24
Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy
Oral evidence: UK strategic posture
Monday 28 April 2025
4.25 pm
Members present: Matt Western (The Chair); Lord Boateng; Dame Karen Bradley; Sarah Champion; Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi; Bill Esterson; Baroness Fall; Lord Hutton of Furness; Sir Julian Lewis; Edward Morello; Lord Robathan; Lord Sedwill; Emily Thornberry; Baroness Tyler of Enfield; Lord Watts.
Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 - 13
Witnesses
I: Dr Rob Johnson, Director of the Strategy, Statecraft and Technology (Changing Character of War) Centre, University of Oxford; Professor Ciaran Martin CB, Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations, University of Oxford; Professor Sir David Omand GCB, Visiting Professor, King’s College London, and former UK security and intelligence co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office; Dr Leslie Vinjamuri, Director of the US and the Americas Programme, Chatham House.
Dr Rob Johnson, Professor Ciaran Martin, Professor Sir David Omand and Dr Leslie Vinjamuri.
Q1 The Chair: Welcome to today’s oral evidence session of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. In today’s session we are going to be looking at the UK’s national security posture and the implications of offsetting strategic reliance on the United States. Can I thank the witnesses for joining us today? Starting with you, Dr Vinjamuri, could you introduce yourselves and who you are?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri: I am director of the US and the Americas programme at Chatham House, professor of international relations at SOAS, and the incoming president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs from July.
Dr Rob Johnson: I am the director of the Strategy, Statecraft and Technology (Changing Character of War) Centre at the University of Oxford, and I am a senior research fellow at Pembroke College.
Professor Sir David Omand: I am currently visiting professor in war studies at King’s College, and formerly UK security and intelligence co-ordinator, director of GCHQ and Permanent Secretary at the Home Office.
Professor Ciaran Martin: I am a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford. I was the first head of the National Cyber Security Centre at GCHQ.
The Chair: Thank you all very much. One of our committee members is joining the meeting remotely so there will be questions potentially coming from her as well. Perhaps I could just kick things off with you, Dr Vinjamuri. How do you see the situation that has evolved quite rapidly in recent months in terms of the US’s changing perspective on European security and what that might mean for the wider international system?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri: First of all, thank you for having me. It is an honour to speak with all of you today.
I will say a couple of things. First, these changes have come very rapidly. For everybody concerned, regardless of their position, it has been quite an extraordinary nearly 100 days. However, it is important to separate out what has come rapidly and what has been longer in its unfolding.
The shift that the United States has been seeking to make, I would argue, began as early as Obama’s presidency, occasioned by America’s invasions and interventions in the Middle East, its trade policy, its rejection of the basic principles that had guided US global commitments for a very long time, and a belief on both sides of the aisle that the commitments that the United States had made in economic, political and security terms were no longer delivering benefits to Americans at the level that was required in the face of rapidly growing inequality, which dated back to around 1993 in terms of domestic wealth and income inequalities.
Many Presidents have attempted to change America’s global footprint, to reorient it away from the Middle East and towards Asia. We all know that story, and we all know the story of the rejection of free trade as a guiding principle.
What has been perhaps less well expected and has come with a great deal of flurry and abruptness has been the attack on two things. The first is the attack on democracy and the rule of law at home; and the second is the attack on the alliances and partnerships that the US has been deeply committed to for nearly eight decades. This has been unexpected and unanticipated in the way that it has taken place, in its abruptness, and in the temperament and style of the diplomacy with which it has been executed.
To the question of what it means and how enduring the change is, I align with those many people who believe two things. First, America is unlikely to come back to the table, regardless of whether there is a change in Administration in another three and a half to four years, regardless of what happens in the midterm elections and regardless of the success or failures of the Trump Administration. The US is now in a period of what looks like demolition and it will at one stage move to a period of order building, but the order that it seeks to participate in and reconstruct will be fundamentally different both because its priorities have shifted and because the priorities of its allies and partners are going to shift quite likely very dramatically in the years ahead.
Secondly, it matters a lot how the change takes place over the next few years. In other words, most people would argue, and I would fully agree, that we simply cannot know what is coming down the line in the United States. We know many things in the short term about America’s likely abrupt diminishment of its commitments in Europe. We know about the Trump Administration’s antagonism towards Europeans and European security. We know about its attempt, so far failed, to reset its relationship with Russia. That does not make it a stand-out, but the nature of that attempt is very unique and not in a good way. It is very difficult to predict where this goes.
The ability of America’s partners and allies to restore their trust in a future US, I would argue, depends on the manner in which the American public and the American institutions respond to the Trump Administration both over the next three and a half years and at the next election. To be specific—this is a very important point—I have had maybe 20 conversations in Washington in the last week. In every single conversation at every single level, people use the word “trust” unprompted and unsolicited. It has not been carefully considered. In my view, trust will depend absolutely on, for example, whether the next presidential election leads to a very narrow divide. It was 1.4% last time. Is it something like that? If it is something like that in the next election, there will be no ability for Europe to restore its trust in the United States because Americans will not have voted decisively against the policies, priorities and style of this current Administration.
If the Democrats in Congress do not become more robust in the defence of the principles, values, alliances and partnerships that they agree in, the ability for a restoration of trust in the medium term will be radically diminished. We saw the first sign of a Democrat deciding to take a very active and robust defence of those values in JB Pritzker’s speech today, and we will have to watch this space and see what follows.
