[00:00:00] [00:00:00] This podcast series is sponsored by the British Army Innovation Team. This team is set up to encourage and facilitate innovation across the Army and supports wider Defence initiatives too. One of their, projects, The Army BattleLab, is due to open this year in the South West of England. If you would like further information about this project why not get in touch directly with the team via the show notes?
[Show notes: The Army Innovation team is leading on the Army BattleLab project which sits within the wider Defence BattleLab infrastructure. On the run up to the opening of this facility later this year, there will be a series of events which seek to engage with industry, academia and wider stake holders. To sign up to these events, and to receive the project newsletter, please email the team at ArmyCap-FFD-Innovation@mod.
[00:00:24] Welcome to this Wavell Room podcast series, which focuses on Defence’s language of change. This series seeks to explore some of the key ideas about change. What does it actually mean to innovate? Are we less adaptive and agile than in the past? What does it mean to empower? And most importantly, why is any of this different from what has gone before?
[00:00:44]This series aims to understand what we mean by some of those Defence buzzwords we keep hearing over and over again. Over the next few weeks, look forward to hearing from a whole host of different people from the military, the academic world, industry, and also the sporting world to [00:01:00] understand their views on this language of change, which has dominated military conversations for decades.
[00:01:05] We are delighted on our first episode to welcome Professor Peter Roberts. Peter is currently the Director of Military Sciences at The Royal United Services Institute in London. A former Royal Naval officer in the Warfare Branch, Peter served as a Commanding Officer, a national military representative and has served with the US coast guard, US Navy and US Marine Corps. With NATO and five eyes roles in the past, and previously the RUSI research fellow for sea power and C4ISR, Peter hosts the excellent podcast series titled “The Western Way of Warfare.”
[00:01:40] Frosty: [00:01:40] So Peter welcome we’re going to ask the same question to all our guests to kick us off. Pete, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but with your decades of experience of trying to understand and decipher defence thinking, if you had to advocate for one defence buzzword, what would [00:02:00] that buzzword be and why?
[00:02:01]Peter: [00:02:01] So firstly, thanks. Thanks for inviting me on a great privilege, but this question really caused me some, some problems when thinking about it. Cause I don’t really like buzzwords, so I thought, you know, what should it be? You know, you play around with it, you know, should it be simplicity or winning?
[00:02:16] Cause that sounds good doesn’t it or courage. I thought about the F bomb because that is just so military that the F bomb should be the single buzzword we’re allowed. I also went with bullshit because we should all have a bullshit buzzer on our desks. And I think that’d be fair. In the end, I opted for calibre, which you can think about. You know, this might be people or approach, but actually the calibre I’m talking about is the specified nominal internal diameter of a gun barrel bore. Now, to me, this, this is cracking because this is about what we should be doing. It’s about language that is accurate, it’s clear, it’s concise and fulfills those three things that I was always told to speak with is accuracy, brevity, and [00:03:00] clarity, right? The ABCs of military language. That’s what we should be doing, and we seem to have forgotten about it. So for me, that buzz word would be calibre.
[00:03:07]Frosty: [00:03:07] Interesting that you’ve chosen something that focuses actually arguably on equipment, rather than in people. But I suppose it bleeds across.
[00:03:17]Peter: [00:03:17] Yeah. I mean, to me, that’s the point is, is that you get this both. I mean, whilst it is, it is very direct. If you’re going to use a buzzword, you want something that, that hits across equipment, people and concepts, and the idea of calibre, you know, whether of people or ideas, the merit of them, as well as the reality, the actuality of capabilities to me is really important.
[00:03:42] Frosty: [00:03:42] Absolutely. I agree.
[00:03:43] Peter: [00:03:43] Well, I still do wish that I’d gone for the F bomb in some ways.
[00:03:48]Frosty: [00:03:48] You could combine the two.
[00:03:49] Peter: [00:03:49] Yeah. Genuinely you could do it would have been, it made a really great start to the interview. Right. And you know, w what is, is the F bomb. There we go.
[00:03:56]Frosty: [00:03:56] So to the outsider, it looks like defence is really grappling with how it [00:04:00] changes at the moment. There’s , a consistent churn of defence reviews. And more initiatives than most will , remember to look back at Michael Falons defence innovation initiative, Gavin Williamson’s transformation fund. Is this is this normal for there to be so many different initiatives going on at any one point is there precedent and what seems like a lot of change and how does it fit into what has occurred since you joined the Royal Navy?
[00:04:24]Peter: [00:04:24] There seems to have been an enormous amount of of these reviews recently. But I think if you look since 1960 maybe. And the defence estimates that we used to have, we do have a regular drum beat of, of change programmes coming out and change is pretty normal in defence. I mean, it’s something that militaries do and they do it reasonably well.
[00:04:48]And to me, we’re. The difference is that I don’t think we’re at a level of change that lives up to the hype. I don’t think that we’re experiencing an era where things are changing faster than ever before. I think there’s no [00:05:00] evidence for that right beside me, because I knew you’re going to ask this question right beside me I’ve got this great book by Robert J. Gordon who tracks the progress of humanity and looks specifically at how we have developed as humans and changed and, you know, the, the growth of humanity, the progress that we make, you know, is an interesting figure and he puts it in economic terms, which is a useful indicator for how we’re progressing.
