Britain Isn't Ready For A Real War - Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE

26:54But if you look at our country, everything is underfunded. We're in huge amounts of debt. Quite frankly, are we even going to be able to service that debt? I mean, there's a discussion around that. Can we really afford to fund the armed forces more from 2.8 to 3.5? Isn't that fundamentally unrealistic when you look at the current economic climate? Well, it is. No, I don't think so. Absolutely not. I think it is the number one priority. Other things have got to give. We know that we've got a lot of net zero projects, which, yeah, I'm as keen as the next person almost on climate change. But I don't see why we're spending billions on that when we haven't got our fundamentals like defense and security pointed out.

27:43And the fact that when it came to try and bridge that 28 billion gap that we've been talked about, defense, first of all, was told you find 10 billion. And to find 10 billion out of a 60 billion annual spend is challenging. I didn't hear the welfare budget, which is six times the amount being asked to save any money. So if we can't get five billion out of the welfare budget, then, yeah, I think we need to get somebody in who can do it. So it's about priorities. And I think this funding has to be. And I suppose like most taxpayers, I don't want to pay any more tax. But quite frankly, if it's the difference between the men and women in the British army getting the right drone or not, then I'm happy to do that.

28:35Although I'm sure a lot of others wouldn't. I think there is definitely the money there. The other element to it, of course, we keep hearing about growth. Now, one of the great industries in Britain is its defence industry. And if we spend our money there, that will generate growth. We just look at the Germans and the new British tank is being built by a German company. I mean, that must be bonkers. But having said that, some of the British companies have the potential to do stuff all over Europe. Now, I know there are a few issues with the EU and Brexit and all the rest of it, but the fact we're making summaries for the Americans and the Australians, I mean, there is a real opportunity.

29:18Now, one is hoping that with Andy Burnham coming in as Prime Minister, we don't swing too far to the left, who traditionally have not seen the defence industry as an area they want to go to growth. But at the moment, it is a bit of a golden goose for Britain. And if we spend our money on defence, it should increase the money within the government. and if we make sure that we sell our capabilities appropriately again. So, yeah, I think whatever else, we have got to fund the fence first, whatever that means to other projects, or even if that means increase in tax.

29:59Francis Foster:That's why your point about net zero is so important, because if you have the highest industrial electricity prices in a developed world, it's kind of hard to manufacture anything, right? I'm just not an expert, but that seems reasonable to me. But I wanted to ask you about the technological side of things as they're developing. You've talked a number of times already about what's happening in Ukraine, drone warfare in particular. And if anyone's been paying any attention at all, and I obviously have family in the region, even in this four-year period, you've seen the technological transformation of the conflict.

30:33Francis Foster:I mean, it's a different war to what it was four years ago, completely. And one of the reasons the high casualty numbers on the Russian side, as you say, Russians are sending the troops in carelessly, but also they're being taken out by drones. I mean, you see videos of people, literally individual soldiers being hunted down. It's actually terrifying to think about being on the ground in that kind of environment. But what is happening with the technological side of warfare at the moment in your assessment? Well, I think we all talk about drones. I had an experience of drones myself. I was, for two years between 2015 and 2017, I was the Peshmerga's chemical weapons advisor, the Peshmerga of the Iraqi military who were fighting ISIS.

31:17And I remember we were near Mosul one day in, I think it was April 2016, and this ISIS drone flew over. And you could see it with a hand grenade on, and they were trying to drop it on us. We fired thousands of rounds of ammunition and didn't hit it. Anyway, the thing couldn't drop its thing. But that was 11 years ago, or 10 years ago. You wind forward to now and what we're seeing, and what has really kept Ukraine actually in the game is the way that they have developed drone technology to an area where I found it really significant. When Iran started firing drones and missiles at the Arab states, Zelensky and the Ukrainians were over there showing them how to defend against them, selling them Ukraine drones.

32:10Ukraine now makes 50 % more drones than it needs, which is unbelievable. Ukraine has developed its own cruise missiles. You might have heard of the Flamingo, which has a range of over 1 ,000 kilometers, a warhead of about 50 to 100 kilograms, not dissimilar from a Tomahawk cruise missile. Oh, by the way, it costs$500 ,000, not$10.5 million. And when you can do that sort of stuff... Now, I'm sure people might argue that a cruise missile is more effective than a Flamingo missile, but 10 Flamingo missiles... It's a bit like when I talk about tanks in the Second World War. There's a great scene where Patton, who was commanding the Allied forces at Salerno in Italy, came up against the German general whose name escapes me.