This space is deeply uncertain. There is everything to play for domestically and internationally, but it is very unwise and foolish to assume how this will unfold. The most intelligent response by Europe, including the UK, and the rest of the world, would be to plan for the worst and engage in comprehensive transnational engagement with all of the United States and its component parts in a way that hopes for and makes possible the best possible outcome. It is a very difficult strategy to pursue, but it is essential and the only wise course.
The Chair: Thank you for that. On the trust front, it seems to be very clear, whether it is in defence, intelligence or even trade terms, that once you do something as seismic as has happened it is very difficult to reverse that because it can be so harmful to organisations and how they view that. We have the national security strategy coming up. What is your take on what this means for the UK and how it can rely on the US in future?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri: The number one storyline—this will not be new to anybody in the room or anybody in the field—is that the UK should continue to do what it has begun to do, which is to invest as much as possible in restoring its own commitment to its defence, its military, its security and its intelligence; to diversify its partnerships; and to prepare for the possibility that the US remains an untrustworthy, unpredictable, uncertain and slightly chaotic Government.
However, I do not agree with the basic principle that it is impossible to repair trust on the security and defence side. In a democracy, it is entirely possible for the people to demonstrate, through legal methods, that they have rejected a style of government decisively. I am not at all persuaded that that is what will happen, but, if it were to come to pass, there could be a period—it is a long way out right now—when America would look to the UK and Europe like a very reliable partner. Again, that is a very big bet. If I were sitting in the UK, I do not think I would count on it.
Q2 Lord Robathan: In these, shall we say, unusual times, can I ask a question, which I think I am probably still allowed to describe as from left field? Is there anything positive that the UK could learn or adopt from America’s recent somewhat strange activity?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri: Could you be just a little bit more specific on which parts of the strangeness you mean? There is so much.
Lord Robathan: We are particularly talking about security and defence here, but you are right that there are one or two other issues.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri: The first thing that I would say is that it is very difficult to disaggregate the foreign policy from the domestic policy because, as we all know, the domestic policy is made, especially on security and defence, by the executive branch. The executive branch has been the source of the attacks by the Trump Administration and the DOGE team. That might begin to change in May when Elon Musk diverts his attention back to his responsibilities as a CEO, to his company, which is doing very poorly, as we all know.
I am of the view that it is possible that we look back on this radical first 100 days of DOGE and think, “Those were an interesting first 100 days”, and that there is some moderation, because the feedback in terms of public opinion polling and market activity up and down has been very negative. Trump, unlike many of the people around him who have very strong and diverse ideological positions, does not have a strong ideological position. He sits, listens and watches, and then he responds on his intuition and his instinct. It is entirely possible that at a certain point this stops because he thinks it is not going well. That does not mean to say there will not be a lot of damage.
What can the UK learn? The UK can certainly learn from the blunders being made by a powerful country that moves erratically, fails to communicate clearly, fails to commit and fails to invest adequately in its most long-standing partners and allies. For the UK, that takes you very naturally to the question of Europe and your relationship with Europe. It would be very foolish to reject the ties with those that are close and have been quite reliable, for better or worse. That would be my number one point.
The second thing would be that it can happen anywhere. I will not in any way discredit the view that, as I heard at a dinner the other night in Washington, there are kernels of truth to many of the things that Donald Trump has said, whether it is about America’s trade position, China’s gains at the expense of many Americans or America’s rightful ask that Europe spend more and do more, which is good for Europe and good for America. I do not reject any of that. None of it is specific or unique to Donald Trump, however. Most American Presidents have said those things for a very long time. We should be very careful not to think that Trump is a genius for having discovered what pretty much everybody else has known for decades.
As the UK looks to its next election, which will matter for security, defence and all sorts of commitments, you should remember that it can happen anywhere. You cannot narrowly talk about security and defence. You have to talk about democracy, the rule of law and elections. The UK has presumably learned the lessons from ad hoc processes in the past for getting people’s views on major decisions.
Educating the public about the importance of security and defence is absolutely critical. In the United States, the public have been willing to change their attitudes and opinions on some major issues with respect to US international commitments largely because they simply do not have the knowledge or education to allow them to hold firm to a set of values that many of us would subscribe to.
The Chair: Thank you for that. I just want to move us now into the Ukraine sphere.
Q3 Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi: In terms of UK strategic posture and Ukraine, the Prime Minister has been extolling the virtues of a coalition of the willing. As we all know, these suggestions have evolved from troops on the ground if necessary—that was in February—and by March had moved on to capabilities in relation to air, sea and land. Dr Johnson, I will come to you, first of all, please. How do you envisage this changing the UK’s exposure to security risks over the next five years?
Dr Rob Johnson: First of all, thank you very much indeed for the invitation to come and address you as a specialist on the subject. Thank you for taking an interest and being members of, in my view, one of the most important committees that we have.
There are several issues for us to unpack. It depends on whether you take a very positive view of current western policy and say that it is working—many people will argue that it is—and that we are a little hasty in rushing to judgments about things potentially going wrong or whether you take the other point of view, which is that we are in danger of rushing into something prematurely without properly thinking it all through.
