Ladies and gentlemen, would you please join me in welcoming Sir Martin Connell? Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Uh it's a real privilege to be here with you this evening and for those online as well. Bob, thank you for the kind introduction, and Tim, thank you for mentioning Peter. Thanks also to Gresham College for this opportunity and to the worshipful company of Mercers. Now, as Tim mentioned, Peter devoted a large part of his professional life to the Royal Navy and the defense of these islands of ours. In particular, his considerable contribution to the Polaris Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Program. In so doing, he helped lay the foundations for me and so many of my former Royal Navy colleagues who sustained today's trident strategic nuclear deterrent, the successor to Polaris. So we are all extremely grateful for Peter's service to the nation. Now the title, as Bob mentioned, of my lecture this evening is Rethinking Deterrents for a Disrupted World. And while some things have remained constant for hundreds of years, such as the need to keep our sea lanes open and protect what moves across, not just on, but increasingly beneath the waves, we must now face up to a threat landscape which is more dangerous, diverse, and destabilizing than ever. Now I commend the authors of the most recent UK National Risk Register, a sober read if ever there was one, updated most recently in July of this year, which opens with the line the risks the UK faces are more volatile, varied, and interconnected than at any time in living memory. Our prosperity, our security, and the freedoms which we all enjoy, and let's not forget, were fought for by those who went before us, can no longer be assumed to be assured in perpetuity. I intend to make the case this evening for substantial change to our broader deterrent posture and the institutions which support it. For we are failing to keep pace with the world we are in rather than the world which we might wish to inhabit. Now, when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, I was into my third year of Royal Navy service and some six weeks into my military advanced flying training on the Royal Navy Lynx helicopter. An aircraft I would subsequently go on to fly from the decks of warships for the nine years which followed. While we knew that this was a significant moment in time, we were utterly immersed in what we were doing. So we simply kept our heads down and carried on with our flying training. And I continued to learn in fine detail the capabilities of all the various classes of Soviet warships. And to the point where I knew the radar characteristics of nearly all of them, and the Western names we gave to them. Headnet Charlie and Bass Tilt were two of my personal favorites, now more likely to be associated with the names of hipster beers, perhaps, than Russian warship radars. But our doctrine, our intelligence gathering, tactics, procedures, and weaponry were all configured against a Soviet threat. I used to spend hours supervising the loading of the WE-177 nuclear depth bomb onto the Lynx aircraft under the two-man rule. Seems rather odd today to think that I was trained to fly a tactical nuclear weapon, kept in the weapons magazines of our Royal Navy frigates. But at the time, that seemed to be nothing particularly out of the ordinary. It was entirely appropriate to the Cold War we were living in. Now those weapons were retired from service very soon afterwards, never envisaging the need for such weapons again. The United Kingdom enjoyed over four decades of relative stability throughout the Cold War. And while the geopolitical rivalry between the United States, along with her Western European allies and the Soviet Union was intense, it never boiled over into direct conflict between the two superpower blocs. Instead, it was defined by an expensive arms race, intelligence gathering and espionage, and a number of proxy conflicts. Most of the naval and military exercises I participated in had a firm NATO dimension to them and a clearly defined adversary. There were even rules in place were we to encounter Russian forces for real. The INCSI or Incidents at Sea Agreement signed by the then US Secretary of the Navy John Warner and Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorchkov during the Moscow summit of 1972. It ensured ships or aircraft took steps to avoid collision or miscalculations. But also importantly, no simulated attacks were permitted and other vessels were informed when exercises were taking place in their proximity. Put simply, each block understood the rules of the game. And that is important if warships or helicopters, in my case, are to avoid miscalculations and costly mishaps, especially so if they have the ability to deploy nuclear weapons. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991 held the dawn of a new era. Most nations in the West envisage this new, more hopeful period as bringing economic opportunity, and steps were taken to reduce defense expenditure and quickly seek some form of peace dividend. For us here in the United Kingdom, this era subsequently defined much of my professional military career. And it explains, to some extent at least, why any suggestion of reversing that trend of managed graceful decline, now with proposals to increase expenditure on defence while our economy is under strain is deemed to be unpopular. And it's certainly considered, or not considered by many politicians, to be a vote winner when out canvassing on the doorstep. I suggest we should all be curious, if not concerned, as to why defence and national security doesn't seem to garner the sort of political interest that it ought to. Now, when I joined the Royal Navy, there were close to some 70,000 active service personnel and around 160 commissioned warships and submarines in service. When I left in 2025, there were 30,000 regulars in uniform and far fewer warships in commission. During my time in service, we were certainly kept busy and often deployed away from the United Kingdom, but successive governments made limited military interventions out of choice, not in response to attacks on the UK mainland. These interventions were therefore somewhat more discretionary and occasionally failed to attract the necessary domestic support, something service men and service women understandably assume when they are sent into harm's way. For nobody wishes their loved ones' lives to be jeopardized or lost to a questionable conflict at strategic reach from their home. This post-Cold War period, defined by American military dominance, is now well and truly over. The rules-based international system in 2026 is fractured, alliances are under strain, and the world has entered a dangerous period of geostrategic disruption defined by complexity, conflict, and raw competition, where hard power and brutal force now matters more than ever. Combine this with the multiple revolutions in military technologies, and we face the sorts of challenges which could define our very survival. We now need to urgently reset our armed forces for the new world. This means the ability to warfight at scale. Now we can lament this new and more dangerous world all we want, and I have no doubt that many will. But I consider it to be a harsh new reality which we must all face up to. Roll our sleeves up and deal with. We are witnessing a global reordering of nations. Economic and military might have shifted into a more complex and contested multipolar world, and many nations are calculating very carefully who they should align with. Some wishing to deliberately remain non-aligned and sustain a degree of strategic ambiguity. The problem with ambiguity is you don't know for sure which way a nation might shift when the pressure is applied to any given situation, which isn't the best incentive for fostering long-term economic or security arrangements. The most likely outcome, in my opinion, from this geostrategic shifting of the global tectonic plates is encouraging numerous groupings, packs, and ad hoc alliances with an increased regional focus and the continuation of numerous regional conflicts, each with the potential to impact the global economy. For example, while many Europeans were relaxing on their summer breaks this August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan were busy signing the Mecca Pact. So we now have the second largest standing army in NATO, the only Islamic nuclear power with a battle-tested army of some 600,000, and the largest state in the Middle East with vast oil reserves, all pledging to guarantee mutual defense, somewhat akin to NATO's Article V. And who would have thought that Russia's self-styled and ill-conceived special military operation into Ukraine in 2022 would quickly impact global wheat production and exports? But it has, triggering massive spikes in global food commodity prices and exacerbating food insecurity in developing regions, which continues to this day. Who would have considered at the beginning of this year the impact to data centers, desalination plants, fertilizers, and global air travel from the Iran conflict? Set aside the obvious impact to oil and liquid natural gas exiting the Strait of Hormuz. Aside from the increased costs of the global supply chain and global energy, the most worrying outcome of this new era is the increased risk of a return to global conflict with all of the associated costs that come with such devastating wars. But more practical responses to punitive tariffs and turmoil are new alliances and treaties. In May of this year, China scrapped all tariffs for 53 African countries until 2028. Despite Africa's huge trade deficit with China, estimated at over $100 billion, China is positioning itself as a reliable economic partner. And unsurprisingly, Africa's exports to China are dominated by minerals and metallic ores, vital to feed China's technological and military expansion. In my estimation, we face at least a decade or so of such disruption ahead of us. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the tectonic plates will eventually settle. So how do middle power nations such as the United Kingdom deter potential aggressors and opportunists in this new and more dangerous era? Not by going it alone, but instead by facing up to the predicament we are in, investing in our national security and by strengthening our collaboration with other like-minded middle power nations. By doing so, we will unlock a stronger influence in the world. Now I'm confident that the bedrock of the UK's security will continue to be our nation's strategic nuclear deterrent. The UK has benefited from over 56 years of a continuously at-sea submarine-based nuclear deterrent. I think it matters more today, and importantly, it also reassures our NATO allies. But the gap between our strategic deterrent and conventional deterrent capabilities has been allowed to drift far too wide. I'm saying we cannot deal with 21st century global challenges with institutions, policies, military structures, and industrial systems forged primarily in the 20th century. A system that should not be considered as a naval weapon system, far from it. This is a strategic capability, with the responsibility resting with the Prime Minister. The Royal Navy operates it and takes that responsibility extremely seriously. But have we adequately explained why we have a strategic deterrent? What it costs, what it enables, what jobs it provides, and its contribution to the wider economy? Until recently, the answer was a firm no. So it is perhaps no surprise the defense planners and commentators look questioningly or suspiciously at the associated costs and draw their own conclusions. Along the line of just think how many jets, drones, warships, or armoured vehicles we could buy if we didn't have Trident. This thinking rather misses the point. The entire defense nuclear enterprise is, however, going through a fundamental recapitalization as the submarines, weapon systems, warhead, and associated enabling infrastructure are all overhauled. This year's delayed defense investment plan outlined some £63 billion worth of investment in the defense nuclear enterprise over the next three financial years. That's roughly the same as the amount spent on the Army, Navy, and Air Force combined. So why so much, you might ask? Well, frustratingly, we are behind time on these vital nuclear recapitalization programs, which means we're operating submarines well beyond their original design life, with fragile infrastructure and insufficient capacity. This has been the result of deferral, reviews, short-termism, and frankly dithering over many years by successive governments. I made this point very clearly when I accompanied the then Prime Minister and Defence Secretary in April 2025 to visit HMS Vanguard as it came off deterrent patrol. A patrol which at the time had the rather dubious honour of being the longest ever patrol in over 50 years, exceeding some 200 days at sea. So imagine, if you will, being one of the submariners on that submarine. Or their families for that matter. For over half a year, you were separated from your loved ones, unable to talk with them or see them, with everything that entails, working continuous shift patterns and being at very high readiness to respond to a firing order, practicing each day for such an eventuality, no matter how remote we might consider this to be. Their commitment and professionalism is what makes it credible. I pay tribute to the men and women who sustain that mission, aptly named Operation Relentless, for their commitment, service, and dedication, which I have had the privilege to witness first hand. What about those who say technology will render submarines redundant? One such quote reads Respected professionals worry openly about a single breakthrough in anti-submarine warfare technology, which will seemingly make the oceans transparent. Perhaps one day the oceans will be transparent. But this was in fact written by Carl Lautenschlager in his essay on technology and the evolution of naval warfare in 1984. Of course, new technologies will change the nature of naval warfare. AI, autonomy, quantum navigation, improved sensing. All of these will undoubtedly change how undersea or sub-sea warfare is conducted. But the undersea environment remains largely unexplored in 2026. With NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimating that less than 30% of the world's oceans have been charted using modern high-resolution sonar. So it will remain an extremely challenging domain to operate in and therefore a strategically important warfare domain to exploit for some considerable time to come. Not many nations are capable of operating nuclear-powered, let alone nuclear-armed submarines. That does give the UK an important strategic edge. Aligned with an unambiguous investment in the UK's defense nuclear enterprise, this provides an opportunity to signal very clearly that the UK takes its security and sovereignty seriously and is capable of protecting its bastion sea areas. But I would offer that the nuclear deterrent needs to be treated very differently from the rest of the defence program. It is a system of systems that is dependent on numerous capabilities. The appointment of a four-star chief of defence nuclear in 2024 with distinct budgetary responsibilities and financial freedoms was certainly a step in the right direction, because it cannot continue to be subject to short-termism and programmatic meddling, which