[00:05:26] So he says, it’s the start of the information age in 1970, we’ve been progressing at about, you know you know, 0.6 0.7% a year as humanity, which is, you know, interesting. But prior to that, between the era of about 16 70 and 1970 during which, we had the really enormous changes that humanity was experiencing in agriculture and industry, in healthcare, in education. These were enormous changes in humanity then was progressing at maybe somewhere between 1.9 and [00:06:00] 2.6% a year. Enormous. And before that we were down at, you know, the, the 1% so. Below 1%. So actually this idea that we’re experiencing change faster than ever before, just doesn’t track with history.
[00:06:12] It doesn’t track with any kind of evidence whatsoever. So this language over God, we’re changing faster than ever before. You know, it’s, it’s so confusing. How do we get over it? It’s just not true. There’s just nothing to it at all. So that said about, you know, this broad idea about, about change of humanity and how we’re growing.
[00:06:31] There is something about the military, which is about we enjoy change actually. I mean, we drip about it the whole time we moan about it. You know, it’s a great thing to have a go at, but both in peace and in war, we like the change we enjoy it. The intellectual challenge of coming up with a way to overcome an adversary is really important.
[00:06:50] I mean, if you look in peace at our changes, aside from the defence review in the 1980s, there was this stark alteration of the operating dynamics and concepts of [00:07:00] fighting, you know, moving from attrition to manoeuvre. This was enormous. It was, it was huge. The arrival of tactical nuclear weapons, the arrival of precision the new generations of air power and a political willingness to challenge, particularly in the high North where you have the U S Navy pressing into the bastion of the Soviet submarine fleet.
[00:07:18] This was a major, really significant shift in peace time. Now this change was Herculean. It was enormous. And in war for militaries, you see something the same. We have differing approaches to campaigns in campaigns. Even within theatres, you get different responses. You know, actions in Iraq didn’t work for actions in Afghanistan in exactly the same way they needed to be at work separately.
[00:07:42] And indeed during the campaigns we had to have enormous change. I mean, really significant change. If you look at, you know, the experiences of the British charter, the Knights in Basra you know, the way they were operating there, you know, 2000 2003, you know, up to maybe 2007, 2011. And then you look at the experience of how they were operating in [00:08:00] Afghanistan.
[00:08:00] They were markedly different, you know, the changes that were required for units rotating through were enormous. Indeed. If you went on your first tour in Afghanistan, in, I don’t know, 2003, 2004. And then you went back as so many people, did, you know, later in the campaign. You would have seen enormous differences in how the British Army was fighting, you know, really enormous changes.
[00:08:25] So we do experience these things and actually do you know, what’s amazing thing is the British military in people, terms is really good at it. We have been screwing with our people so often in so many ways, and that might just be, you know, how the manners, you know, have done the appointing and, and drafting requirements of individuals.
[00:08:42] But we’ve made people antifragile this, this idea that we don’t just ride with chaos, but actually that’s where we thrive that the British military has been screwing with these people so often that actually our people now thrive in chaos. They do better in chaos than they do in sort of barracks where they have to abide by a set of rules and [00:09:00] very normalised set of performance standards.
[00:09:02] They do better when they’re riding this liminal wave of change. And I think that’s the, that’s the exciting part, but I would go back to that base point. I don’t think things are changing faster than ever before. I think we’re in a period of stagnation, but we might see huge changes approaching as we start to get through the 2020s and into the 2030s.
[00:09:25]Frosty: [00:09:25] Peter it is really interesting that you bring up, the tyranny of the now, essentially that we continually seem to be living in. You brought up examples from all the way back to the 1670 I think thats fascinating. You really don’t have to go far to see even our own current records of how we continually talk about how we’re living in the in the fastest change that’s ever been going on. I’ve been working my way through Max Hasting’s tome on Vietnam.
[00:09:50] Peter: [00:09:50] Right. Yeah.
[00:09:52] Frosty: [00:09:52] Again, there’s the there’s extracts from the from the joint chiefs of staff talking about how the change is happening so much. And even while you were just saying there, you know what I mean? How, [00:10:00] how much did the U S military have to change between the end of the second world war, the Korean war, and then.
[00:10:06] The type of warfare, they fought in Vietnam.
[00:10:07]Peter: [00:10:07] And, and they were fighting different ways. You know, there was no incredible experience, a series of books that I was reading about Korea and how the US had to repurpose second world war gear for Korea, because it served them better in the kind of fight they were doing there then than it would have worked in than it would have worked in Europe against the Soviet forces there and the same thing in Vietnam, actually, what they needed for close air support in Vietnam was very different from the, you know, star fighters and Phantoms that they were using in the European theatre.
[00:10:40] So, you know, these, these are changes they’re specific, they’re contextual through, through, through lots of different campaigns. And it doesn’t mean that you have to go for one, perfect, beautiful answer that will give you a force design that will meet every possible eventuality [00:11:00] when we’re not going to be there.
[00:11:01] Frosty: [00:11:01] Well, when we try to do that, we, we roundly waste money and get it wrong, I think. Or we frustrated with this, with the beautiful stuff that we procured when it doesn’t do all the things that we wanted to do later, because it had, I
[00:11:14] Peter: [00:11:14] I guess, you know, that’s, that’s one of the problems is, is often we buy stuff at the moment because it’s out there and it sounds really good. And I don’t think we have a way of, of using it or a concept of how we want to use it. It’s, it’s, it’s a really challenging problem at the moment for, for people procuring stuff. Right?
[00:11:33]Frosty: [00:11:33] Yeah, absolutely. So do you think we would benefit then from having a more US style? A quadrennial every four years they have a defence review. That’s set in stone on a cycle rather than our reviews are less set in stone arent they, they’re more kind of fit in with when governments change.