33:00The German general said, you know, Patton, you're struggling, aren't you? You're losing 10 Shermans for every one of my tigers. Patton said, no, I'm not struggling. I've got so many more Shermans than your tigers that ultimately we will win, which of course they did. So it goes back to my point about flamingos. The way, at the moment, Ukraine is using drones, they're just swamping, absolutely swamping. And what is brilliant, again, without wanting to go too much detail, they're also tying drones to weather balloons that fly at 10 ,000 feet, 10 ,000 kilometers, yeah, 10 ,000 feet. And these drones are above the range of most of the Russian air defense, except the S-300s and S-400s.

33:48These drones electronically look like big Reaper drones or small aircraft. So, Russia is firing these$5 million missiles from S-300 or S-400 at a balloon. And while they're firing at a balloon, the real drones are sort of sneaking through, which is why Ukraine has pretty much destroyed 50%, I think it is, of the Russian oil industry. But on the technical side...

34:14Francis Foster:The refining side of it, not the entire industry refining. Sorry, you're right, the petrol. But when you come to the evolution of drones, when it first started, it was all about the electromagnetic spectrum. If you could control that, you could control the battlefield. Then we saw fiber optic drones, which seemed bonkers. I remember the first Gulf War, the Iraqis fired a lot of anti-tank guided weapons at us. And the whole battlefield was strewn with these sort of cables, which were doing these anti-tank guided weapons. And then we overcame that. So now, Ukraine is the use of AI and the use of mother drones that fly lots of smaller drones, thousands of kilometers, and then through AI, they light up and then hit targets.

35:05Now, this is something completely unenvisaged four or five years ago. How can such a small military like the Ukrainians be defeating the Great Red Army, as it were, because of innovation. And the other element to this is training. The other reason the Russians are losing so many people, an infantry guy recruit conscript is getting about a week's training. A lot of them don't even know how to clean their rifles. And when you've got a rifle, once you've fired a couple of hundred rounds through it, it clogs up with carbon and you can't use it. So these guys, I mean, if they had a couple of hundred rounds to use.

35:44So again, but that sort of perpetuates through the whole thing. You've got these Ukrainian drone units, a lot of them sitting back, a lot of them with very untraditional military people in there. We go back to the whole diversity issue and all the rest of it. If you can fly a drone, then it doesn't matter. Even if you've only got one arm or one leg or whatever, you can do it and and i think i'm actually in recent writing i've been saying to the british military we don't all need to be able to lift heavy weights and run fast you know that's we

36:20Francis Foster:need a few of them yeah but the rest need to be good at call of duty right entirely entirely and i in the video i made for the telegraph about challenger 3 you've got a sort of playstation hand stick that um i mean luckily because it wasn't too different from challenger 2 that i last fired about 10 years ago, it took me about two or three minutes to familiarize and then in the simulator to get a first round hit. But actually, had you been a kid who PlayStation, you would have just got in there and you wouldn't even need any training at all. You know, it says, blaze, line, fire. I mean, dead ease.

36:58Yeah.

36:58Francis Foster:And I imagine AI is going to be another huge area where, like, if this war keeps going in another four years, there might not be any humans on the battlefield. Perhaps exaggerating, but you know what I'm getting at. Yeah. I mean, I think, as I talk about in the last chapter, where we're going, it's about autonomy, autonomous vehicles, land, sea, and air. We still need the human in the loop. And certainly the way we've visited with tanks, you'll have one Challenger 3 or one Abrams or whatever, but then tethered to it will be hundreds of autonomous vehicles. and that creates the combat power. So, although at the beginning I've decried the fact we're only getting 148 Challenger 3s, if we have several thousand drones that can be controlled and manipulated by the Challenger 3s, then we can get there.

37:48And I sort of use Ajax, the recce vehicle, as an explainer. All throughout my military career, our recce vehicle was something, the CVRT, the Scimitar. A fairly small, wrecky vehicle with a few sensors, but a troop, three or four scimitres, would cover a frontage of about three kilometres. Now, one Ajax with its digital turret, its sensors and its drones, one troop of three or four Ajax will cover 60 or 70 kilometres. So you've got a massive increase in capability there. So I think autonomous, the other element, the other human you need in the loop, ground. So you'll hear people saying holding ground, you still need something physical there.

38:35And it's about endurance. I mean, things are getting better. One of my reasons for saying that the tank will endure, I've been on operations in tanks where we haven't refueled or anything or stopped for 48 hours. Now, at the moment, we don't have drones that have that endurance. I'm sure we will do. And we don't have other capabilities. So once you've held ground, you still need humans there. But I think autonomy is exactly where it is going. And AI will enable it. But I'm no great expert on AI and all the highly technical things. And I'm sure there will be some, I hate to say nerd or whatever the politically correct term is, sat in the back with his computer that can probably do a heck of a lot more damage than I could in my tank.

