Chi is invited to talk to RUSI because it’s in Westminster and they like talking to people about really anally retentive defence and security things

Hello everyone. Nice to be here and all that. I’ve been told I need to talk about defence and foreign policy for a little bit but honestly I need to be somewhere so I'm going to keep it brief.

We need to be realistic. We are not a world class fighting force anymore. We cannot compete with the likes of China, USA or even Russia. We probably couldn’t compete with most western nations. We could maybe take Spain if we really thought about it and tried really hard. And this isn’t really the army, or the RAF or the Navies fault but it’s a wider issue. It’s a cultural thing, something we’ve been forced to accept but still not quite accepting of. We’re not a big boy anymore. We can’t afford it, we can’t act like it and we certainly do not have the impact or respect of one. Our last two major conflicts, Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s hard to label them as successes. In both our areas of operations, we had to rely on American reinforcements because we’d bit off more than we could chew. Now, once again, I do not blame our armed forces. In Afghanistan, 8000 soldiers were charged with defeating an insurgency which spread from the Scottish border to Hampshire. They did extremely well in extreme circumstances. But we shouldn’t have bitten off more than we can chew and that’s exactly what happened.

Our armed forces are still a brilliant fighting force in terms of knowledge and experience, although the 7 year rule is about to come into effect. But the size of them, especially our land forces, is woeful in comparison and sadly even in this day and age, size does still matter. We are going through endless cycles of papering over the cracks. Defence conferences here at RUSI, recently we had one on defining new arts of maneuver. Why? Because we can barely muster a full division. We need to create new definitions to suit our army. That should tell us something.

What should we be told? We need a fundamental change in our military institutions to reflect the reality of the situation. We need to stop trying to be something we are not and live up to what we really are. We need to pick an area and specialise in it because currently we are trying to keep up in terms of land forces, navy and air force and we simply cannot and then end up failing all of them. We need a radical and fundamental re-orientation of how we think and practice our armed forces in this country.

Thank you. I'm going now.