[00:11:52] Peter: [00:11:52] Yeah. I mean, you know, were we’re supposed now to, I think it’s every four years we are thinking about having them. We tend to have them more often, but one of the [00:12:00] problems with, with our set defence reviews is, is that, you know, things change. A couple of years later. And do you have to wait to do your major defence review or do you change in the meantime, if you go back to what was widely lauded as a, as an almost perfect defence review amusingly in 1998, George Robinson’s defence review and it’s set up the UK for a sort of, you know, force for good Blair Chicago speech, you know, perfect interventions, peacekeeping roles around the world.
[00:12:31] It was absolutely lovely, but you know, a couple of years later, 9/11 happens, which really changes absolutely everything. We go from an era where we’re doing little operations in Sierra Leone. We’re doing peacekeeping in Bosnia and Kosovo and we’re changed suddenly into major large-scale war fighting in 2003.
[00:12:53] We’re doing a major counterinsurgency and CT operations globally. You know, this is, this was a [00:13:00] distinct shift in how we did it. I remember driving in 1999 into the U S dockyard and you know right up to a carrier, no one checked your ID card. You just we’re in a hire car and you drive all the way through, up to the brow in effect of a US carrier.
[00:13:16] And there were a couple sat alongside, and that was what we did. Now. You, you roll that on two years, you wouldn’t even get near it. The airspace was closed, you couldn’t fly over it. You know, this is, this is really, really different. So, you know, I, I do think there is a problem with us saying absolutely, we set it in stone, but likewise. what’s the trigger for calling a defence review. And when should it be conducted? I mean, ideally when a government takes office. It should have this policy lined up, right? You would expect them to say, here are our foreign policy objectives. Here are our strategic objectives. And this is how we think the military fits into it.
[00:13:56] The home office fits into it. The, the overseas development aid fund fits [00:14:00] into it. This is how we stack this up. And therefore roll-outs within a couple of months, at least at the maximum your defence review, that’s what it should look like. And then give. You know, funding certainty. Now the funding certainty is really, really important and no one can undo this.
[00:14:18] The, the flip-flopping over money makes defence a very, very very expensive business. And there are NAO reports that back this up and House of Commons Defence Committee reports that do it there are think tank reports that do it. You know, the, the idea that you can prevaricate until the defence review to make spending decisions makes stuff more expensive, its a given.
[00:14:39] And if you don’t. Deliver on those promises of funding, then stuff gets even more expensive and you end up with a huge black hole in your funding mechanism, which funny, old thing the UK has a habit of doing. So we end up in a, in a really difficult situation. You know, how often do you do it? The one thing you do need is a long-term spending commitment.
[00:14:59] And [00:15:00] maybe that is a four or five-year thing, but that’s absolutely clear as you need to put that in stone and lay it down. You need to put it in law. So that actually you give not just the military, but you also give industry a driver on how to deliver this stuff.
[00:15:16] Frosty: [00:15:16] So do you think that needs to be delivered with cross-party agreement? Essentially. So your big projects, things like carrier strike, is that the sort of thing that should be, should be done on a, I guess a non-partisan basis?
[00:15:31] Peter: [00:15:31] You would hope so. Right? I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s the ideal, whether it’s a good idea or not, you know, the politicians, you should agree to it.
[00:15:38] But at the end of the day, you know, that’s not the way our political constitution works. The defence policy and the budgets are set by the government in power and, and effectively the military, like every other department gets to suck it up. You know, and if the health service gets cut by one government, the health service has to suck it up.
[00:15:57]And the government has to live [00:16:00] with their financial envelope that they’ve set that’s, you know, they lose power and things change. So, so I don’t think it can be a cross-party support and I think they do need to be reviewed, but the government needs to take ownership for the additional costs that are put in the idea that you can, you know, that you can just inject a bunch of cash into the British military, like now, 16 and a half billion pounds, that new money that gets injected.
[00:16:25] That’s not going to cure any problems in the British military. I think we need to be pretty clear about that. There is nothing that that is going to fix. It’s going to sort out equipment problems in 10 years time. But the near-term problem is really massive, which is why we’re going to see short-term problems as we always do in defence reviews, because we promise a bunch of stuff about change.
[00:16:46]Frosty: [00:16:46] So Pete, we talked an awful lot and you’ve been pretty clear that your view on the pace of change is that actually it’s not really that different at all, but would you agree that there are there’s a whole, there are a whole set of new [00:17:00] domains emerging say space, cyber, cognitive domain people talk about as well.
[00:17:05]And there’s a whole new, there’s a whole new list of expected tasks for the military to do. Do, do you think we’re adapting quickly enough to those new domains and potentially new potential new challenges?
[00:17:17] Peter: [00:17:17] Yeah, there’s, there’s this great argument isn’t there that, that That there are sort of four or five sets of people who are in the defence argument at the moment that there’s the, there’s the change agents.
[00:17:30] You know, the, the futurists who think that everything is changing faster than ever before and, and their idea of the future and how they should change and what should be a domain. And what shouldn’t is led by some science fiction writers really. I mean, it’s PW Singer and August Cole. They’re driving the doctrine and domain agenda of Western militaries.
[00:17:49] That’s, that’s where it is. Then you have the, sort of the Colin Gray school, which is, you know, things aren’t changing that quickly. This is all a little bit of smoke and mirrors. Actually. [00:18:00] There’s a lot more continuity to this than we like to see. We just need to have a bit of perspective and step back from some of the problems.