39:25But again, AI is... Anybody who's used AI will just see the power of it. I'm a writer. I write books. I try and not go near AI at all anyway. But very occasionally, in fact, I had to write a eulogy for an uncle of mine who I didn't really know, had served in the military for 40 years in a regiment that I didn't really know. And I reached out to his regiment and said, tell me about him. and I'd only met him once in my life, bizarrely. And I got 400 pages of stuff. And I had to do the eulogy in like two days' time. And I just went, right, chat GPT, give me a 15-minute eulogy of all this stuff. And it did.

40:07And it was brilliant. And I suppose even more, after I gave the eulogy, a number of people, some generals and others who served with him said, Hamish you got him absolutely right I can't believe you only met him once and I said well what people told me but it was it was AI.

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41:40There's a lot of people going to be listening to Hamish, you're wondering, what is the existential threat that Russia poses to the UK? Because there have been talks about, I think it's Russian boats in British waters, etc., etc., drones. What's the risk? I think that is a great question. And what would I would say? I'm not sure it's existential, but it is certainly something that we need to face up against. Now, I live near Salisbury, and on the 4th of March 2018, we had a chemical attack, Novichok, in Salisbury. Sergei Skripal, a double agent, survived. Unfortunately, an innocent civilian, Dawn Sturgis, died.

42:27But that type of hybrid asymmetric warfare is at the moment that we need to be most concerned about by the Russians. We are not going to see Russian paratroopers landing in the mail. We are not going to see T-90s driving up Constitution Hill. But what we know, or what the Security Service tell us, and I have no reason to doubt them, is that all the other attacks that are happening and the tests, and you may have seen in the press last week, the American government saying that the Russians were going to attack Poland or one of the Baltic states to test NATO. to test us out. So when it comes to a threat, one doesn't see that the current Russian military and the position it's in can really do much more than it's doing at the moment.

43:19But the tip of the Russian spear is not the Russian ground forces. The Air Force doesn't really exist and the Navy doesn't really exist. It's everything else. What the Russians are really good at is the espionage, is the asymmetric warfare, the cyber. And that is the big threat to us. That's what we must be resilient against. And I mentioned the chemical attacks because, again, it's an area of my expertise that I dealt with. I commanded the UK's cyber and NATO's defense forces. So I saw it firsthand and I saw it with the Peshmerga, with ISIS. And I think not a lot of people know, it hasn't been widely reported, though I've written about it quite a lot.

44:03Russia is using industrial amounts of chemical weapons on the front line in Ukraine. Has been for a couple of years. Admittedly, it's something called chloropicrin, which was one of the first chemical weapons used in the First World War. Most people were known as CS gas, a riot control agent. But it is illegal under the Chemical Weapons Convention and has a similar effect. If you don't have a gas mask respirator, anybody who's had any CS gas will know how really unpleasant it is. And what the Russians were doing is firing it into trenches. People were getting out and getting shot, and they were making a bit of ground.

44:38Then, through a whole host of various avenues, actually the British, funded by others, gave gas masks to every Ukraine soldier. So then it didn't become an issue. But that's with something like Clara Pickering. So, what am I concerned about if they escalated? Something like the Novichok program that we saw in Salisbury. Now, if chloropicrin is toxicity one, Novichok is 40 ,000, 50 ,000. So, it's on a slightly different scale. So, I think when it comes to what is the threat from Russia, it is those threats, the asymmetric and the hybrid, that we need to. And we know the Russians will test all the time.

45:20And the Russian secret services, you know, GRU, etc., are still pretty good and still all over the place. And they are the ones that we must protect against, certainly from the home base. And I expect it's the same throughout Europe and, you know, to a slightly lesser extent, the US as well. Because what's really fascinating, and you can talk about this, obviously, with your background in chemical warfare, is the idea of a dirty bomb. And what are the risks to the UK from that type of warfare? Whether it's, I doubt it would be the Russians, but it might be a terrorist organization or just a lone terrorist.

45:59Well, I think we sort of put them all together, CBRN, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear. I think the dirty bomb is the radiological piece. I actually think it's a bit of a chimera, as it were. It's never been used. It's never been successful. Because, actually, radiation is... One of the good things about radiation is it's very easy to detect. I mean, I have been involved, and no secret at all, in helping the Ukrainians secure their nuclear power stations because there have been a number of occasions where the Russians have appeared to attack them to create an improvised nuclear device.

46:41and everybody knows about Chernobyl. There are still sheep farmers in North Wales who can't sell their sheep because their ground's infected from Chernobyl. But having said that, if you can identify a threat, particularly radiation, you can avoid it. And without giving any secrets away, the United Kingdom, like the US and others, has a lot of monitoring capability around the place to detect anybody trying to move radiological materials. And if you blew up a dirty bomb in Westminster, it wouldn't have a great impact. It would provide a bit of contamination. It would be hugely expensive. It is our open source knowledge that every building in the City of London has to be insured against a dirty bomb.