the rest of defence is routinely subjected to, and which I have seen firsthand what the implications are. But alone this will be insufficient. It is now time for a national conversation about the multitude of threats our country now faces. For those threats are many and varied, and there should be no longer any illusion about them, with an urgent need to rethink how we can effectively deter, and if necessary, deal with such threats. We are living through a period of profound change. As General David Petraeus, former US Army General and Director of the CIA, said in his speech here in London at the House of Lords in early September, the challenge is do we care to recognize the magnitude of these changes before us and respond with the urgency they require? Western deterrence has become weakened through inadequate stockpiles, insufficient industrial capacity, slow procurement, and a failure to recognize the rise of authoritarian regimes which have spent years developing the largest military buildup in history. Now with a willingness to cooperate and create an alternative military-industrial system. Earlier this year, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, couldn't have been more clear. He said, This is the most dangerous period that I have known. The risks and threats to this country are greater than I have known since the end of the Cold War. I have sat round the same chief's table in the Ministry of Defence as Sir Richard, and I completely agree. Now, some might suggest military chiefs, well, they would say that, wouldn't they? In which case, let's consider what Sir Richard Moore, the former head of MI6, said. MI6 being, of course, the Secret Intelligence Service, responsible for monitoring global threats to our nation. He said in June of this year that Putin was keen to expand the battlefield away from Ukraine. And he does that by using techniques such as sabotage, cyber attacks, and even arson in a way that it doesn't cross the conventional threshold into open conflict, but he is hoping it will be disruptive, distracting, costly, and intimidating. Iran is beginning to do the same thing, and China undoubtedly has the means to. Anne Keith Butler, the director of GCHQ, one of our three world class intelligence agencies here in the United Kingdom, in her annual speech at Bletchley Park in May of this year said the risk of miscalculations is as high as I've ever seen it, and that we're in a new era of radical. Uncertainty. You see, our liberal and open democratic society is vulnerable to such disruption and sophisticated disinformation campaigns which fuel civil and social unrest. So for those who perhaps refuse to accept we live in more dangerous times, we can, I hope, all agree that the challenges our country faces begin at home. Begin with each and every one of us, every business and every community, and left unchecked, they will impact the way of life for all of us. Let me explain further. Now these threats are sophisticated, and their impact could be profound and immediate. We are, after all, a digitally dependent, networked, and open society. Our economy is utterly reliant on being an outward-facing, globally trading island nation. We are reliant, of course, on our critical undersea infrastructure, including undersea cables, those fibre optic arteries which enable our digital and connected economy to function and this city to trade. We're a net importer of natural gas, with about 50% of the total UK gas supply arriving via sub-sea pipelines, with approximately 30% arriving from our own fields in the North Sea. We have numerous high-voltage energy interconnectors and sub-sea electrical cables which connect us to many of our northern European partner nations. Some of our military sites around the UK are not as hardened as many might expect them to be. So I welcome the UK government's announcement ten days ago to invest an additional £470 million on furthering security resilience. But there are also numerous industrial and commercial sites deemed critical to our economy and the efficient running of this country, which are also easily disruptible or are single points of failure. Each and every one of us is perceived as a digital vulnerability by hostile actors. For they know we occasionally cut corners through weak passwords, wanting to act quickly, trusting links, open networks, and a tendency to click first and check later. We've become hooked as a nation on digital expediency. We've not had to consider resilience as a nation or as individuals for decades. But we do now, we must now. Now imagine for a moment, if you will, waking up tomorrow morning, not to the budget, but to a sophisticated disinformation campaign, extensive cyber attacks to our critical national infrastructure, and coordinated explosions occurring across the UK. Your banking isn't available. Communication networks stop working. Transport hubs come to a halt, no doubt with the associated irritating tanoi of your onward journey might be disrupted. Energy supplies are disrupted, and there is a run on the markets and the pound tanks. Blue light services will be quickly overwhelmed, and civil unrest may well soon follow. In a time of such