Speeches by Thomas.

“You had a meeting with the Prime Minister before Christmas, the details of which are classified. You define one of your roles as advising Ministers, including the Prime Minister. Do you have the sense that current Government are going to fund defence fully enough for us to be ready for full-scale combat in the next few…”

“Brakestop sounds really successful, and I am sure you will be able to bring your experience from Kindred into your new role with much success. What is your view on the idea, which seems prevalent in the MoD, that it is not a concern that we would currently be unable to operate in any peer-on-peer war and that we would …”

“Awesome. General, where do you personally sit—or, if you are not able to comment on that, what are your orders—on this: do we need to be ready for how war is fought today, or do we accept that we are not ready for war today because we are going to invest in what we think it might look like in five years’ time?”

“Can you give us a very basic definition of what segmentation is in this context?”

“Do you think these programmes are resourced well enough?”

“When you say you are making sure that they are resourced well enough, does that mean, “Yes, they are resourced well enough”?”

“To respond to this idea that we are taking drones as seriously as the Germans, in hard terms Germany will be sending troops out to Lithuania with €350 million-worth of one-way effectors; we will not be doing that with our troops in Estonia any time soon. Our troops in Estonia do not have that capability. In terms of ac…”

“General Reilly, “Learn the lessons from Ukraine” is probably the most popular catchphrase among Defence Ministers across Europe. You know them better than most: Kindred, as this Committee said when we visited DE&S last year, is one of the most awe-inspiring and successful British programmes in the last several decades,…”

“You have a slightly more heavily regulated domestic programme to look after. I don’t think that it is policy, but we hear officials and serving uniformed folks very often saying, “We don’t want to make the mistake of preparing for war today, because we don’t know what war tomorrow will look like.” While that may sound …”

“I want to place on the record my immense thanks to staff at Derriford hospital in Plymouth, who are working tirelessly to keep people safe during the busiest winter yet. I am sure that the Secretary of State will want to join me in giving those thanks. The south-west has seen a 93% increase on last year in the number o…”

“Britain’s future security depends on developing, testing and, crucially, adopting uncrewed systems quickly and safely, but the regulation is immensely complex. It spans many Departments, including the Ministry of Defence, the Department for Transport and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The regula…”

“4. What steps his Department is taking to increase the speed of the development and adoption of uncrewed defence systems.”

“To scrap the Ajax programme completely would be a very bold move, considering that the UK has sunk over £6 billion into it and it is nine years late. The vehicle is still making soldiers ill every time they get in it, even though Ministers both current and former have been repeatedly briefed that it is good to go. It i…”

“It goes to something in NAD Group and then down to UKDI as part of NAD Group. That is clear. Who is going to run UKDI?”

“It travels from frontline command, from MSHQ to NAD Group and then down to UKDI.”

“It is not MSHQ.”

“Given the time, I want to ask some quickfire questions. We are talking about innovation and pillar 2. In the context of UK MoD, UK Defence Innovation is part of the defence reform. Where does and will UK Defence Innovation get its demand signal from? How does it understand what problems it needs to solve?”

“We are saying the same thing, Minister.”

“I buy what you have just said, but it is worth noting that, from where the conversation on pillar 2 was a year and a half or two years ago, we are now in a space where we are talking about stuff being able to use similar software and talk to each other. We are talking about that being the output for pillar 2, which is …”

“I look forward to hearing from Sir Chris, but what you said is interesting. It is the Government of the day who are held accountable, but, in 10 years’ time, the Government of the day here and anywhere else will be being, as you say, held accountable for stuff that either is or is not happening now. That is the way of …”