[00:18:07] I think I set within that camp that there’s, you know, that. There is change. There’s always change, but it’s not fundamental in nature that it’s not faster than ever before. And that we need to think about how we are going to do this. So the idea about cyber, for example, you know, we’ve been using cyber weapons.
[00:18:26] I think that the first recorded cyber weapons in the 1960s by the FBI in a sting operation with the Soviet Union. I mean, it was a, you know, it was a brilliant operation. We’ve been doing them fairly consistently since then. Yeah. And we’ve got a fairly good idea of what they are, this idea that suddenly it’s, it’s an enormous change to what we’re doing.
[00:18:43] I’m not sure is the case. And I think we’ve not been very smart about how we have adapted to that in the same way with. You know, space, it’s been up there for years. We’ve been putting military satellites in space, right? I mean, it’s, there are, depending on how [00:19:00] you define it, weapons in space and there have been for decades.
[00:19:03] So none of this stuff is particularly new. And again, I’m not sure that our knee jerking towards it has been a particularly good idea in the same way with, you know, our idea about AI, you know, crikey, there we go. There’s a new domain, AI let’s sprinkle AI on everything and everything will become absolutely fabulous.
[00:19:23] You know, there’s the small pieces of understanding really does damage, I think, to the longer term intellectual problem, which some parts of the British military are really good at dealing with. I look at the concepts where I’ve been engaged with concepts team in Andover for what five years now.
[00:19:42] And they’ve done some genuinely really, really good deep long-term research that brought them out to CFL 35, right? Conceptual Force Land 2035. It’s a really, really good document its backed up by years and years of evidence it’s been [00:20:00] war game, trial tested. It stood the rigour of, you know academic challenge.
[00:20:06] It is, it has been through numerous tests and games. It is stacked up really well. You know, genuinely, it’s a really good answer to what we think the future looks like. And then from that, you get to roadmap that comes back. Now, when I look at CFL 35, I think, you know, that is something that you can go to and admire you kind of mind much from DCDC, but you can a admire CFL 35 genuinely.
[00:20:32] I think it’s a good piece of work. And yet if I go to the RAF or the Royal Navy, there’s nothing similar. Nothing, absolutely zip their idea of, of, of, you know, future force design and understanding the future is effectively a series of capital replacement programmes. Based on the whole life or the, or the airframe life of, of what they’ve got the idea then that they would go to, I don’t know, August Cole or some people, and get them to write some, some fiction about what the future looks like, and that [00:21:00] will solve their problems about how they fight in the future and what it should look like.
[00:21:02] I mean, you know, it’s embarrassingly poor, so. So, how are we, are we doing well on this? I think some parts of the British military are, and I think there are some elements, some areas who are doing some really, really good and interesting work. There are pieces of DCDC that do actually deliver some really interesting stuff on EM.
[00:21:22] For example, there’s some really good thinking about that. But what we’re not doing is we’re not putting it all together. It’s not coming on at the same pace at the same rate. And so I don’t think we are thinking about this wellenough, I don’t think we’ve got a a wide enough approach to it. And I think we are, we’re too faddest in our response in the UK military.
[00:21:42] Frosty: [00:21:42] So what do you think we do about that?
[00:21:44]Peter: [00:21:44] , I think it requires some intellectual leadership . What I think is, is a really good programme. So the agile warrior stuff and the concept stuff that happens in and Andover, you know, that stuff, and we need to mainstream it.
[00:21:54] We need to ensure that the others play catch up with it too. And we need to give it a voice. We need to make it slightly [00:22:00] independent. So it doesn’t succumb to it. It needs to, you know, maybe sit under vice chief rather than anyone else, as DCDC used to do. We need to give it genuine freedom rather than saying that it’s got to conform to the wishes of all single services and, and and cross government. And it must represent all the views and it, you know, and therefore it descends into what does it, accept to the lowest common denominator, rather than something that is genuinely conceptual and challenging and testing, which is what I think we always wanted it to be.
[00:22:29] But what the UK military doesn’t have a very good history of doing. I mean, if you go back to. Where we were with, you know, when, when Basil Liddel Hart, JFC Fuller. I mean, these guys didn’t come in because they went so transformational because the British military were good at it. They came in and were transferring to shore because the British one that you weren’t good at it.
[00:22:47] And we always had this, we always have this problem. They’re actually changing stuff inside the tent is really, really difficult for lots of good reasons. And sometimes you need an external change agent to shake things up a bit. [00:23:00]
[00:23:00] I think the Army strategy is in a really good place. The problem is, is that the. Air Force and the Navy have no strategy. No and, and yet they’re the ones seem to be doing well out of a financial settlement.
[00:23:12] Now, you know, the problem is a financial settlement. Doesn’t make, doesn’t put you in a good place intellectually. It might put you in a good capital place, but, but you know, genuinely you’re screwed because you have no, no idea of what you want to do with your kid.
[00:23:26] Frosty: [00:23:26] But I think the, the problem. The army is always going to have is it’s really, really easy to, to demonstrate that, you know, here’s a boat, here’s an airplane, here’s a battalion well that could be smaller, that could be bigger. That, what is that ? It’s very difficult to explain that to the people who have to hold the purse strings.
[00:23:45]Peter: [00:23:45] I think that choices are now not between platforms and people. I think that’s the choice has gone away.
[00:23:51] I think the choice is now that people are arguing is between technology or digitization and people. And I think there are some really good [00:24:00] examples of, you know, for Boris Johnson when he went into a hospital. Did, did he want an AI system sat in front of an iPad where he could type in his name? Or did he want a doctor and some nurses to pick him up and take into a bed and treat him.
