend billions on it. But the biological weapons convention, I think we spend $100,000 a year on it. A lot of it is because, and I'd like to be disingenuous to Big Pharma, a lot of it's because Big Pharma doesn't want us poking around in its laboratories, but it's making stuff

that it's going to make a fortune on. But I think what we need to get really serious about bio-warfare, and I think once people have read Annie Jackson book and read Iron Pilgrim, they will agree with me. But again, it's not any threat. It's the threat you ignore that it's really dangerous, the threat you focus on, and any threat can be suppressed. You just need to put effort and money into making it happen. So that, a long answer to your question on biological warfare. It's interesting you mentioned that because my father, he was a biochemical, engineer in the Soviet Union. And one of the things he always said to me was, this is the thing

no one's talking about, but biological weapons are the most dangerous weapons that people will ever make, and they may well be coming. It's interesting, I sort of made it as half as a joke about COVID, but there's, I mean, we've had Lord Ridley on the show and others talking about the origins of COVID. Your perception of someone who's an expert in this area, did you think this was a virus that was likely manufactured? Perhaps not as a weapon, but manufactured nonetheless? Well, Matt Ridley and I have very similar views on this. So you do then.

And his book is excellent. I don't think it was deliberate. No. But a little bit like Annie Jacobson's book, there are so many what we call biosafesaf laboratories around. Biosafe laboratories go from one to four. Biosafafe 3 and 4 is where the really nasty. pathogens are kept, places like Porton Down in the south of England, Edgewood in Maryland,

and they were military research places. In the last 20 years, we've gone from about 10 of these labs around the world to about a couple of hundred. And that's level four and level three. There are now thousands. So there are thousands of laboratories around the world, a lot of them in some of the dodgiest places in the world. And there are millions of of scientists, completely unregulated, who are dealing with these pathogens. Now, a lot of it is big farmer trying to make sure that we have the medical countermeasures to deal with them, but not all, but the opportunity for accident and the way that things developed in Wuhan, it must absolutely must have come from the laboratory. All this stuff about haemorrhagic fever coming

from wet markets and eating bats is, you know, I don't get it. And I don't think anybody who understands the basic gets it at all. But the fact that it spread so readily and the fact that buyers a threat today because we move around so much. You know, the plague, the black death in the Middle Ages took ages because people were basically traveling at three kilometers an hour. We're now traveling at 600 kilometers that hour, whatever it is. So the ability to spread it around there in the issue. So I think I agree with people like Matt Ridley that, yeah, it must have been an accident from Wuhan. And 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.

and the answer to that for me are twofold. First of all, regulation that we haven't bothered with. And the other one is monitoring. Now, I was involved post-COVID with helping the government and others come up with schemes. How could we have prevented COVID? Well, we didn't have the technology at the time to do it. Everything was happening so slowly. You were given a sample and 24 hours later you were either clear of COVID or you weren't.

when Omnachron arrived in the UK from South Africa, it took us five weeks to work out that it had arrived and where it come from. Actually, we have now developed sampling techniques where we can almost do DNA analysis in real time or near real time. So the scenario I always paint, that airplane that came from South Africa, if you could have tested everybody, because all you need to do is test the air that they're breathing very quickly, if there was this new virus on the plane,

you could have then quarantined them and dealt with it. Five weeks later, when we knew it, 400,000 people had come from South Africa, and those 400,000 people had travelled the world and spread Omnacrom around the world. But if you could have stopped what they call patient one, then you can prevent it happening. We have the technology to do it now,

and a few years ago, well, when the report's done, to provide this sort of technology and monitoring system in the UK would have cost about 10 billion pounds to set up and a billion pounds a year to run. Now, we now think, well, at the time, think, well, COVID's over, it's not worth it. If COVID becomes something like plague, spending that money would be insignificant. So that's, I think, the area where we can do stop all these things, but we go back to this business about where do we get 20 billion for defence?

where do we get 10 billion to make sure that a pathogen doesn't bring us to our feet again? It might be easier to get that money, probably more than defense, because one would expect industry and the economy to be happy to pay for it. But at the moment, they're not. And it's easier to scare the public into wanting it as well. Because, I mean, if you look at COVID, but on your telling and Matt's telling, it's the most deadly, one of the most deadliest events in human history, but it's the deadliest industrial accident by a long, long way.