national crisis, the armed forces will be mobilised, but they may be unable to satisfy all the various requests for military aid to civil powers. And therefore, wider society has a vital role to play. It is too late in the early stages of a crisis to start this debate. It needs to start now. And not just in isolated pockets in the UK, it must include every community and every citizen across the entire United Kingdom. Last year's strategic defence review was a positive start. It made reference to this whole of society approach. But this was a defence review with no authority over other government departments to act. The connection between the UK armed forces and wider society is vital. But in my opinion, it's been allowed to drift. The UK armed forces recruit from and operate with the consent of the society they serve and protect. Most servicemen and service women consider it a privilege to serve, I most certainly did. But with reduced numbers of people electing for a life of service in uniform today, combined with the passing of the vast majority of the Second World War generation, this has created too much of a societal gap. And a society with much less awareness or connection with what the armed forces actually do on their behalf. I even had to consider advice to people in the Royal Navy about not wearing uniform in public for their own protection a few years ago. This too must change. As Ukraine has shown us, sadly, all too vividly, it is a nation which goes to war, not just the armed forces. Therefore, preparation for war is crucial and importantly, done correctly, helps to deter an adversary from mounting such an attack in the first place. You see, this is no longer the unthinkable and unlikely scenario of the past. But still, political rhetoric alone won't mobilize a nation into action. It requires legislation, dialogue, and regular national and regional plans and exercises for it to become real, and a moral obligation for the whole of society to get involved and not to merely allow it to become discretionary, such that many might choose to sit it out on the sidelines and wait until the government of the day makes it an imperative. I contend that all of us must be willing to contribute to this national debate. For no longer is it acceptable for politicians, senior officials, and senior military to say this is all very highly classified, and we can't possibly share it with you all, so you'll just have to trust us. Nor should it be left to think tanks, podcasts, and serious news programs to debate. If it results in less money being spent on things that matter to people in their everyday lives, then they all have a right to know why. If we're perhaps in need of some more data to determine just how worrying and divided public opinion and understanding is on this matter, we need look no further than a July 2026 Ugov poll. It found that only 6% of people in Britain would volunteer to fight if the country faced an imminent invasion. An imminent invasion. Additional findings showed that 14% would serve if called up, 17% would refuse, and a further 52% feel they're either ineligible due to age or disability. But interestingly, the same poll found that roughly three in ten people considered a full-scale military assault on the UK within the next decade to be a realistic prospect. So let's hope that scenario doesn't come to pass too soon. So what does society need to do? Well, firstly, what I'm not advocating for is more military parades or turbocharging Armed Forces Day. There must be a sustained national conversation followed by action. For national awareness of the threats we face is pitifully low. Now on Armed Forces Day in late June this year, I was on a pack train heading towards London. There were rugby fans on the train because Wales were playing The Barbarians at Twickenham that day. There were three large music events across the capital as well. But there was no evidence of it being Armed Forces Day. Now I do, however, commend those towns and cities across the UK where people did turn out, from Aldershot to Chatham to Plymouth and beyond. But isolated pockets of activity doesn't look like a national commitment to me. Now perhaps I am more sensitized or observant to it than most. When I lived in the United States, I was thanked for my service on countless occasions in uniform, and most of the time this was in the full knowledge that I was a British serviceman, not an American. For it is in their culture to do so. In all the other years in uniform living in the United Kingdom, I can count the times on perhaps the fingers of both hands. I have, however, been shouted at, harassed, assaulted, and called a murderer while wearing my uniform in public in the UK. So while our servicemen and women certainly don't seek out recognition and gratitude, it is a worrying societal malaise that has been allowed to steadily creep in. Not helped, of course, by many years of discouraging people from wearing their uniforms in public. Firstly in the 80s and 90s because of the threat from sectarian violence, then again post-9-11. Sadly, society has become more remote from those who serve on their behalf. Now, as far as I'm aware, the