I say that because we cannot get away from the fact that the peace negotiations, such as they are, that are being discussed are effectively the imposition of an instrument of surrender. Ukraine has not been consulted properly. The United Kingdom has been right, alongside its European allies, to discuss the idea of an alternative that fully embraces the Ukrainian position. Unfortunately, the UK has been somewhat quiet on the shocking direction taken by Washington on the issue. We should be reminding the United States that it is abrogating a treaty to which it signed up for the protection of the sovereignty of Ukraine as a neutral state. A true friend is an honest friend. We have a moral duty, as well as a political and diplomatic one, to point out to our American allies exactly what they are imposing.
It has been very interesting to see the Ukrainian parliament’s response to the conflict. I have interviewed a number of individuals over the last few weeks, partly in preparation for this committee. The Russians, you may remember, when they arrived inside Ukraine and attacked in February 2022 wanted first to decapitate the regime. Most of us associate that with trying to seize or kill Zelensky, the President. In fact, they also wished to eliminate or round up all the parliamentarians inside the Ukrainian parliament. The Ukrainian parliament continued to sit during that year. That is something really quite remarkable, actually. It is resonant with us in 1940.
The way that the UK Government framed the negotiations was that we might have peacekeepers to endorse a peace settlement that was agreed. No peace settlement has been agreed. If you examine Russia’s intent by looking at Russian documentation and what it says in its own media, it is pretty clear that there is no intention for there to be a peace settlement on anything other than its own maximalist terms—in other words, terms that would in effect remove the independence and sovereignty of the Ukrainian people and their Parliament, and, indeed, Ukraine’s viability as a state.
There have been some roadblocks thrown up, apparently. The Russians say, “We cannot permit Ukraine to join NATO”. Labels can be an obstacle at times. There are clearly other solutions that need to be explored. We in the United Kingdom probably ought to do more to explain to our American allies exactly what those other alternatives are to their rather instrumentalist way of approaching the problem.
The defence and security of Ukraine is an enormous strategic opportunity for the United Kingdom. It is not a negative; it is a positive. Ukraine already has the potential to be a great trading partner for the UK and Europe for the next 20 or 30 years. It will need a lot of help in the short term, but it is a country that ordinarily would be trading with Europe and with the United Kingdom. It has a great aviation industry. It has learned a lot about technologies. It therefore represents a very significant opportunity.
Looking over the long term, one thing we might like to consider is whether Ukraine, which has a great deal of experience in nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy, could become the third nuclear power of Europe, which represents a very significant shift indeed.
Of course, in all these calculations, we have to work out what Mr Putin and his regime would do next if they do not get what they want. It is highly unlikely that Russia will demobilise. Putin knows that, if he were to do so, it would be rather like the dilemma that Saddam Hussein faced after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. If you demobilise your army, you flood the marketplace with lots of men who are disgruntled, are unhappy and know how to use weapons. After the Soviet war in Afghanistan, we saw a massive upsurge in crime inside the country.
If Putin were to be successful in wresting Donbass and Crimea from Ukraine, which the United Kingdom would not be able to do much about, it is more likely that Russia would then pick on a smaller target such as Georgia or indeed one of the central Asian republics, on which UK energy supplies rely.
Turning deliberately to this question of whether the UK should put forces inside Ukraine, we have to say it would be extremely premature. Even putting a British brigade on the ground in Ukraine would require a division of troops. You already have a large-scale commitment to Estonia and the North Atlantic. It seems to me highly unlikely that the UK has the capability to put boots manifestly on the ground.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi: Sir David, moving on to you, the Defence Secretary recently noted that he did not in fact envisage a peacekeeping force on the ground to separate the two warring parties. He has reportedly, along with the French, pushed for more in terms of air intelligence and border surveillance. Given that context and your own expertise in terms of intelligence and security, how might that change the UK’s exposure to security risks?
Professor Sir David Omand: The first thing to say is that all this has some way to play out. It is important that the committee not jump to conclusions too early. For example, just to comment very briefly on what we have heard so far about trust and a lack of trust, “trustworthiness” is a much better word. Trustworthiness is demonstrated by a long-term pattern of behaviour.
President Trump in writing said that he supports the Washington treaty and is not seeking to withdraw from it, including Article 5. We do not know whether he really means that. We will not know that until things have played out. What that does mean is that we should not jump to the worst-case assumption that we are on our own. Indeed, I would argue that the British Government should be very vigorously putting to the United States the point about the value of having the North Atlantic looked after by a rebalanced NATO where European partners are taking a much greater share and taking the burden-sharing argument off the table.
When it comes to the British role—I hope there will be one—in supporting Ukraine, assuming there is eventually a ceasefire, our main role will be in supporting Ukraine to rebuild its capabilities. The one thing that the committee could be absolutely certain about is that, as soon as there is a ceasefire, Russia will be rebuilding its capabilities. It has already ramped up its production. Ukraine must be supported to build up its capabilities because it is Ukraine that will be standing up to Russia, not us. We can support Ukraine, and we should support Ukraine.
The one thing that I would fear is that in Moscow they may think that Ukraine is an easy target again and the war will restart. That will not happen if we and our partners have helped Ukraine build up its capabilities.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi: I just want to move on to Dr Vinjamuri and Professor Martin, if I may. The European nations have been pushing for some sort of US backstop. Do you think that will materialise? How credible would the UK’s military contributions be in the absence of significant US support?
The Chair: I am sorry. Please make your response fairly brief. I am just conscious of time.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri: I have very little confidence in a US backstop at this stage. That is not to say that that could not change. It would change if Putin’s behaviour and actions, especially with respect to Ukraine, continue to be more aggressive. We saw Trump’s response to that even over the last few days.