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Use code trigonometry and grab it before it's gone. We wanted to talk a little bit about Syria before we wrap up, which is a place you spend some time in. You mentioned Al Sharah, who's the new leader, some questions about him, but you mentioned you were actually pretty happy with the way things have turned out. Yeah, very, I mean, I first started going into Syria in 2012, 2013. sort of purely slightly by accident.

I'd spent an awful long time in Afghanistan, and my wife had sort of had enough, said, right, you know, time to do it, something else. I've only had two good ideas in my life, and both were in Afghanistan. One was, we had to deal with a whole lot of chemicals from the Taliban, which they're used to synthesize poppies into heroin. And we found about 100 tons of this stuff, and it was basically acids and alkalis.

It's the recipe for a massive fertilizer bomb, and it was outside the barracks in Lashkar. If it had blown up, it would have killed everybody there. So I was actually there in an intelligence role, and I remember a guy from MI6 coming up to me and said, we understand you're the world's expert in chemical weapons. You've got to deal with this. I thought, I was going, oh, God, I'm not. I'm not really not. But anyway, it's got a very long story short.

We had this issue. There's a lot of fighting going on at the time. port and down, the laboratory down in Wiltshire were telling me to take it into the desert and blow it up. And I was going, you must be joking. There are 3,000 people, 3,000 talibam between mid the desert, no way. And then I sort of said, well, hang on, we've got 50 tons of acid, 50 tons of alkali. Why don't we mix them together and turn it into pH 7 water? And the great brains at Port and down about a day later came back.

And then, yeah, that might work, actually. And it did. The other thing that I was doing in Afghanistan was using DNA to track terrorists down. And because when we were doing biological weapon analysis, we were basically doing something called PCR, which is DNA analysis. And in Afghanistan, we were sending all the DNA off terrorists we were capturing back to the UK, and it was taking 14 days to come back. I suddenly went, well, why don't we get this kit out here? And we can do it in a couple of hours. did. So we turned a 14-day process into a three-hour process and we were, you know, you made that

bomb, your DNAs on it, you know, off to jail sort of thing. And then, and somebody said, well, that's great. We can commercialize this. But once I left the army, then a great mate of mine who was an ex-soldier was running security for CBS News and he said, Hamish, we've got this chemical attack we think in Aleppo, can you take our guys in there and do it? I thought, ooh, yeah, sounds like a lot of fun. So we did that and it was the first major thing. I can see why your wife gets annoyed. Well, well, it gets worse. It is all in my memoir, Chemical Warrior, so I'm not breaking any confidentialities. But actually once we did that, when, because Syria was really difficult at the time,

lots of... This is under Assad still. This is 2012, 2013, very much. Lots of, lots of were aid workers were being picked up by ISIS and Al-Qaeda and killed. So it was really difficult. But once I'd done that, then the BBC got onto me and said, oh, God, can you take one of our teams in and this? So I then sort of thought, yeah, it's only a couple of weeks. And the slightly funny, funny sort of inverted, common story is, I was with the BBC in a place called Sarakab in May 2013,

covering another chemical attack. And somebody came into my wife and said, Julia, what's Hamish doing in Syria? She said, he's not Syria. He's in France. And they went, well, I think you ought to turn on the BBC. And there it was. And Hamish to Breton Gordon from Syria until you're going. Oh, anyway, that took a bit of explaining.