47:30Because the only way you can decontaminate a building that has radiation in it is to remove it. And something like the shard, which I think costs$5 billion to build, if that became irradiated, you would have to take it down and build a new one, which, presumably, these cut prices would be double that. So I think it's a real issue. What concerns me? The chemical bit, I think, again, the chemical weapons we know are quite easy to identify and we know what to do. although Novichok was designed so that NATO sensors couldn't detect it, which is why it took us 18 months to clean up Salisbury, but things have moved on.

48:11I think, to me, the real concern in this area is biological weapons. And I'm... Excuse my ignorance. What are biological weapons? Biological weapons are pathogens. People are... Plague. Plague which... COVID, mate. COVID. Plague which killed half of Europe in the Middle Ages. Anthrax, the Amerithrax anthrax attacks in the US after 9-11. Some people think Covid. Until Covid happened, me as a biological weapons expert, I discarded that as an issue. Because biological weapons take quite a long time. What we call the incubation period of most pathogens, like anthrax or plague or whatever else, or Ebola, are about four days.

49:02So if you want a big bang, people aren't going to be able for four days. I always thought, well, it's not something a terrorist would want. But COVID, a not very virulent pathogen, death rate less than 1%, brought the world to a standstill for three or four years. Now, if you think if you were a terrorist and you could do that, that's pretty good. So Annie Jacobson wrote a brilliant book last year or the year before called Nuclear War, which goes through a scenario of how nuclear war can start. Now, I'm just reviewing her book that's published in two weeks time called Biological War. And a lot of it comes actually from COVID.

49:41A little bit of work I did at Cambridge. with the explosion in synthetic biology, enhanced by AI. And now that we know the genome, DNA so well, you can actually manipulate things. So we did a tabletop exercise at Cambridge of whether we could splice Lassa fever, which is a hermitic fever. And there was an outbreak in Suffolk a few years ago. Luckily, it only killed three people. Only three people caught it, and it killed them. 80 % mortality rate, could you splice that with COVID, which is very transmissible? So you had a very transmissible, but 80 % death rate. And you probably could, or you certainly could in the near future.

50:26So once you get into that sort of vector, now in Annie Jacobson's book, she talks, actually it's about plague that's been manipulated. And if anybody has not read the book, I Am Pilgrim, which after you bought my book, you must read it. I think it's the greatest book ever written. It is fiction, but it's about jihadists who manipulate actually the smallpox vaccine. And it potentially brings the world to a standstill. So all these shock horror stories, the thing that would keep me awake at night is the bio threat because of everything that's gone forward, It's a cheap person's nuclear weapon, if you like.

51:11And the reason that people like I are concerned is we spend virtually no money on trying to prevent it happening. So the Chemical Weapons Convention, which has done a great job and removed 90 % of chemical weapons from the planet, we spend half a million,$500 million a year to make sure that it doesn't happen. The Atomic Energy Agency, non-proliferation, we spend billions on it. But the Biological Weapons Convention, I think we spend$100 ,000 a year on it. A lot of it is because, and I might be disingenuous to Big Pharma, a lot of it is because Big Pharma doesn't want us poking around in its laboratories, but it's making stuff that it's going to make a fortune on.

51:51But I think what we need to get really serious about is bio-warfare. And I think once people have read Annie Jacobson's book and read Iron Pilgrim, they will agree with me. But again, it's not any threat. It's the threat you ignore that is really dangerous. The threat you focus on, and any threat can be suppressed. You just need to put effort and money into making it happen. So that long answered your question on biological warfare.

52:18Francis Foster:It's interesting you mention that because my father, he was a biochemical engineer in the Soviet Union. And one of the things he always said to me was, this is the thing no one's talking about, but biological weapons are the most dangerous weapons that people will ever make. and they may well be coming. It's interesting, I sort of made it half as a joke about COVID, but we've had Lord Ridley on the show and others talking about the origins of COVID. Your perception as someone who's an expert in this area, did you think this was a virus that was likely manufactured? Perhaps not as a weapon, but manufactured nonetheless?

52:55Well, Matt Ridley and I have very similar views on this. So you do then? And his book is excellent. I don't think it was deliberate.

53:07Francis Foster:No. But a little bit like Annie Jacobson's book, there are so many what we call biosafe laboratories. Biosafe laboratories go from one to four. Biosafe three and four is where the really nasty pathogens are kept. Places like Porton Down in the south of England, Edgewood in Maryland, and they were military research places. In the last 20 years, we've gone from about 10 of these labs around the world to about a couple of hundred. And that's level four and level three. There are now thousands. So there are thousands of laboratories around the world, a lot of them in some of the dodgiest places in the world.