home defense program is led by the Cabinet Office, and the National Conversation is a program of public engagement, which is part of that effort. The problem is you'd be hard pushed to find anyone who could tell you much about any of that. Which is perhaps why many veterans get frustrated when they read headlines which tell them they might be called up for an exercise in 2027. I think of all the audiences you need to reach to state there is a national effort required, veterans perhaps aren't the top priority. Now I do take some solace in the fact that we are not addressing all of this from a standing start. The National Preparedness Commission, for example, has some excellent analysis and advice. Some government ministers are beginning to acknowledge at least this is a whole of nation endeavor. Good. When it comes to procurement, we need to prioritize, I think, for resilience rather than securing the cheapest bidder. History tells us that transforming a peacetime military industrial base into a wartime defense economy is neither quick nor inexpensive. We cannot effectively deter with a peacetime force structure. We have allowed our defense industrial base to decline gradually such that acquisition processes remain measured in years rather than months, with little appetite for regulatory or commercial risk taking or long-term investment. Lord Robertson, one of the co-authors of the 2025 Defence Review, lamented the process which underpins this as vandalism. Sadly, he's right. But moving away from slow, heavily regulated and bureaucratic procurement cycles will certainly not be easy. I saw some worrying early signs of just how brittle our supply chains and skill sets were as a nation as we all recovered from the shock of the pandemic. Many defense firms were quick to draw up additional costs and delays to programs due to a sudden lack of skilled workers that was now available to them, combined with disruptions to their international supply chains and increased energy costs. Examples of a lack of resilience in industry and as a nation, which we have allowed to become the norm. We now need robust supply chains, alternate suppliers, dual-use technologies, and a move away from just-in-time supplies. We need always on production lines and manufacturing facilities, continuous shipbuilding and dispersed facilities rather than single and vulnerable buildings and facilities. This does not happen by accident. It needs strategic investment and commitment. In order to effectively deter, we must demonstrably make clear that any attack against the UK will be met with a convincing and overwhelming response. We are in an era now where hard power matters, not rhetoric or stern words. But nor should we abandon our effective world-class diplomatic options either. Many have reflected on just how brazen the Russian Novochok poisoning in Salisbury in 2018 was. Clearly sanctioned at the very highest level, the calculus was no doubt that the UK's response would be tepid and ineffectual, all bluster and no substance. In reality, the UK's response was far more effective than what would have been expected, mainly because of the international response it garnered. 28 NATO nations expelled more than 150 Russian intelligence and other officers, the largest such action in history. Alliances and solidarity matters in a crisis. But a military alliance between the autocratic regimes of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is profoundly worrying. We don't need to think too hard to imagine the consequences, for they're in plain sight if we only choose to see them. If I had predicted three years ago that North Korean soldiers would be fighting in their thousands alongside Russians on the European continent, many would have scoffed. That Russian ships and submarines were spending days loitering over our critical undersea infrastructure or firing warning shots at yachts in the English Channel for that matter. That the new and more hard-line regime in Tehran considers UK military bases used by the United States as legitimate targets. That UK bases in Diego Garcia and Cyprus had come under attack. British shipping denied safe passage through internationally recognized straits and often attacked with no notice. Cyber attacks, sabotage, attacks on our democratic system, disinformation and arson attacks. They're all too easily explained as hybrid or non-attributable. This is our new, rather messy, violent reality. Technology being shared between these four nations is already happening at scale. Iranian FATA 2 hypersonic glide vehicles and Russian zircon hypersonic cruise missiles are capable of flying at mind-boggling speeds. And left unchecked are able to hold the United Kingdom and its interests at risk today. We know that Iran, China, and Russia are exchanging military technology routinely now. Shaheed drones are probably the most obvious example. Six months into the Ukraine war, Russia started to use Iranian Shahid drones until Moscow's rather brilliant defense tech industry figured out how to defeat them. So Moscow added a Chinese jet engine and regained the upper hand. Chinese, Russian, and Iranian technical and industrial expertise