But then when I got back to the UK and I came here and berated people, they just weren't interested. And somebody said to me, and we had a vote. in part, it was a big chemical attack, you might remember, in September, 2013, August 21st, August 2013, when 1,500 people died and the British government were voting whether to go with the Americans and flatten Assad's chemical weapons program. And I was in Parliament and briefing the Prime Minister and everybody else, and they voted not to for Ed Miliband. That was his fault. And I just, and people said, no, we need evidence. So I went back into Syria. We set up something called the CBN Task Force, which was all about treating casualties,

but probably more important, collecting evidence. So we set up this network to collect evidence of the chemical attacks, which we did from 2014 up until when Assad fell. And the proudest thing in my life is that the evidence that the UN has, the evidence of French government are using to prosecute Assad now, has my DNA on it. So that, for me, and it was when Assad fell in November 20, 2014, in December, I was the new government got in touch because a lot of the new government were guys that I've been in Id live with and said, you must come to Bascus.

And in December 2014, at 2024, Russia today put out this big piece saying, it was my fault that a sad fault. I was the reason. I said, I went, I certainly weren't. If I had any tiny bit to do with it, then I'm delighted. I said, it's a Syrian piece. people. Assad killed half a million of them. That's why they rose up. And once they rose up, they realized that the Syrian army was useless and the Russians faded away as quickly. But it was going to Damascus and meeting a whole bunch of ministers and getting the word from the ministers and via them from Al-Sherar. The line was, isn't it strange, Hamish, you know, we've been trying to kill you for 10 years and now we've invited you back.

for you to give us advice. I think you Brits call it real quality. But I'm, you know, despite, I first saw HTS as it were, Al Qaeda turned into HCS in about 2015. So, so life became a little bit easier after 2015, because although they were Al Qaeda, they weren't, they weren't trying to, well, people like me, as a very dearest Syrian friend of mine called Gunham, who was a doctor and still lives in this country, but spends a lot of time in Syria. He always says to my wife, you know, I could have, I could have got $10 million for your husband, and we would have split it. And Julia always said, yeah, yeah, I'm happy that, $5 million. And in fact, funny enough, he took me back there. He was part of the team. We went in January 2025, and they all joked,

your wife could have had five million dollars and she would have been very happy. But anyway, I'm being slightly obtuse. But now going back there to see so many happy faces, being able to go around the country without fear of your life, and there's real opportunities. And it is a secular place. I thought about going into the oldest church in Christendom with the Imam of Homs. And then the Bishop of Homs showing me around the main mosque in Homs. So I'm, you know, I'm very confident and very hopeful, but the West is not interested in Syria.

Syria is sort of sorted. And the British government haven't even opened an embassy yet. So I've actually told the Prime Minister, I need to be the ambassador. Let's open an embassy. Oh, it's too dangerous. We haven't got a building. I actually rang up one of my Syrian friends the other days. Any chance getting a building for British Embassy in Damascus?

I can offer you five or six different buildings that we'd see. Anyway, I live in hope, but Syria is a wonderful place. And 99% of the Syrian people are wonderful. I realize before we wrap up, we should talk about tanks very briefly. Because our booker, Billy, who you know, we were sitting around, I think it was on one of our America trips. And I was like, well, you know, looking at the stuff in Ukraine, the tank is kind of obsolete. Anyway, no, it's not. And I think he got that energy from you.

So why is the tank not obsolete? Well, that is a really good question. What I would, I'd try and frame it. The tanks have been around since basically 2016. 1960. Yeah, World War I. 110 years. The first big tank battle was the Battle of Combray.

Interesting, one of the big issues of my, it was the Royal Tank Regiment, the regiment I commanded. One of the big issue of tankies at Combray was the German. Germans throwing grenades and sticky bombs onto the top of the tanks where it's weakest. So they built metal cages to prevent that happening. We wind forward to probably about 24. And FPV drones dropping hand grenades onto tanks, put cages on. But literally the day after Combrae, everybody's saying, that's it.