Would UK boots on the ground or a European reassurance force be credible? It is a highly risky proposition. Again, I would not consider myself an expert on this, but the proposals that I have heard strike me as being potentially very provocative to Russia and very problematic.
Professor Ciaran Martin: I will be very brief because I do not consider myself qualified to comment on the military aspect of it. There is one scenario worth contemplating. A ceasefire could trigger continued digital harassment of and cyberattacks on Ukraine. Those can take place semi-deniably in the conditions of a ceasefire. Having no active US government support is better in that situation than it might be in a military context, providing that there are not restrictions put on the US private sector, which has been crucial to the cyber-defence of Ukraine.
Lord Watts: Dr Johnson mentioned that he thought the British Government should be more vocal on some of these issues with our allies in America. Part of the reason why we are not might be because we are worried about what the implications would be from the Trump Administration. For example, if we criticise him, we know he normally reacts in a negative way.
What I do not know is how reliant we are as a nation on America’s contributions. If you look at the nuclear option, although it is independent, it requires missiles to be refitted into submarines in America. There are many other aspects of security that are linked to America. What is the danger that, by being more critical, we would leave ourselves exposed in a number of those areas? Do we even know how exposed we are?
Professor Sir David Omand: There is no evidence that I am aware of that anyone in the United States Administration is thinking of prejudicing their very close relationship with us in the nuclear field. I would be very surprised indeed if they thought that because it is not in the United States’s interest. It is not because they are doing us a favour. It is because it is in the United States’s interest that we remain a strong power. I would apply the same logic in the intelligence field.
Q4 Sir Julian Lewis: Ambassador John Bolton, having served 17 months as national security adviser to President Trump previously, has become a strong critic of his. Writing in Prospect, he said, “The worst outcome would be taking steps now that increase the havoc he will cause or hamper the repairs that will be needed once he leaves office. Most significantly, cheap talk about US withdrawal from international security affairs undercuts the credibility of America’s ‘extended deterrent’”.
Following on from what you said, Sir David, about there being no reason to believe at this point that Trump wants to withdraw from NATO, if the worst happened and he tried to withdraw from NATO—he certainly has little love for the organisation—are there any barriers that Congress could put up to prevent that?
The difference between the first half and the second half of the 20th century was that in the second half, despite the confrontations, potential aggressors knew that America would be involved in any conflict in Europe from day one, while in the first half America came into the world wars only after they had started. This is a pretty perilous situation. I want to know what the safeguards are against one man being able to undo a system that has worked so well in the past.
Professor Sir David Omand: The only answer I can give to the very valid point you are making is that, although there are Republican majorities in the two Houses, there are a great many supporters in the Republican Party of the long-standing relationship across the Atlantic. They will be briefed by their staffers and defence planners that, as they square up to China as the main threat or main axis, they will want to be sure their backdoor in the North Atlantic is secure. That is something that we can help deliver through a rebalanced NATO, of course, because we cannot go sheltering, as we did in the past, behind American money.
Q5 Emily Thornberry: Given the meeting in St Peter’s, we might be heading in this next week for a very critical period for Ukraine, with Donald Trump wanting an easy win, an easy peace or an easy agreement. If he does not get it, what are the chances of America walking away? Why would it not walk away? What do we do in response to that?
Professor Sir David Omand: To offer a point of speculation, I mentioned earlier the talk in the second Trump Administration of the multipolar world run by the strongmen, the Chinese and the Russians, with the United States as the primus inter pares, if you like. For that multipolar vision to be realised, President Trump has to re-establish a good working relationship with Russia. Therefore, he does have to find a way of ending the war. You cannot regard the threat of walking away, from a man who wrote The Art of the Deal, as anything more than part of an ongoing negotiation.
Dr Rob Johnson: I am very glad you asked the question because there is a deeper point here. Forgive me; this is a very academic answer, in the sense that there are two sides to this story. On the one hand, if you want to appeal to the current President and Administration, you do not make appeals based on principles or some idea of special pleading. You cannot. They do not work. We know that. It is pretty clear, we know now from experience, indeed even from the previous Administration, that you have to offer something. That is why, as you know, there has been such an emphasis on the minerals deal that was put forward and so on.
We also know that, rather like the point that Sir Julian was making about the United States before 1941, America has gone back to the idea that it will act only when its national interests are directly affected either positively or badly. The idea that there is a principle you uphold has now gone.
On the other hand, this is very easily viewed negatively. There is a lot of negative press at the moment because culturally, as people from the United Kingdom, we find it quite difficult to manage some of the ways in which ideas are conveyed by the current President. If we look at the arguments that have been portrayed by the American Administration, they said they needed to decouple from China and reassert American power and influence. They are doing that. They wanted to regenerate their domestic industries as a way of preparing for some sort of threat from the Pacific. They have done that. They are seeking to create a security cordon for North America. They are doing that. A lot of the talk about Canada, Greenland and so on has really been about that. They want domestic homeland security and not least to stop the inflow of drugs, which has been pretty much an epidemic.
The point about military security has been mentioned already by Sir David. If we are really honest with ourselves, we recognise that, on this side of the Atlantic, the 2% target was not met. Eight nations still do not meet the minimum 2% of GDP spending on defence.