53:50And there are millions of scientists, completely unregulated who are dealing with these pathogens. Now, a lot of it is big pharma trying to make sure that we have the medical countermeasures to deal with them, but not all. But the opportunity for accident and the way that things developed in Wuhan, it absolutely must have come from the laboratory. All this stuff about hemorrhagic fever coming from wet markets and eating bats, is, you know, I don't get it and I don't think anybody who understands the basic gets it at all. But the fact that it spread so readily and the fact that it is a threat today because we move around so much.

54:38You know, the plague, the Black Death in the Middle Ages, took ages because people were basically travelling at three kilometres an hour. We're now travelling at 600 kilometres an hour, whatever it is. So, the ability to spread it around, they're in the issue. So, I think I agree with people like Matt Ridley that, yeah, it must have been an accident from Wuhan. And I think most people, except for the Chinese authorities, accept that. Which is why, going forward, we must make sure it doesn't happen again. And the answer to that for me are twofold. First of all, regulation that we haven't bothered with.

55:20And the other one is monitoring. Now, I was involved post-COVID with helping the government and others come up with schemes. How could we have prevented COVID? Well, we didn't have the technology at the time to do it. Everything was happening so slowly. You were given a sample and 24 hours later, you were either clear of COVID or you weren't. When Omicron arrived in the UK from South Africa, it took us five weeks to work out that it had arrived and where it had come from. Actually, we have now developed sampling techniques where we can almost do DNA analysis in real time or near real time. So the scenario I always paint, that airplane that came from South Africa, if you could have tested everybody, because all you need to do is test the air that they're breathing very quickly.

56:09if there was this new virus on the plane, you could have then quarantined them and dealt with it. Five weeks later, when we knew it, 400 ,000 people had come from South Africa. And those 400 ,000 people had traveled the world and spread Omicron around the world. But if you could have stopped what they call patient one, then you could prevent it happening. We have the technology to do it now. And a few years ago, well, when the report's done, to provide this sort of technology and monitoring system in the UK would have cost about£10 billion to set up and£1 billion a year to run. Now, we now think, well, at the time, we think, well, Covid's over, it's not worth it.

56:50If Covid becomes something like plague, spending that money would be insignificant. So that's, I think, the area where we can stop all these things, but we go back to this business about where do we get$20 billion for defence? Where do we get$10 billion to make sure that a pathogen doesn't bring us to our feet again? It might be easier to get that money, probably more than defence, because one would expect industry and the economy to be happy to pay for it. But at the moment, they're not.

57:22Francis Foster:And it's easier to scare the public into wanting it as well. Because, I mean, if you look at COVID, on your telling and Matt's telling, it's one of the most deadliest events in human history, but it's the deadliest industrial accident. by a long, long way in the history of humanity. And that was not something people wanted to believe for a long time, but I'm glad we're finally coming around to the realization. Here's something nobody tells you about getting older. You can eat well, exercise, do everything right, and still feel like your body is running at about 70%. Tired after lunch, sluggish after meals.

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59:45Francis Foster:We wanted to talk a little bit about Syria before we wrap up, which is a place you spent some time in. You mentioned and Al-Shara, who's the new leader. Some questions about him, but you mentioned you were actually pretty happy with the way things have turned out. Yeah, very. I mean, I first started going into Syria in 2012, 2013, sort of purely, slightly by accident. I'd spent an awful long time in Afghanistan, and my wife had sort of had enough. I said, right, time to do something else. I've only had two good ideas in my life, and both were in Afghanistan. One was we had to deal with a whole lot of chemicals from the Taliban, which they used to synthesize poppies into heroin.

1:00:28And we found about 100 tons of this stuff. And it was basically acids and alkalis. It's the recipe for a massive fertilizer bomb. And it was outside the barracks in Lashkar. If it had blown up, it would have killed everybody there. So I was actually there in an intelligence role. And I remember a guy from MI6 coming up to me and said, we understand you're the world's expert in chemical weapons. You've got to deal with this. I thought, I was going, oh God, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm really not. But anyway, it's got a very long story short. We had this issue. There was a lot of fighting going on at the time.

1:01:01Porton down, the laboratory down in Wiltshire were telling me to take it into the desert and blow it up. And I was going, you must be joking. There are 3 ,000 people, 3 ,000 talibans between me and the desert. No way. And then I sort of said, well, hang on. We've got 50 50 tons of acid, 50 tons of alkali. Why don't we mix them together and turn it into pH 7 water?" And the great brains had poured them down. About a day later came out and said, yeah, that might work, actually. And it did. The other thing that I was doing in Afghanistan was using DNA to track terrorists down. And because when we were doing biological weapon analysis, we were basically doing something called PCR, which is DNA analysis.

