Speeches by Carns.

“We are always trying to prevent conflict—that is primarily what defence does—but we have to be prepared if conflict were to break out. When we move from, in some cases, the previous 20 years of wars of choice to wars of necessity, there is a bigger bill when it comes to some of the capabilities we need to field. That i…”

“We are working with the CMCC on the piece around Gaza, where we have females there providing support and understanding. They are the interface between the military, civil society and, indeed, the charitable organisations. I have a whole list of countries that we are working in, including technical support to Brunei on …”

“It is really important that we have senior women throughout our civil service within the Ministry of Defence, and within the Ministry of Defence serving population. Earlier, I mentioned the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. We have some really senior and super-effective women in the Army, Navy and Air Force, and long ma…”

“I can start. The best way to prepare for and prevent conflict is to be ready for one. It sounds quite counterintuitive, but a strong defence reduces the likelihood of conflict. We could argue that the way in which the withdrawal from Afghanistan was conducted sent a signal to the world that the west was weak and, along…”

“There are benefits of equality, yes, but primarily performance. There is also a communications issue here, where the more women you have in these places, the more hope you give to a whole swathe of people who look up, emulate, and realise that they can achieve their ambitions. I fully support it. If there were more wom…”

“It is probably worth while talking about what we have in the UN from our perspective. We have 23 military staff officers to the UN peacekeeping abroad, which is Cyprus, Somalia, Lebanon, South Sudan and the DRC. We also hold some critical positions in those countries—for example, the UK military staff officer and gende…”

“Gunner Jaysley Beck.”

“Absolutely, and this is where we had all the NATO female leaders come together. The UK is leading in some of this space, but we are not ahead in everything. Some of the Nordic countries have a lead on us, and we are learning this collaborative approach to learning best practice in this area. We need to get to a space w…”

“The shorter the timelines, the more time we spend preparing the work to get evidence rather than delivering. There is maybe a discussion that we could balance this out. In particular, if we can get our methodology of measuring effect up and running, it will become far easier for you to hold us to account.”

“When I was the Minister for Veterans and People, I sat down with various different groups, one of which was Women in Defence. We would take a plethora of all different ranks from very senior down to the other ranks, and we would just hear their experiences. Some of those were negative; the majority were positive. The k…”

“We have a zero-tolerance policy which runs internally across all our military. It is primarily against any unacceptable sexual behaviour and it is dealt with at the most severe level. A lot of those changes came in after the Gunner Jaysley Beck case. We work with other countries to make sure they have a similar policy.…”

“In the military or internationally?”

“It comes along with the breakdown of national and human norms. Conflict desensitises people to the most extremes and, as a result, societal norms break down.”

“Absolutely. It is women, peace and security that is docked in. We call it human security in the military and part of that is the women, peace and security piece.”

“We can give you a list. It goes back to the statistics we talked about earlier. In some past cases, we have done a lot of work but we failed to capture the exact impacts of it. It is quite difficult to do in some cases, but we could make a better effort at doing so. My commitment to you today is that we will take it aw…”

“The financial mechanism as a measure of effect would give you a false reading. In a lot of programmes that we run, we train up a swathe of people and expect them to take it on through the train-the-trainer package. I would not want to speak for Minister Elmore, but I have a feeling we would welcome work on how we measu…”

“They are part of defence.”

“There is also a slight difference—in some but not all cases—in the way the different Departments deliver, which may be through a charity or a second or third-order connection, whereas ours is often our own people delivering in conjunction with a host nation, an ally or a partner, which means it is easier for us, perhap…”

“On the national action plan, you are working in conjunction with the FCDO. This is done at an official level, with officials at every level. It is well-connected. The delivery mechanisms are sometimes different. I do not want to go over old ground, but we need to work collectively to measure the effectiveness of our pr…”

“From my perspective, internally within defence, we have our permanent joint headquarters and human security. We have the same in our single services. That trickles all the way down to a relatively low level in the commands. We have taken this really seriously. We have three dedicated policy teams at the strategic level…”