[00:24:13] You know, th that’s the difference. And I think once I think that’s why he gets it. But I think lots of people still are seduced by this idea of technology, but we might get onto that.
[00:24:22]Frosty: [00:24:22] All three services bang on all the time about its our people that make the difference. But the focus seems to be on equipment continually.
[00:24:30] Peter: [00:24:30] Big ticket items.
[00:24:31] Always, always, always, always amazing.
[00:24:34]And yet the U S has a completely different culture around its relationship with its people. Yeah in the military and you know, and it’s not because they’re a bigger part of society because they’re not a bigger part of society, you know, it’s not suddenly, you know, massive and disproportionately different to what we got here and yet their relationship between the society and the military is just distinctly different and it is about the people. It’s much less about that. I mean, they’re, [00:25:00] they’re proud of seeing, you know, new F35s or a new carrier or whatever else, but actually most of that press is bad news about equipment, you know, for whatever reason it’s failed here, or it’s not got through there or, you know, the latest ships not working or whatever.
[00:25:15] None of that, none of the equipment stuff is good news in the U S but the people stuff is all good news.
[00:25:25] Frosty: [00:25:25] I’d lay some of that over here. That’d be nice.
[00:25:27] Peter: [00:25:27] Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t be nice.
[00:25:27] Frosty: [00:25:27] Right, right. Let’s let’s go back onto it. So as this podcast, title suggests, we really want to dig into the language that we are using across the UK military to articulate change.
[00:25:38] One of our writers last year said that this language of change has become increasingly impenetrable. Going on to say, not everything can be adaptive, innovative, transformative, and modernised. And that’s before we get onto the game changers wise pivots and moonshots, is this criticism fair or is this just representative of any large organisation that’s that’s [00:26:00] trying to change?
[00:26:01] Peter: [00:26:01] Yeah, I think there’s a tension there. Isn’t there. I mean, The military has always had its own language. And indeed the Army has a different language than the Navy. The Boot Necks just speak a different language altogether. You know, and submarine is, you know, it’s, it is even more impenetrable than anyone else.
[00:26:16] But the reality is, is that the military headquarters language has, has changed again over the past 10 or 15 years. And, and in my experience, this is about trying to adopt a business language that actually has little transferability into Defence. You know, the military is not a business. It doesn’t have a profit and loss account because warfare doesn’t do profit and loss accounts as they do in business.
[00:26:46] And the idea in business of efficiency, Is the antithesis of everything about warfighting, business concepts just don’t transfer to the military. And so trying to shoe horn, this language into the military makes [00:27:00] it seem well it’s just frankly inappropriate. So we do end up with military people who know what they’re talking about in terms of war fighting, sounding really rather ridiculous when they start to spout business language and in doing so and trying to explain it it really loses the audience. And now that’s not just, it loses the military audience or it loses the industrial audience or it loses the politically, it loses everyone. You hear some you know senior military officers talk. I cannot understand what they say. Their sentences make no sense whatsoever. It become so riven with, with buzzwords that we’ve really lost that ability to speak with clarity. Now, these are the same people who then start to worry about why we don’t have support or understanding from society or our political masters.
[00:27:51] And, and that’s surely the answer is that we don’t speak with accuracy, brevity, and clarity. We have stopped giving [00:28:00] military advice and we’re now giving what feels like business language advice that we don’t really understand anyway. So I don’t think we are doing particularly well at the moment at this.
[00:28:12] I think we need to really go back to some of George Orwell’s writings to understand, you know, actually we need to be much clearer in our language, much more simple in our approach.
[00:28:23]Frosty: [00:28:23] So be more straightforward, use clear, more simple language,
[00:28:27] Peter: [00:28:27] I think. Yeah. It’s like simplicity. That was why I was, I was thinking about, you know, that first question, those first words, simplicity was really, really important and simplicity and planning, simplicity, and procurement, you know, all these things would be, would be really useful if we just underpinned all of our approach with this idea of simplicity.
[00:28:44] If I can’t explain something to my wife, then she makes me rewrite it. Right. I mean, it just, you know, we can’t, we don’t express the same thing. You don’t go back to your wife and talk about transformation programme. So at least I hope you don’t. I mean, you know that I would, I would, I, she would staple me to the ceiling. [00:29:00] It is just a, it’s a ridiculous set of concepts to have. We don’t have it. Why would we possibly put that into the public domain? Why would we have that conversation with the press and think that’ll sound good to the general public?
[00:29:12] I mean it’s yeah. Surely we don’t think that way at all.
[00:29:14]Frosty: [00:29:14] No. And I think we have to then spend time on picking it to explain it to our own people as well.
[00:29:19] Peter: [00:29:19] Yeah. Even worse. Right. We, if we can’t explain it to our own people and we own that audience, then you know, we’re in a bit of trouble.
[00:29:27] Frosty: [00:29:27] Fair enough. I suppose the only thing I’d say contrary to that is there is a danger that we can fall into using our, using our own military speak.
[00:29:35] So I can understand why we might want to try to talk to some people in their language. And perhaps that’s where we’re getting it wrong, where we’re trying to communicate to politicians who maybe have a business background in business speak rather than in military parlance that they lose.
[00:29:53]Peter: [00:29:53] There is space for exploring, you know, ideas and language elsewhere. Don’t get me wrong. We need to broaden, broadened our inputs and grow diversity. [00:30:00] You know, these are important things in language, but the fact that we’re asking people to speak in English, You know, with, with, you know, clarity and accuracy and brevity means that you open the audience to everyone.