1:01:48And in Afghanistan, we were sending all the DNA off terrorists we were capturing back to the UK, and it was taking 14 days to come back. I suddenly went, well, why don't we get this kit out here and we can do it in a couple of hours? So we did. So we turned a 14-day process into a three-hour process. And we were, you know, you made that bomb, your DNA's on it, you know, off to jail sort of thing. And then, and somebody said, well, that's great. We can commercialize this. But once I left the army, then a great mate of mine who was an ex-soldier was running security for CBS News. And he said, Hamish, we've got this chemical attack, we think, in Aleppo.

1:02:25Can you take our guys in there and do it? I thought, ooh, yeah, sounds like a lot of fun. So we did that and it was the first major thing.

1:02:35Francis Foster:I can see why your wife gets annoyed. Well, it gets worse.

1:02:42It is all in my memoir, Chemical Warrior, so I'm not breaking any confidentialities. But actually, once we did that, because Syria was really difficult at the time. This is under Assad still. This is 2012, 2013, very much. Lots of aid workers were being picked up by ISIS and Al-Qaeda and killed. So it was really difficult. But once I'd done that, then the BBC got onto me and said, oh God, can you take one of our teams in and this. So I then sort of thought, yeah, it's only a couple of weeks. And the slightly funny, funny sort of inverted commas story is, I was with the BBC in a place called Sarakeb in May 2013, covering another chemical attack.

1:03:29And somebody came in to my wife and said, Julia, what's Hamish doing in Syria? She said, he's not in Syria, he's in France. And they went, well, I think you ought to turn on the BBC. And there I was. And Hamish Brayton-Gordon from Syria. And she went, oh, anyway, that took a bit of explaining. But then when I got back to the UK and I came here and berated people, they just weren't interested. And somebody said to me, and we had a vote in part, it was a big chemical attack, you might remember, in September 2013, August 2013, when 1 ,500 people died. The British government were voting whether to go with the Americans and flatten Assad's chemical weapons program.

1:04:16I was in Parliament and briefing the Prime Minister and everybody else, and they voted not to for Ed Miliband. That was his fault. And people said, no, we need evidence. So I went back into Syria. We set up something called the CBN Task Force, which was all about treating casualties, but probably more important, collecting evidence. So we set up this network to collect evidence of the chemical attacks, which we did from 2014 up until when Assad fell. And the proudest thing in my life is that the evidence that the UN has, the evidence the French government are using to prosecute Assad now, has my DNA on it.

1:04:54So that, for me, and it was when Assad fell in November 2014, I was in December, the new government got in touch because a lot of the new government were guys that I'd been in it and lived with and said, you must come to Tabascus. In December 2024, Russia Today put out this big piece saying, it was my fault that Assad fell. I was the reason. I said, I certainly weren't. If I had any tiny bit to do with it, then I'm delighted. I said, it's the Syrian people. Assad killed half a million of them. That's why they rose up. And once they rose up, they realized that the Syrian army was useless and the Russians faded away as quickly.

1:05:41But it was going to Damascus and meeting a whole bunch of ministers and getting the word from the ministers and via them from al-Sharah. The line was, isn't it strange, Hamish? We've been trying to kill you for 10 years, and now we've invited you back for you to give us advice. I think you Brits call it real politics. But I first saw HCS, as it were. Al-Qaeda turned into HCS in about 2015. So life became a little bit easier after 2015, because although they were Al-Qaeda, They weren't trying to... Well, people like me, as a very dearest Syrian friend of mine, called Ghanem, who is a doctor and still lives in this country, but spends a lot of time in Syria.

1:06:34He always says to my wife, I could have got$10 million for your husband, and we would have split it. And Julia always said, yeah, I'm happy about$5 million. dollars. And in fact, funny enough, he took me back there. He was part of the team we went in in January 2025. And they all joked, yeah, your wife could have had five million dollars. And she would have been very happy. But anyway, I'm being slightly obtuse. But now going back there to see so many happy faces, being able to go around the country without fear of your life. and there's real opportunities. And it is a secular place. I thought about going into the oldest church in Christendom with the Imam of Homs and then the Bishop of Homs showing me around the main mosque in Homs.

1:07:25So I'm very confident and very hopeful, but the West is not interested in Syria. Syria is sort of sorted and the British government haven't even opened an embassy yet. to I've actually told the Prime Minister, I need to be the ambassador. Let's open an embassy. Oh, it's too dangerous. We haven't got a building. I actually rang up one of my Syrian friends the other day. Any chance of getting a building for British Embassy in Damascus? I can offer you five or six different buildings that we'd see. Anyway, I live in hope. But Syria is a wonderful place, and 99 % of the Syrian people are wonderful.