collaborating to bring terror to citizens in Ukraine, which I witnessed firsthand just a few weeks ago. We now need to do the same with our closest allies. And while sovereignty, of course, matters, it is one of only many factors that must be taken into consideration. European NATO allies have pursued the sovereignty path at the expense of true warfighting, resilience, and interchangeability. It's why there are some 29 different classes of frigates and destroyers in European NATO navies, most in classes of single-digit numbers, not to mention the myriad of different components fitted to each. Imagine if there were just six or seven, each with always-on production lines and numerous manufacturing and maintenance facilities across the continent. You see, NATO provides us with the opportunity to build resilience rapidly. The sort of resiliency, industrial capacity, interchangeability, and always-on readiness, I believe, is now necessary. Mark Rutter, NATO Secretary General, in his Chatham House speech in June this year stated that a 400% increase in allied air and missile defence was needed, and that NATO defence ministers had agreed ambitious new targets. We shall see. As someone who's been closely involved in NATO force design and bringing defense capabilities into operational service, we should not assume this will be a straightforward task. Nor will new technologies immediately enable us to do defence on the cheap, as some might wish. But Mark Rutter didn't just cite air and missile defence, an acknowledged weak point. He made reference to needing millions more artillery shells, thousands more artillery vehicles, and doubling all of our enabling capabilities, such as medical support, logistics, supply and transportation. These critical enabling capabilities rarely seem to catch the selector's eye when finances are tight. Can any of you recall Minister standing by support hubs or opening logistics facilities recently? No, neither can I. But every politician across Europe right now is keen to open or visit a new drone factory. How many thousands of these will we buy before realizing they're perhaps not as interoperable, effective, or battle-hardened as they need to be? And no, I don't consider myself to be a technical or hybrid cynic. Far from it. After all, I oversaw the development of what is now described as the hybrid navy. Investment in new technologies is vital and will enable us to scale, network, and persist in environments which we have hitherto struggled to dominate. But not at the expense of high-end capability. Revolutions in military affairs will likely, in my estimation, continue to occur rapidly in the next decade or so. But the worst thing we can do is partial modernization combined with prolonged capability gaps and unrealistic efficiencies, spun to convince everyone that we're adapting, but expensive enough to consume scarce resource and insufficient to deliver a decisive advantage. In this new era where warfare is becoming increasingly data-driven, AI-enabled, and autonomous, NATO needs to significantly step up the pace of development. NATO member states need to go a step further than just agreeing capability or financial targets or headmarks many years from now, important though that is, but act now. To that end, I welcome yesterday's E5 defense minister's statement, promoting a more proactive deterrence posture. Noting that very few NATO nations can lay claim to having a balanced force structure and indigenous manufacturing base and supply chain, it is now time to revisit how allies need to focus on specific capabilities and collaborate closer, avoiding the desire for design creep or discrete national requirements. It's been done before and will be needed again if NATO is to get anywhere near its own capability targets. So, in conclusion, to effectively deter in this new disrupted world, the UK needs to think and rethink how it can raise its game. I was privileged to command brilliant people in the UK's armed forces. They are our decisive edge. But that alone is insufficient. We must invest in our most important allied partnerships, be at the heart of NATO leadership, bolster our conventional forces and the industrial base which critically underpins them, speed up productivity, drastically reduce bureaucracy, and be at the forefront of adopting new and innovative technologies and resourcing our intelligence agencies' abilities to defeat them. In addition to this, we need to build much more societal awareness and resilience, from individuals to communities to regions to businesses, all able to deal with the inevitable sabotage, subversion, cyberattacks, disinformation and probing, which will likely only escalate in the years ahead. I think there needs to be political consensus on this most critical topic, and it must be a shared national endeavour. Public and private sectors across all regions at local and national levels, all of us pulling together. If we choose to do so, I'm confident that we will be able to weather the many storms which lie ahead of us and signal to the world that the cost of attempting to harm the UK just isn't worth it. For the alternative is simply not an option. Thank you.