[00:30:11] It doesn’t mean that you sound stupid, which I think is what people worry about. It means that you sound really clear and concise and lucid. It means that you’re able to express your arguments really clearly. And, and just by dressing stuff up with meaningless business speak and jargon really doesn’t help.
[00:30:32]And, and you know, this, the ability to talk clearly gives you cross audience, you know, input, and you can just talk to people and surely that’s what’s important.
[00:30:45]Frosty: [00:30:45] Well, I agree, definitely. Right. Defence has several initiatives, which try to generate change.
[00:30:50] Now. I, I think there’s a basic tension when you want to try and generate change in innovation. Defense currently tries to do that by imposing new structures on top. [00:31:00] So we have organizations like DASA, the Defence and Security Accelerator. We have the J hub. We have the Army Innovation Branch. We have all sorts of different parts of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force that all are about innovation.
[00:31:11] So there’s centralised innovation, centralised change. But change it also be business as usual as we’ve talked about in this interview already, we are changing all the time and we used to it. We’re comfortable with it. So to get the most out of changing, do you think it’s best centralised or is it best distributed?
[00:31:31]Peter: [00:31:31] Yeah, in a typical cop-out answer, I’d say you can do it both ways. I think the problem is, is, is the usual military problem of not following through . The idea that you can, you can only do change in one way, is wrong. Gives you change in a whole variety of ways. And it depends on the context and the problem and all sorts of variables.
[00:31:48] But what you have to do is when you come up with a solution about changing is you have to run it from, start to finish. Now the military tends to be really, really good [00:32:00] at starting stuff. Right. We’re really, really good at starting stuff with we’ll shut lots of other things and start this new initiative.
[00:32:07] But then, you know, maybe a year, maybe a year and a half in the people running it will change. And the new people that come in will have a slightly different idea and the money will be taken for a different initiative. And that, that will be the one that’s then pushed forward by a new set of people in a new area.
[00:32:24] And you fail to realise the benefits of your change. And this is one of the reasons why change can be unsuccessful is because you won’t follow through and deliver on those objectives. Absolutely at the end. And again, this can be a question of leadership. It can be a question of support, but the reality is it’s about wanting to ensure that you deliver on a plan and being funded to do so.
[00:32:53] And making sure that any new plan that comes in is deconflicted.
[00:32:58] Frosty: [00:32:58] Do you think part of this is a structural problem [00:33:00] with the military posting system? I think all three services basically run two year rotations.
[00:33:06] Peter: [00:33:06] Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I was, I was talking yeah, to ambassador Ryan Crocker about this recently.
[00:33:12] So he, he spent his entire career in the middle East and he said, listen, there, there is a massive difference between a career politician who spends their life in, in and around the area who becomes absolutely climatised to every single nuance in different ruling parties in different countries that will spot the changes and understand that the buzz and the background noise that, that runs with it.
[00:33:36] And someone who piles in for six months or even a year or even three years, and then disappears again, that actually. They are a, they’re a speck on a, on a really significant timeline and they could do more damage than good. And I think that works for militaries as well. And it works not just in change programmes.
[00:33:57] It works in Manning. It works in [00:34:00] capability development. It works in long-term planning. It works in headquarters that actually, when you get the right people, in the right spot who are actually delivering stuff. The one thing you want to do is retain them there, but for, but for reasons, good reasons, historical reasons about how we reward people.
[00:34:20] We can’t let those people stay in the same place. So, you know, the commanding officer of a warship in the UK, it really needs to take off a few things that need to be worked up. They need to do maintenance period and they need to deploy. And once that’s done the need to get out, and none of that is about command.
[00:34:36] None of that is actually about caring and maintaining and developing your unit. You know, company commander can be an absolutely brilliant company commander. You want to keep them forever. Right. But if they’re a really good company commander, the one thing you’re not going to do is keep them there forever because you want them to move on.
[00:34:51] They’ve ticked in and done that box and it does a disservice to everyone. So in many ways, I think we have slightly got this, the wrong way [00:35:00] round in that provided we can keep people in the right place and find different ways to reward them. I know, you know, there’s Project Castle, which, you know, might try and get to this, but, you know, we need to find other ways of rewarding people and keeping them in the same position because that continuity is really, really important in change programmes, but also in all our business as usual.
[00:35:23] Frosty: [00:35:23] So recently you discussed innovation fatigue in your podcast series, something you didn’t discuss in that series is where that fatigue might sit. You could have a guess and there’s a level of disbelief or confusion internally within Defence, especially as we’re running this podcast series with you on this language of change.
[00:35:44] But what’s your view. And could you expand on how wider industry and academia views the military when we have more press releases and speeches that explain the virtues of innovation and how we can leverage or utilise new changes to be [00:36:00] decisive.
[00:36:01]Peter: [00:36:01] When innovation came about as a buzz word for the British military and followed about the, the U S had started talking about it maybe a year beforehand. Yeah. And suddenly this became the one thing that was going to be the cure all. And I think there were some, some people who sat at the top of the single services who recognized that innovation was going to be where money was sewn.
[00:36:26] And so individual single service commands set up innovation hubs. Very few of them had anything to do with innovation as a definition at all. And in fact, when I was at a rather wonderful seminar with a bunch of industry and and some senior military from across the three services you know one of the industry team turned around and said, you know I just don’t think that we’re talking the same language.