1:08:04Francis Foster:I realise before we wrap up, we should talk about tanks very briefly. Because our Booker, Billy, who you know, we were sitting around, I think it was on one of our America trips, and I was like, well, you know, looking at the stuff in Ukraine, the tank is kind of obsolete. And he went, no, it's not. And I think he got that energy from you. So why is the tank not obsolete? Well, that is a really good question. What I would try The tanks have been around since basically 2016. 1960. World War I. Yeah, yeah. 110 years. The first big tank battle was the Battle of Cambrai. Interesting, one of the big issues of my...

1:08:45It was the Royal Tank Regiment, the regiment I commanded. One of the big issues of tankies at Cambrai was the Germans throwing grenades and sticky bombs onto the top of the tanks, where it's weakest. So they built metal cages to prevent that happening. We wind forward to probably about 2024, and FPV drones dropping hand grenades onto tanks, put cages on. But literally the day after Combré, everybody's saying, that's it, the tank is dead. And that's been happening throughout history. What has happened is the tank has evolved. The tank originally was there to sort out a problem of machine guns. So how could the infantry cross the trenches to attack the enemy without being mown down with machine guns?

1:09:28well, a land ship as they were. The Royal Navy actually started. That Winston Churchill who started off tanks. And tank was an OPSEC, operational security acronym for what it actually was. But it did what it did. I mean, a few years before, it was gas. So when the Germans started using chlorine, that was terrible. And the Germans made a lot of ground, but then we got gas masks. So the tank was there to prevent that. The Second World War, things developed. and evolve, better armor, quicker. The holy trinity of firepower mobility and protection still sounds good today. So, yeah, a lot of people are saying, where does the tank fit in?

1:10:11And you see so many tanks brewing up, as we call it. Well, Russia has lost about 5 ,000 tanks in Ukraine. Now, I explain it because the Russians aren't big on protection. They like firepower and mobility. They're not too bothered about the people inside it. They can be washed out and a new lot put in sort of thing. Whereas Western tanks, the American Abrams, German Leopard, British Challenger, protection is a big deal. So despite the fact the Brits only gave the Ukrainians 14 Challenger 2s, 13 of them still exist and are driving around. And I think the way the things have evolved, I mean, again, the Ukrainians have been brilliant with their tanks, certainly the challengers and the leopards.

1:10:55If you believed every report coming out of Ukraine's social media, there are about 5 ,000 challenger tanks in Ukraine. They're here, they're there. And again, people are fixated by it. And the way that the Ukrainians are using these Western tanks are sort of like long-range snipers, because they're still really effective. If you can suppress the drone threat, The ability to knock out another vehicle at three to four kilometers is still there. And you don't see British, German or American tanks brewing up because we protect our ammunition inside. I think the way we're going forward and the way I describe in the final chapter of the book is, although it's all autonomous, we said before, you still need a human in the loop.

1:11:43So I think going forward, you'll see much fewer tanks. Challenger 3, I think Challenger 3 is probably the last, it might be the last man tank we ever produce, or certainly the last tank with four people in it. You probably don't necessarily need four in future. But Challenger 3 is the first digital tank, so that it can work with all these other drones seamlessly. I mean, it's bloody difficult. I mean, as a young tank commander, even with a year's training, it is quite a difficult job. You know, I sat in Challenger 3 and Ajax, and I'm just covered with flat screens of sensors and everything else.

1:12:18And people are complaining about these new tanks make you sick. And I go, yeah, bloody hell. You know, maybe for not youngsters like Billy and others and you guys who are used to, you know, on your phones and laptops all the time. But, you know, for us old fellas, driving around with all these screens makes it difficult. So I think the tank will still have relevance when we think about fire protection and mobility. You still need to be able to hold ground. And if you can increase its lethality through autonomy, autonomous vehicles in the air on the ground, then I think they will evolve. And the final line in my book is that I am sure in 100 years from now, somebody like me will be talking to somebody like you about something called the tank.

1:13:00Francis Foster:It's really interesting you say that. The reason I was more skeptical about it, I guess, is if a$50 drone or a$500 drone can blow up a multi-million dollar tank, that seems like a losing battle over time, right? Yeah, but I would counter that by saying it can't now. Can I not? So a$500 drone dropping a hand grenade or a two or three kilogram explosive or something, would not take out a Challenger 3 because the Challenger 3 will either shoot it down before it even gets there, or with its defensive aid suites, it wouldn't penetrate. Now, if we're talking about something like a cruise missile, so we're getting a$5 million cruise missile, could that take out a$5 million tank?