There is another side of the story. We cannot permit ourselves to do what some of my French analyst colleagues are doing, which is holding their noses in the air and saying, “America is finished. This is about strategic autonomy in Europe”. It does not work that way. Hastings Ismay apparently did not say that it is the job of Britain to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out, but it is the sort of thing he might have said. That is still true. It is not about keeping the Germans down any more—we want the Germans alongside us—but that is still the case.
We have to work out, though, how the methods by which we engage from a diplomatic, economic, military and, indeed, security point of view need to be modified. That is what this committee is about. President Trump is very fond of elites, and the United Kingdom is an elite from a Five Eyes perspective. It is a nuclear power. It is a member of the UN Security Council. He does not like difficult customers. I made a remark earlier about being honest. You can be honest without being difficult. That still works. We need to take a business management approach, which is different from what we are used to in diplomacy. It is about acquisitions and mergers, doing trade deals and valuing valuable suppliers that increase the prestige of the United States. That is the appeal. One does not need to be rude about that, but one does need to be more adroit in how one handles it.
The Chair: I am conscious of time and Lord Boateng was due to come in. Are you okay if I move on, Lord Boateng, or was there something specific you wanted to raise?
Q6 Lord Boateng: I have one specific question. There has been talk about a coalition of the willing. Dr Johnson, you have referred to the particular approach that the French have tended to take in relation to these issues. What are the risks around coalition cohesion in terms of a weakening of resolve or a different emphasis? The Nordics and Baltics are facing the real possibility of limited incursions by Russia. What is your take on that?
Dr Rob Johnson: It is in our national interest to maintain as much of the cohesion and integrity of those coalitions and the NATO alliance, particularly, as we can. It is strong. It is stronger than we are often given to believe.
There is a lot that we can do. Look at the initiatives that are taking place in Scandinavia. You mentioned the Nordic countries. In terms of national resilience, the UK has a lot to learn from our comrades there. Great strides have been made. Germany is changing, with the so-called Zeitenwende towards the threat it faces. The eastern Europeans have done a fantastic job at leading the way, particularly Poland, and showing what can be done. There has already been greater integration at an operational level between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. They are highly integrated. On land, there is a little bit more work to be done. Clearly, there is an interesting intelligence relationship to figure out, including whether a sort of 13 Eyes arrangement could be useful. There is a lot to build on.
My argument would be that we should present this to the United States and say, “Look at what we are bringing”. NATO has 2.1 million personnel in Europe. It is a free good for the United States. That is an incredibly powerful offer for someone who believes in the art of the deal.
Lord Boateng: David, do you take the same view or are you a little more guarded?
Professor Sir David Omand: That is on the basis that we have rebalanced our contributions to NATO and the European nations are visibly seen to be doing more. We have a role, clearly, to ginger up those who might need that.
The point that has been made about the high north and the North Atlantic is very powerful. That is our neighbourhood and we have to defend it. The countries in that area, I know from my own experience, look to us for leadership to do that. That is the case that we should be making across the Atlantic.
Q7 Lord Sedwill: I just want to pursue this point about rebalancing. Rebalancing largely means building up European capability. I think that is what you are referring to, Sir David. First, to what extent is that realistic? Secondly, would it be wise for us to reduce our strategic dependence and capability terms on the United States?
Professor Sir David Omand: The answer to that is to the extent that we feel obliged to do that because capabilities are being moved from the European theatre elsewhere. We will have to invest more in air defence. In the North Atlantic, we have a task to protect the undersea cables, which are so vital to our economy and our well-being. Nobody else is going to do that for us, other than us and our NATO partners. These are the areas where I would say we should be doing more.
It would take a very long time—I am not sure it would be sensible—to try to push the Americans to draw down some of their strategic capabilities. We need the intelligence. Our Ukrainian friends need the intelligence that the United States can provide. More on strategic lift would be a very nice thing to have.
My final remark on this would be that there is going to be a difficult balancing of priorities because it may be that the needs of Ukraine will, in the short term, have to be given greater priority just to prevent the war from breaking out again. There are gaps in our force capabilities that we ideally would be plugging, but funds are restricted.
Lord Sedwill: In terms of investment, though, should we be building alternative capabilities, for example with the French, to our current dependence on the US for a whole range of our equipment and so on? Should we double down on our investment in US-UK or AUKUS capabilities?
Professor Sir David Omand: We have to do it for the right motives. We should not join projects just because we want to be independent of the United States, unless it is absolutely necessary to do that and the US has made that clear. That is not the motivation. The motivation is to look at the force goals overall and what is necessary to produce convincing defence forces in NATO.
Just to give you one example, with which you will be very familiar, if we and the French were to develop an air-launched missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload once we have our new nuclear warhead, that would be a very strong and powerful addition and a very strong signal to Moscow. Could we afford to do that over the next couple of years? Probably not, no. Would we benefit from a strategic set of priorities in which we get round to that should it be necessary? Yes.
Q8 Edward Morello: In conversations with various countries and NATO allies, I often pose the question, “How confident are you that in an Article 5 situation the US would meet its obligations?” From what you have said, Sir David, you have a reasonably high degree of confidence in that. Even those who say they think that America will often caveat it with, “The US response will depend on the nature of the threat”. I wonder whether you agree with that.
Dr Johnson, I would be interested in whether you agree that we cannot rely on a full-scale US response and that it would be limited by the nature of the threat and possibly by other factors, such as whether we are meeting our defence spend obligations.
Professor Sir David Omand: I would be very confident that the NATO commanders, in particular the supreme commander, who is an American officer, would respond, were NATO to come under attack, in the way in which they traditionally have.