[00:36:49] Can you just define to me what innovation means? And of course the military defined innovation as a sort of, you know, change and, and that was about it. And he was dressed up in different language, but [00:37:00] it wasn’t really innovation as industry understood it. And there was this sort of. Gasp of surprise from the industry participants who went.
[00:37:07] Ah, okay. Well, I, you know, that sort of explains it, you know, so we’re just talking about change, then we get that. So then we can have a decent conversation. I, I guess a lot of people like me, as soon as you have that realisation was bored. We get bored by the language because it’s dressing something up to be something it isn’t, it, it can’t be honest about the conversation. There’s nothing wrong with things not being innovative. But still being good. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s great. But it would allow us to focus on innovations that are genuinely innovations that are genuinely going to allow money to be focused in that area, but to do all these things and dress them up as innovation have innovation teams that aren’t generally doing innovation has led the, the, just the very word of innovation to become quite toxic.
[00:37:56] And I think we’ve, you know, there’s going to be a whole generation of [00:38:00] military officers who exist and, and innovation is going to be a poisonous word for them for at least the next 20 years in the military. I mean, we’ve, we’ve just turned off a whole generation of people to this idea of innovation, even where we mean it in the right way.
[00:38:14] And I think that’s, you know, that’s one of his problems with language is we have to be really careful about how we use it. And I think innovation is, is one of those excellent examples over how to do it badly.
[00:38:26]Frosty: [00:38:26] People, ideas, technology in that order as John Boyd said, when it comes to the language of change, do you think that we’ve got the balance right.
[00:38:34]Peter: [00:38:34] I sort of disagree with Boyd on this. I think for militaries, it shouldn’t be people, ideas, technology. I think it should be ideas, people, technology and that’s not a very popular view because we like to put people upfront really front and center, at least in language, but this is the military we’re talking about. And at the end of the day, what we’re about is death and destruction and people are resourced that we are [00:39:00] prepared to see used up the reality of conflict. Our people are resourced, they die, they get injured, they move on. They’re not there forever. And if people are also required to follow orders to do. What civilians would think is the unthinkable. You know, we’re asking 19 year olds to stick a bayonet on at the end of their rifle to stand up and walk towards a machine gun. You know, these are the things we’re asking people to do.
[00:39:26] And in that I think the ideas are the critical parts. The ideas, which then galvanize the people, the levy or mass Napoleon was a master at this, and then the technology, which is subservient to both of those, it, it delivers the ideas and enables the people that sit behind it. So I think it’s the other way around from that are ideas and the critical part you pulled together, what you want to do with the reality of what you have to do it.
[00:39:53] And. Yeah. Do we get that right? Absolutely not. But are we alone in that? I don’t think we are either. I think there are, [00:40:00] there are lots of states or lots of militaries that gets this mixed up really badly about not just people, ideas and technology or ideas, people and technology, not just about the order but also what’s in there.
[00:40:12] I think, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of confusion about, about what sits in those three. Boyd to me identifies a great mix, but there are others you could put in there, right?
[00:40:22] Frosty: [00:40:22] I mean, as you talk about I’m wondering what, you know, when he says ideas, does he mean, or do, do we mean ideas as in ideals and almost like the moral component of fighting power?
[00:40:33] Or are we talking concepts?
[00:40:36]Peter: [00:40:36] Yeah, I, this is, this is a mix and it’s yeah, yeah. Yeah, because I think Boyd was focused mainly on, on the operations and the planning. I think this is about, you know, the concept of operation, the I, the ideas of doing it, but you’re right. You know, this is, you know, the values as well.
[00:40:51] And, you know, to the values, attract the people. Is it about the ethics and the morals, you know, are they, how do they feed through to the people? And then how does technology enable those [00:41:00] things together? I mean, it is, it, it is a natural flow, but to me, I would reverse those first two it’s ideas, people and technology.
[00:41:06] And I will stand up and say, I think John Boyd is wrong. Send in the hate mail.
[00:41:11] Frosty: [00:41:11] I’ll have it redirected to you whenever it arrives. No problem. The headline from this podcast, John Boyd is wrong.
[00:41:19]Peter: [00:41:19] There we go.
[00:41:20] Frosty: [00:41:20] Send your answers on a postcard. We’ve we’ve talked about, yeah, we’ve talked all the way through this, about how this pace of change isn’t necessarily something new. And the organisation said right at the start, you know, we are used to chaos now. So I suppose what I want to ask you is, you know, Are we getting everything that we need out of people who are used to chaos?
[00:41:46] Is there a way that we can do a little bit more that allows us to, to, to get some more, to get more of a product out of people who are willing to change all the time?
[00:41:56]Peter: [00:41:56] I mean, to me it strikes me that this is absolutely [00:42:00] related to, to that John Boyd comment about ideas and people, the idea that warfare and the battlefield is chaotic is not new. Right. I mean, you know, Thucydides wrote about it, you know Sun Tzu you know, touched on it.
[00:42:17] The battlefield is chaos and in a sort of romanticized understanding of post Napoleonic warfare the idea behind armies and military leaders is they can bring some kind of order to the chaos. That’s what they do. They arrive, they provide stability. They set the ship on a level field and, and, you know, and they then commence operations to go and, you know, win whatever they have to win.
[00:42:44] And, and. Lots of our military operations, particularly in the 20th and 21st century have been about that sort of change is that there is chaos. We aim to send the military end to [00:43:00] provide stability. They go in, they fight the initial action. They calm it down. And then, you know, whether they nation build or something else, this is what we believe that they do.