The tank is dead. And that's been happening throughout history. What has happened is the tank has evolved. The tank originally was there to sort out a problem of machine guns. So how could the infantry cross the trenches to attack the enemy without being mown down with machine guns? Well, a landship as they were. The Royal Navy actually started. That Winston Churchill who started off tanks, and tank was an offset, operational security acronym for what it actually was. But it did what it did. I mean, a few years before, it was gas. So when the Germans started

are using chlorine, that was terrible. And the Germans made a lot of ground, but then we got gas mass. So the tank was there to prevent that. The Second World War, things developed and evolved, better armor, quicker, the Holy Trinity of firepower mobility and protection. You know, still sounds good today. So, yeah, a lot of people are saying, where does the tank fit in? And you see so many tanks brewing up, as we call it. Well, Russia has lost about 5,000 tanks in Ukraine. Now, I explain it because the Russians aren't big on protection. They like firepower mobility. They're not too bothered about the people inside it. They can be washed out and a new lot put in sort of thing. Whereas Western tanks, the American Abrams, German leopard, British Challenger, protection is a big

deal. So despite the fact the Brits only gave the Ukraine's 14 Challenger 2s, 13 of them still exist and are driving around. And I think the way the things have evolved, I mean, again, the Ukrainians have been brilliant with their tanks. Certainly the challengers and the leopards. If you believed every report coming out of Ukraine's social media, there are about 5,000 challenger tanks in Ukraine. They're here, they're there.

And again, people are fixated by it. And the way that the Ukrainians are using these Western tanks are sort of like long-range snipers because they're still really effective. You know, if you can suppress the drone threat, the ability to knock out another vehicle at three to four kilometers is still there. And you don't see British, French, British German or American tanks brewing up because, you know, we protect our ammunition inside. I think the way we're going forward and the way I described in the final chapter of the book is, is although it's all autonomous, we said before, you still need a human in the loop. So I think going forward, you'll see much fewer tanks, Challenger 3. I think

Challenger 3 is probably the last, it might be the last man tank we ever produce, or certainly the last tank with four people in it. You probably don't necessarily need four in future. But Challenge 3 is the first digital tank so that it can work with all these other drones. I mean, it's bloody difficult. I mean, as a young tank commander, even with the year's training, it is quite a difficult job. You know, I sat and challenged the three in Ajax, and I'm just covered with flat screens of sensors and everything else. And people are complaining about these new tanks make you sick. And I go, yeah, bloody hell, you know, maybe for not youngsters like Billy and others and you guys who are used to, you know, on your phones and laptops all the time. But, you know, for us old

fellas, driving around with all these screens makes it difficult. So I think the tank will still have relevance when we think about firepack protection and mobility. You still need to be able to whole ground and if you can increase its lethality through autonomy, autonomous vehicles in the air on the ground, then I think they will evolve. And the final line in my book is that I'm sure in 100 years from now, somebody like me will be talking to somebody like you about something called the tank. It's really interesting to say that. The reason I was more skeptical about it, I guess, is if a $50 drone or a $500 drone can blow up a multi-million dollar tank, that seems like a losing battle over time, right?

Yeah, but I would counter that by saying it can't now. So a $50, a $500 drone dropping a hang grenade or a two or three kilogram explosive or something would not take out a Challenger 3 because the Challenger 3 will either shoot it down before it even gets there or with its defensive aid suites. it wouldn't penetrate. So now, if we're talking about something like a cruise missile, so we're getting, is a $5 million cruise missile, could that take out a $5 million tank?