Behind your question, though, is an unanswered one. What would happen in a context in which armed conflict with China had either broken out or was liable to break out? In that case, the Americans would have to think about where exactly their priorities are.
In the past what has worked—and I believe today still works—in deterrence terms is the thought that you do not put your hand in the mangle, because you cannot work out exactly what is going to happen and how you might get out of a very difficult situation if you are conducting an attack on NATO territory. I would still be very confident that Moscow would have to weigh that very heavily indeed. Provided that the structure of NATO, its command structure and its main capabilities are still in being, that would not be the most of my worries.
My worry would be much more that the Russians will stage provocations in Ukraine and they will try to destabilise a peace agreement. If we are heavily engaged in training and equipping the Ukrainians, we will get drawn into that.
Dr Rob Johnson: I would add a couple of very quick points, if I may. It is not in America’s interest for the UK or Europe to suffer a catastrophic failure in its critical national infrastructures or its energy supply, for example. That would not be in America’s interest. We are fairly clear there.
I would go back to the point I made earlier. What are we bringing to the table for the United States? How can you ensure you do not get drawn into this debate: “Is it Article 5? Is it not?” Of course, Article 5 is a principle on which Governments will make a judgment. The North Atlantic Council would have to meet to decide it.
What key things does the UK bring? We do very well on foresight. That is an extraordinarily valuable asset to the United States. That is a factor that keeps the Americans keen on us. We have our own nuclear deterrent. There is lots of speculation in the press about what can and cannot be done with a UK independent nuclear deterrent, but it is there. It works; it is independent; and it is sovereign. That matters to the United States.
Conventional deterrence and, indeed, the sub-threshold grey zone hybrid form of threats is where we are currently falling short. That is where America is dissatisfied with us. That is why you get these threats: “Don’t think we’ll do this, if you’re not prepared to step up”.
There is no doubt that the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces are hollowed out and inadequate for the range of threats that we face. They were useful and correct for the threats we faced in the 1990s and early 2000s. They are not appropriate for the threats we face today. We can make some better investments. We cannot regenerate force in the way that we could in the Cold War. We must address that. In terms of our covert deterrent, we have a rapid reaction force. We have the headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, but there is almost nothing in it. That cannot be right. If we are going to counter hybrid threats, we must be able to respond robustly in a way that will deter an opponent. Those are the areas we need to address.
Finally, we need to think about the critical enablers. We need to do better at space. We are leading with small and medium-sized enterprises on directed energy and some of those other new systems, which is outstanding. We need to make better use of them. Of course, we have great opportunities through the Global Combat Air Programme with Japan and Italy, and particularly pillar 2 of AUKUS, which will give us all sorts of new opportunities for developing those enablers for the future.
There is lots of potential there, but we urgently need to address those two areas if we are going to continue to be useful to the United States and it is going to be useful to us.
Q9 Baroness Tyler of Enfield: I would just like to move on to intelligence-sharing arrangements. I would really like to know your thoughts on the effect of some the big shifts that we have been talking about in this radically new world that we are operating in, particularly the shift in US attitudes and priorities, not least given some of the sentiments expressed by Tulsi Gabbard. How does that affect UK intelligence-sharing arrangements and wider interagency work? Sir David, would you be able to start?
Professor Sir David Omand: I am speaking from outside the system, so I do not have privileged information. My understanding is that, day to day, the intelligence partnership goes on as it went on before. Professional is speaking to professional with utmost respect for each other’s professionalism.
There is turbulence at the top. The director and deputy director of the National Security Agency were both fired. I thought it a rather odd thing to do when the United States is squaring up for confrontation with China to remove two of your most experienced signals intelligence professionals, but it has done that. It is a big organisation. It will survive. The partnership will survive.
The message I would want to get over to the committee is to have the confidence to say to our American friends, “This is all in your interest too”. We have taken huge care over many, many years to make sure the United Kingdom remains a global-class intelligence nation. We contribute a lot, both bilaterally and through the Five Eyes. That is to the United States’s strategic advantage. If it is serious about national security and the pacing threat from China, it will recognise that as an asset.
I would express confidence that it will continue and will continue to flourish. We have been through periods where there has been some political turbulence before. We will get through it.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield: Professor Martin and Dr Johnson, would you like to add anything? I am particularly interested in whether this might differ between signals and human intelligence.
Professor Ciaran Martin: That is a good question. To begin with, to echo some of Sir David’s comments, Five Eyes is almost designed to withstand political turbulence. That does not necessarily mean it always will, but it is not principally even a political arrangement. It is almost an organisational or administrative agreement going back to 1946 between the signals intelligence agencies. It has withstood serious tensions between the member countries, most notably when the United Kingdom stayed out of the Vietnam War.
The distinction between signals and human intelligence might matter. Signals intelligence, which is the direct experience of Sir David and me, is very mechanised in many ways. At the moment, the turbulence at the top will affect people, but it will not affect systems. It will affect morale, not machines. While those organisations will be going through difficulties, the underlying foundations will continue as normal. That should continue to be true in human intelligence as well, but it is not as mechanised for obvious reasons.
While I do not think there is any evidence, again from the outside, that that is as yet under strain, you are right to at least contemplate that there could be different impacts in the two disciplines.