[00:43:08] But the reality, and I think, you know, for you and others, you’ve served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, and goodness knows where else is that the fact that the army goes in or land forces go in doesn’t stop the battlefield or the environment from being chaotic even after they’ve arrived. Right. In indeed in some cases it becomes even more chaotic.
[00:43:31] So. It’s about how we get people to understand that chaos. Do we want people to go in there, the central idea that they arrived there to provide structure and order? Is that the role of militaries, you know, as in, you know, you’re going into Haiti or you’re going into Montserrat or wherever it is to provide disaster relief, you go in, you put your ship alongside you land your aircraft, you [00:44:00] establish your perimeter.
[00:44:01] You know, you start handing out aid, you do your surveys, you grow infrastructure project, you know, that sort of order. Is that the sort of thing or. Do we want to grow people who go in and go, okay, this is utterly chaotic. But I can understand how I can achieve our ends in this and that is within this chaos it allows me the freedom to go and do to pay off this warlord, to go and attack that person that solves the problem that we have as a national policy objective. And I think that’s the difference. It’s it’s going back to that idea. First of how do we understand the problem , how do we understand the environment and what we want our people to be able to do?
[00:44:41] That’s not just about being flexible and adaptable. It’s about a sort of philosophy. It’s about a theology of, we want how we want our military to be able to operate in this chaotic world.
[00:44:53] Frosty: [00:44:53] Well, I suppose we want them to be able to do, to do both, to be comfortable in that chaos, but then also when, [00:45:00] when required provide structure,
[00:45:03] Peter: [00:45:03] It’s hard to think of it, isn’t it?
[00:45:05] I mean, I think in an ideal world, you absolutely want to provide structure. I’m not sure what we think the scale of the problem is that the UK military can provide structure to now. I mean, I, you know, and this is G this is, you know, we’ve got to have this generally honest, honest discussion. Because we can’t just, you know, glibly go around saying, you know, well, you know, we can, we can go into Iraq and provide structure.
[00:45:26] Now we can go into Basra and provide structure. No, We can go into Helmand province and provide structure, no. So where can we go and, and provide structure? Is it Sierra Leone? Is that it? Should that be the limit of our ambition where we do it? Should it be about disaster relief? Cause I can’t see deploying the British army to Haiti after disaster, that it could provide sufficient structure that that would underpin you know humanitarian assistance, disaster response, where U S South Comd Southern command really had problems doing the same thing with all the resources they had available.
[00:45:56] I think we need to be quite honest about this, you know, where is it [00:46:00] that we think we could provide the structure that we think is in keeping with our mass.
[00:46:07] Frosty: [00:46:07] And well, so it’s interesting that you, you link it to mass because I think you can, you could de-link it from that. And I want to say mass, the size of the force that’s trying mass, I feel like is one of those buzz words that, that generals use or but, but can you de-link it from, from the size because it’s a smaller country can be more complex and more chaotic than a larger one, potentially for various different reasons, but could it be the stability that we can provide is a conceptual stability as in an ability to plan an ability to create small areas of stability within something, for example, the British military leaning into help other government departments with planning COVID responses. Not just during the response to COVID-19 we provided planning assistance during the 2012 Olympics, we regularly do it for all sorts of internal disaster relief.
[00:46:57] Isn’t the right word, is it? But you know, large internal events [00:47:00] or large UK based events where you, the military provide planners to, to add stability to people. You don’t normally plan stuff. So what I’m saying is that maybe even a small, a smaller military, you can still provide a useful structure to larger places.
[00:47:19] Peter: [00:47:19] Yeah. I don’t think you’re wrong now. I think, you know, you absolutely can, but we just need to be realistic about what that is. Yeah. And I think the problem is that sometimes we’re not, we have this great can-do attitude, which says, yeah, we’ll go out and do that. No problem. We can, we can, you know, bring disaster relief to Montserrat and we can cure everything.
[00:47:35] And, you know, and we can’t, it’s really difficult. And yet we can do some things that are amazing. So, you know, there was that great TV show about one of the battery type 22 frigates that went out to the Indian Ocean after a hurricane had hit and they went to an Island and he saw this, you know, this doctor who went ashore and just looked at this and was very honest with the camera. And she said, you know, we are [00:48:00] not going to be able to do anything here. You know, the size and scale of this problem is just, it’s just huge. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to touch this, but the ships company went and they sorted one hospital.
[00:48:11] They, they dug it out. They did the drainage, they set up a clinic. They, you know, they brought in food, they did fresh water, all the stuff that you would expect at a very small level but that grew and that, that bringing structure to one small, very micro area had really significant impacts for the surrounding area because it bought stability and structure.
[00:48:33] And then you had governance that came in around it. And the local seniors of the villages came in, took over. And at the end of it, you know, this doctor went away and it was already a revealing I still remember it now, you know, that this doctor turned around and goes, you know, genuinely, I never thought that was possible.
[00:48:46] I thought we were, we, we couldn’t do it. So I do think we can do it, but we just need to be realistic about what we’re offering and not do the, we can solve all the world’s problems because, you know, as a medium-sized [00:49:00] power, our footprint is still is today pretty small.
[00:49:05]Frosty: [00:49:05] And I think on that bombshell, we will bring the interview to a close.
[00:49:10] Fantastic
[00:49:11]This podcast series is sponsored by the British Army Innovation Team. This team is set up to encourage and facilitate innovation across the Army and supports wider Defence initiatives too. One of their, projects, The Army BattleLab, is due to open this year in the South West of England. If you would like further information about this project, why not get in touch directly with the team via the show notes?