Yeah, probably could. But then again, to my eyes, that's sort of evened up. Are you going to use your $500 cruise missile that's really designed to attack headquarters and all the rest of it to try and find a tank in the Ulu? maybe, maybe not. It's a balancing thing. And I think until fairly recently, say the last 12 months,

absolutely the drones have had their way. And I think that that is right. What I'm seeing now with the development of hard-killed defensive aid suites, the drone is becoming less, the FPV drone, and the electromagnetic spectrum, again, with the jamming and everything else. Now, no doubt people would get round it. you know, the focus on Ukraine at the moment is deep strikes with flamingos and others and all the rest of it. Yeah, they're not really worried about Russian tanks. Now, I suppose the final bit

I was saying this, if you can start maneuvering again, we've had a static, trench warfare in Ukraine for four years now, but if you could maneuver, a bit like you might remember the Kursk offensive in September 24, when actually a bunch of tanks and loads of drones broke into Kursk, took about 1,000 square kilometers of land, and held it for three or four months. Now, if you could do that now and then multiply it, you could then see that what we call maneuver coming back in there and you could gain traction. At the moment, that, you know, the Ukraine is quite happy. Ukraine's doing the deep battle. And I would say that maybe in their strategic planning, once they've won the deep battle, they'll then focus on.

on what we call the close battle and maneuver. And if you think, you know, Ukraine's been really clever. They cut off Crimea. They cut off routes into the Dombas. Russian logistics, their front line, are running out. They can't get ammunition and fuel through Crimea, and they can't get it through the Dombas because they've been suppressed by drones.

Now, I personally think, and, you know, Ukrainians seem to be much better than any of us lot, there may be a time when actually Ukraine decides to break through and break out. It's creating the conditions to do that. They'll still need the ability to maneuver with tanks. And we've seen the U.S. Leopard infantry fighting vehicle has been tremendously successful in Ukraine. And none of us really saw that. So that is why I still think there is a role for something that's armored that can maneuver in future.

But it's trying to spin the innovation to stay one step ahead of the enemy, which at the moment Ukrainians are doing. And we need to learn every bit of that as we go forward. Well, Hamish, thank you so much for coming on the show and for making Billy's Day. I haven't seen him look this happy in years. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Hamish answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you go to

triggerpod.com.uk, where you'll be able to see this. Is manning a tank now one of the most dangerous jobs a soldier can do? After Ukrainians demonstrated that a drone or two can destroy tanks with relative ease. Do you think there's a concerted effort to undermine the military by the left wing of politics? If a major conflict involving NATO were to begin in the next year, what would be the single biggest weakness of Britain's armed forces that the public either don't know about or doesn't fully appreciate? And what's the one thing we're not talking about?

that we really should be? Well, I suppose I was going to say the bio threat. I think that's what really concerns me. And we've covered that in quite a lot of details. And one doesn't want to overly terrify people. I think if you accept my premise that there is mitigation to every single threat, but you just have to look at it head on to do it, then that's what I'd say on the bio side. I think the other element that we're not really talking about, and probably, you know, for good reasons, is the clandestine world, you know, the espionage. And it's something that Russia has invested so much time and effort in. But actually, I think they are losing the war.

And, you know, this human intelligence, the spies and all the rest of it, and I know it's changing. But I think, you know, Russia traditionally really punched above their weight because they, they, that was their world, the whole espionage. And of course, Putin, that's the world he comes from. But I think they're losing the war. I think Ukraine is showing us how the SPU are just unbelievable. People remember Operation Cobweb, where they attacked the Russian strategic aircraft 2,000 kilometers into Russia by hiding drains in a truck and then attacking it. That was the Ukraine's secret service who did that. And I think you know, that unseen and unheard world, it's going on all the time all around us.

I think one thing where Britain probably punches above our weight, and I know that a lot of us military people say that, but I think in the security world, I think we're still getting there. So not that we should talk about it, but there is a lot that goes on under the surface that people don't see. And it's really part of the whole defence and security piece. you know, that part of our defence and security must be absolutely funded because it produces such huge capability. But I suppose when it threats and all the rest, it bio to me is a concern.

And when people have read my book, do read Annie Jacobson's Biological Warfare when it comes out and Iron Pilgrim, which I think is the gracious book ever written. Hamish, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to Triggerpod.com.com.com. at the UK where Hamish is going to answer your questions. I know what's probably a very disconcerting question. If the UK cannot restore its military capability to protect power, should it consider negotiating with Argentina the status of the Falkland Islands?