Professor Sir David Omand: I would just add one further thought. The human intelligence agencies are well used to sharing intelligence but not sharing sources. Sometimes we and the United States have operated jointly and have run joint operations, but the identity of some of the United Kingdom’s star agents certainly would not have been revealed to any other service outside the Secret Intelligence Service. That is manageable.
The other thing that is manageable is caveating the intelligence that is shared to say, “This is being shared for this purpose, and it can be shared on to these people on this agreed list, but not to those people”. That will find its own level in time, but there will need to be some care.
Dr Rob Johnson: One of the great advantages that the UK has is that we are a net contributor, not just a consumer, of intelligence with the United States. That is very important in that relationship. In my brief experience—I had a two-year secondment with the Ministry of Defence from my university—I saw nothing but very close co-operation. I see no reason why that would change.
The Chair: Can I ask Professor Martin a related question about cloud computing. We have seen the actions of certain “tech bros” who wish to curry favour with the President. Do you see any concern with UK intelligence or, in the widest sense, defence using cloud computing provided by a US company?
Professor Ciaran Martin: Not intelligence, no. I will be brief in this because it is a much longer conversation. This goes back to Lord Sedwill’s earlier question about diversifying away from strategic capabilities. He asked it in a military capability context. Had he inserted the word “technological” between “strategic” and “capabilities”, I would have said, “Ideally, yes, but it is fiendishly difficult to do”.
All across this continent there is an ongoing discussion, which was pretty unthinkable a year ago, about the implications of strategic dependence on US tech giants, principally in cloud but also some of the satellite providers and so forth. That is a much bigger, longer and more difficult strategic challenge.
The intelligence is manageable in terms of cloud: getting the capabilities, putting in the arrangements about where it is built, who is cleared to run it, et cetera. That is not much different from the way that Five Eyes has always worked in terms of trustworthiness and so forth. The wider strategic dependence of the economy on a small number of US tech moguls is an issue that should be on the radar of policymakers and parliamentarians.
Q10 Lord Hutton of Furness: Perhaps we should turn our attention now to the issue of cyber and cyber-threats to the UK. My questions are mainly aimed at Professor Martin, but I would welcome anyone else coming in. How would you rate the UK’s current cyber-resilience and our ability to cope with a period of heightened aggression, possibly without US support?
Professor Ciaran Martin: It is mixed. It has improved, but there are two key issues around how we are framing all this. First, much of the public risk that matters to national security and is carried in cyberspace is held in private hands. Secondly, we have built a set of legal and other incentives that prioritise data over countering disruption.
There are basically three types of cyberattack that you should worry about. The first is stealing cash. The second is copying data. We call it data theft, but it is not really that, as the data still there. The third is the disruption of the network. Ignore cash for a second. In law and in corporate governance, we have told corporate Britain to protect data. Being disrupted is far worse. Think of this institution. Let me give you two bad scenarios.
Imagine that the data of the parliamentary estate is expropriated by a hostile foreign state. Clearly, that is a very bad thing. If the alternative is the comprehensive degradation of the IT system of the parliamentary estate—nothing here works; the broadcast does not work; none of your emails work; the parliamentary authorities cannot pay invoices; the security rosters are not available—the institution grinds to a halt in a way that it does not otherwise.
Hitherto, we have prioritised the protection of data in law, and that matters. Some data breaches matter more than others. That is another discussion. We have gone as far as we can with the voluntary encouragement of our critical industries to improve their cyber-resilience. It is not quite the same thing as cyber-defence, because it assumes that something bad is going to happen and it is about how quickly you can manage to recover from it.
In terms of the threat, there are a number of very worrying indicators. One is that Russian-based criminals have given the rest of the hostile world a playbook on how you can mess us around. Less than a year ago, Guy’s and St Thomas’, those major hospitals, were at 10% capacity. We were issuing appeals for blood donations for two major types of blood because we were running short following a cyberattack by criminals on an NHS supplier.
You can see what is happening with Marks & Spencer at the minute, which is not strategically important. However, the next point is that, while we do not have direct evidence that it is against us, we do have direct evidence that China is preparing an NHS or Marks & Spencer type of attack simultaneously and at scale, should it need to, against the US over Taiwan. Interestingly, it has been found in all sorts of sectors excluding healthcare, but, if you think of 100, 200 or more of those types of attacks at a time, we could struggle a lot.
Looking more generically at cyber-threats, while there can be a lot of hype around the implications of AI for our security, AI will almost certainly make it easier and cheaper for more people with ill intent to be semi-good at cyber and do that sort of thing.
We have reached the limits of voluntarism. This is, I hope, a bipartisan issue, because the work started under the previous Government. The forthcoming cyber security and resilience Bill is the first time the Houses will have been asked to consider resilience in cyberspace, instead of fairly onerous data laws, because disruption is worse than data loss, but our law and policy posture has not treated it that way.
Lord Hutton of Furness: In terms of government resilience, are you saying to us you are reasonably confident that there is a degree of resilience to withstand potential aggressive cyber-threats there? However, your main concern is what is happening in the private sector. Presumably, you are thinking of the energy system and other critical parts of the economic infrastructure of the country.
Professor Ciaran Martin: It breaks down into three. You have the national security systems, which are subject to special, and pretty onerous and costly, protections, which you cannot replicate economy-wide. It would not scale in an affordable way. You have mainstream civilian government services. Much like the private sector, those will be patchy. The Government will be obliged to practise what they preach under the new legislation and test for resilience.