1:13:57Yeah, probably could. But then again, I mean, to my eyes, that's sort of evened up. Are you going to use your$500 cruise missile that's really designed to attack headquarters and all the rest of it to try and find a tank in the Ulu? Maybe, maybe not. It's a balancing thing. And I think until fairly recently, say the last 12 months, absolutely the drones have had their way. And I think that is right. What I'm seeing now with the development of hard-kill defensive aid suites, the drone is becoming less, the FPV drone, and the electromagnetic spectrum, again, with the jamming and everything else.

1:14:38Now, no doubt people will get around it, but the focus on Ukraine at the moment is deep strikes with flamingos and others and all the rest of it. They're not really worried about Russian tanks. Now, I suppose the final bit I was saying is if you can start manoeuvring again, we've had a static trench warfare in Ukraine for four years now. But if you could manoeuvre, a bit like you might remember the Kursk offensive in September 2024, when actually a bunch of tanks and loads of drones broke into Kursk, took about a thousand square kilometers of land and held it for three or four months. Now, if you could do that now and then multiply it, you could then see what we call manoeuvre coming back in there and you could gain traction.

1:15:27At the moment, Ukraine is quite happy. Ukraine's doing the deep battle, and I would say that maybe in their strategic planning, once they've won the deep battle, they'll then focus on what we call the close battle and manoeuvre. And if you think, Ukraine's been really clever. They cut off Crimea. They cut off routes into the Donbass. Russian logistics to their front line are running out. They can't get ammunition and fuel through Crimea, and they can't get it through the Donbass because they're being suppressed by drones. Now, I personally think, and Ukrainians seem to be much better than this than any of us lot, there may be a time when actually Ukraine decides to break through and break out, it's creating the conditions to do that.

1:16:16They'll still need the ability to maneuver with tanks. And we've seen the U.S. Leopard, our infantry fighting vehicle, has been tremendously successful in Ukraine, and none of us really saw that. So that is why I still think there is a role for something that's armored that can maneuver in future. But it's trying to spin the innovation to stay one step ahead of the enemy, which at the moment the Ukrainians are doing. And we need to learn every bit of that as we go forward. Well, Hamish, thank you so much for coming on the show and for making Billy's day. I haven't seen him look this happy in years.

1:16:53Final question is always the same. What's the

1:16:55Francis Foster:one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Hamish answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you go to triggerpod.co.uk where you'll be able to see this. Is manning a tank now one of the most dangerous jobs a soldier can do after Ukrainians demonstrated that a drone or two can destroy tanks with relative ease? Do you think there's a concerted effort to undermine the military by the left wing of politics? If a major conflict involving NATO were to begin in the next year, what would be the single biggest weakness of Britain's armed forces that the public either don't know about or doesn't fully appreciate.

1:17:34And what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Well, I suppose I was going to say the bio threat. I think that's what really concerns me. And we've covered that in quite a lot of detail. And one doesn't want to overly terrify people. I think if you accept my premise that there is mitigation to every single threat, but you just have to look at it head on to do it, then that's what I'd say on the bio side. I think the other element that we're not really talking about, and probably for good reasons, is the clandestine world, the espionage. And it's something that Russia has invested so much time and effort in.

1:18:20But actually, I think they are losing the war. The human intelligence, the spies and all the rest of it, I know it's changing, but I think Russia traditionally really punched above their weight because that was their world, the whole espionage. And of course, Putin, that's the world he comes from. But I think they're losing the war. I think Ukraine is showing us how the SBU are just unbelievable. People remember Operation Cobweb, where they attacked the Russian strategic aircraft 2 ,000 kilometers into Russia by hiding drains in a truck and then attacking it. That was the Ukraine Secret Service who did that.

1:19:05And I think that unseen and unheard world, it's going on all the time, all around us. I think one thing where Britain probably punches above our weight, and I know that a lot of us military people say that, but I think in the security world, I think we're still getting there. So not that we should talk about it, but there is a lot that goes on under the surface that people don't see. And it's really part of the whole defence and security piece. You know, that part of our defence and security must be absolutely funded because it produces such huge capability. But I suppose when it threats and all the rest of it, bio to me is a concern.

1:19:48And when people have read my book, do read Annie Jacobson's Biological Warfare when it comes out. And I Am Pilgrim, which I think is the greatest book ever written.

1:19:59Francis Foster:Hamish, thank you so much for coming on. head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Hamish is going to answer your questions. I know what's probably a very disconcerting question. If the UK cannot restore its military capability to protect power, should it consider negotiating with Argentina the status of the Falkland Islands?