Speeches by Scrogham.

“Briefly, professor, can you go back to what you said about our capabilities underwater, specifically for mine hunting? That was really interesting, and I am interested to know if you think that that is financed well enough. I recently visited the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. Of the two ROVs that they have for their capabi…”

“We found one!”

“Professor and Commodore, are there any wider challenges to delivering this programme that you are aware of?”

“Do you think that an AUKUS visa would make that easier for you?”

“That tells me almost everything I need to know. Would you like to elaborate?”

“I have a quick question for Brett. As a small business owner engaged in delivering underwater capability, what do you see as the greatest challenges you face at the moment?”

“No, that was not rambling at all. Can we ask about security clearances for your staff when you are doing things in defence?”

“Moving on to that, which countries are excelling or doing better than the UK when it comes to research, testing and production?”

“Let us return to the original question: what are their limitations and what are they best suited for?”

“Thank you. Let me move on to autonomous vehicles, which we have talked about an awful lot. We have talked about submarines and the need for more of them. You won’t get any arguments from me on that, because I certainly think we need more of them, but when we are advancing so far into everybody adopting underwater unman…”

“I would like to ask Sir Hew first on this one. Do you think that the UK’s posture on deterrence needs to change in the light of shifting ways of warfare?”

“If we are going to go down that line, I should put on record that my son is a volunteer in the cadet force. We are not advocating for them to be paid.”

“When we visited Finland, we looked at their whole-of-society approach, which is utterly different.”

“I am from Barrow-in-Furness, so we understand the deterrent very well. Do you think that the rest of society understands the importance?”

“Do you think there was a whole-of-society response?”

“Last year’s SDR talked about a whole-of-society approach to bolster the UK’s resilience. How will moving in that way have an impact on the challenges we face for future warfare?”

“Does the public understand enough about what is happening in the grey zone, about deterrence and about what we need to spend on defence for us to justify that politically?”

“And on developing deterrence itself?”

“What impact will the failure of support for the international non-proliferation agreements have on this, such as the expiration of the New START agreement?”

“We have seen an escalation in attacks in the grey zone over recent years; we talk about cyber-attacks and, again, I would suggest that we do not talk about that enough publicly. People might see a delay to their shopping from Marks and Spencer but not understand the implications of those attacks on our supply chain. I …”