A different vantage point today for the ever-excellent @RoyalAirForce flypast, after Trooping the Colour.

The December 2024 assault near Lyptsi by the Khartia Brigade was an impressive operation, but only the first stage was unmanned. On the first day, Khartia employed UGVs and UAVs to inflict casualties (mostly caused by Mavic drops) on Russian forces to set conditions for an assault. The second day involved a company-size mechanized assault with infantry who dismounted from BMP-1TS and M113 APCs. Drones did not seize or hold terrain, infantry did. youtube.com/watch?v=Ql47h1UP…

This week the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. British researchers were studying it. British companies were testing it. British hospitals were piloting it. Not any more. This isn't an AI story. It's the story of every industry we used to lead. Britain has some of the best AI talent in the world. DeepMind was built here. Our AI Safety Institute writes the rules other countries follow. We have the researchers, the universities, the standards. What we don't have is the power stations to run the data centres, the planning system to build them, or the industrial base to make the chips. So the work happens here and the value lands somewhere else. We invent. Others build. Others decide. Then we read about it on Saturday morning. Same story as the kit our soldiers don't have. Same story as the factories we used to. I spent nine months in government making this argument inside the room. I'll make it louder from outside.

‘At pace’ klaxon. 🚨

Thoughts for @SkyNews. Our say/do gap manifests in ambitions for European leadership where we can still make a contribution, but currently not at the scale we have promised.

There are days when I miss working at the Ministry of Defence. And then there are days like today...

I was asked earlier on the BBC why other NATO countries have avoided DIP-like crises. Part of the answer is the large and growing share of spending taken up by nuclear deterrent & adjacent areas, leaving less for conventional forces. That is partly why German conventional spending will be around double UK spending, remarkably, by the end of the decade. Part of the answer is that other countries are willing to allocate amuch higher share of national output to defence. Poland & Baltics nudging 5% of GDP. Healey's letter points out today that UK would be at 2.68% of GDP by 2030 on the DIP settlement he was given. But more important than this is the gap between spending and military commitments: the UK spends more (it is third highest spender in NATO in absolute terms) but also commits considerably more, leaving a wide and in recent years growing chasm between promises & delivery.

UK defence secretary John Healey’s resignation letter is devastating for Keir Starmer He accuses the PM of being “unable” (!!) and the Treasury “unwilling” to “commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats” Healey reveals he was first told about the new lower DIP settlement figure of £13.5bn (first reported by FT) on Monday - ahead of PM wanting to announce it this week UK must commit to “a headmark date for 3% of GDP on defence in 2030”, Healey declares

The credibility gap between the rhetoric on urgency/need and the volume/rate of any increase in defence spending.

A few thoughts on Healey's departure. At the end of the day, the root cause is a failed defence review process. The review proposed things on the basis that spending would rise to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, a relatively modest pace of growth that was & is incompatible with everything the UK wants to do—GCAP, AUKUS, a strategic reserve corps for NATO on land, carrier strike & more munitions/readiness. The gov't was unwilling either to make choices among these, which would have been politically and diplomatically painful, or to spend *significantly* more in the short & medium term, instead pointing to non-credible commitments out into the mid-2030s. There was and is no credible path to the 3.5% of GDP target by 2035 that the PM publicly agreed at the Hague last year. Now the UK is going to go into the Ankara summit in a weak position, with a teetering government, and with a likely successor to Starmer who is no more likely to support higher defence spending, all with predictable consequences for the US-UK relationship.

Good that Freuding makes clear this is a capability timeline, but also important to specify what sort & scale of attack this assessment assumes. '“2029 is not a German timeline. It’s NATO-agreed intelligence,” Freuding said. “All 32 NATO partners agree that Russia might have the capability to invade a NATO partner country in 2029.”' politico.eu/article/we-must-…

Lots of discussion in recent weeks about how to fund the (much-delayed!) Defence Investment Plan. While this is important, it is only the first step in the longer-term and much larger defence spending increase this government has committed to. A short thread:

My colleagues model the growing spread and depth of Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. economist.com/interactive/eu…