The final point is what is worrying me the most. This applies to both mainstream government services and private services. I will use an example from the US to illustrate the point, if you do not mind. In 2021, the US suffered a fuel shortage on the eastern seaboard because of a cyberattack on a company that administered the main pipeline that runs from the deep south all the way through, up the east coast to New York state. It is responsible for about 45% of automobile fuel in that area.
The attack that took the pipeline offline left the big, complicated pipeline system entirely alone, because that would have taken years. It could have been done, but it would have taken a lot of skill, money, time and luck. Instead, they just did a fairly standard attack on the administrative systems of this company. This company, all of a sudden, could not invoice anybody, could not pay anybody and its safety rosters were all scrambled. The safety inspection to say “keep going” that was due at 3 pm in the state of Georgia on Saturday afternoon could not happen.
The company took the decision to switch off the pipeline. That connection between the ordinary systems that we all use and critical infrastructure has been the big learning period for the last few years. We have to get that right. It is actually harder. There is a lot of speculation about what has happened in Spain and Portugal today and, at the time of entering this committee room, it looked less likely than likely that that is a cyberattack. If it is, that would have been really difficult to do, but you can do other things.
The risk we have to focus on, which we have learned a lot more about over the past four or five years, is the simple inability of a digital economy to function, because that is hugely disruptive and strategically, socially and economically damaging.
Lord Hutton of Furness: I just wondered whether I could ask you a question about the origin of these threats. You have talked about the Russian criminals showcasing what can be done. You have talked about potential state adversaries and state actors. Does China present a more significant cyber-threat to the UK than Russia, in your view?
Professor Ciaran Martin: It is different. Russia has been the more immediate threat. As some members of the committee will know, it is very fashionable in UK national security policy circles to describe Russia as extreme bad weather and China as climate change. That sort of applies here. Russia has always tested the boundaries of the grey zone of hybrid warfare. It has done quite unpleasant physical hacks on broadcasters, sporting agencies and so forth for a mixture of propaganda and intimidation reasons.
China has never undertaken a single cyberoperation of that kind, as any Chinese interlocuter will tell you. It has been probably the most voracious data thief in human history, but it has never actually disrupted a single network. What has emerged in the last two years is that China is preparing to do so, but it is unlikely—and this was the official assessment of the Biden Administration—just to give it a go in the way that Russia does in grey zone time. It is keeping it for a time of maximum tension and escalation.
It is a different threat. Should the worst come to pass, it would be more potent, but only in those conditions.
Professor Sir David Omand: I agree with everything that Ciaran has said. When it comes to disruption, there are two things to worry about. If you are in government, think about the distraction. Just when you should all be focusing on the big crisis, you are actually worrying about the fact that nobody can get money out of the hole in the wall, pay for anything or whatever it might be. You do not have to do a lot to really distract Government.
The second point I would make is that Russia is fighting a war. It started a war and it is continuing to fight it, and we are part of the backwash from its attempts to slow down and stop Ukraine. My assumption would have to be that we will be right in the crosshairs after a ceasefire and that we really must expect the Russians to pick on us. We have been in the crosshairs since 1917 and our attempt to send the British Army in to stifle the revolution. It is Russian demonology.
I am sure President Putin learned at his training colleges that we are an original Satan, in their eyes. If we are really propping up Ukraine and rearming Ukraine, we will be in the crosshairs.
Lord Watts: I am conscious of the time. A yes or no would be sufficient. If I was China, I would be building up that capacity. Do we have the capacity to respond, like for like, to China, India, Russia or anyone else who wants to cyberattack us? Do we have the capacity?
Professor Sir David Omand: I cannot answer yes or no. I would just have to say that that is a classified matter. I would not want to give an impression. As Professor Martin has said, it is not easy to craft offensive cyberactivity, but we have the capability. It is a joint enterprise between the Ministry of Defence, the agencies and the Armed Forces. I would leave it at that.
The Chair: That takes us neatly on to the new national security strategy.
Q11 Baroness Fall: We have spent a lot of time today talking about the moving parts of the security environment and the context in which the new national security strategy paper is being put together. Mindful of time, I want to ask your thoughts around content and timing. The two fit together. On the timing, this paper is supposed to be due out in June. At the same time, we are trying to do a tariff deal with America. We are coming into the NATO summit and a supposed peace deal with Ukraine. At the same time, we are looking at a reset with Europe.
There are all these moving pieces. At the same time, how much is the content a reset and how much is it a collation of so many reviews that were all coming from different parts of Whitehall, whether it is defence or the China audit? My question is twofold to you. Is this national security strategy going to be dead on arrival, because there is too much going on and it simply will have already gone out of date the minute the words are on the page? Secondly, and related, is it a reset or a collation?
Professor Sir David Omand: We will have to wait and see what the content of this is. My hope would be that the strong message that comes out of it is that strategy is a habit of mind. It is a way of thinking. It is not a glossy document. Certainly, in current circumstances, I cannot see it being a glossy document where you say, “That’s it sorted for the next 10 years”. It is not going to be like that.
I hope the committee will really push for a greater capacity in government to think strategically. We need to have a national school of government which brings private sector folk and public sector folk together, with the Armed Forces, in order to train them on thinking strategically. How do you maintain your strategic goal, yet produce plans that are flexible enough to cope with all the changes? That is a rather bland statement. I apologise for it, but that is the essence of what you have to get out of a national security strategy in the current context.
Baroness Fall: It is more a process than a report and, yet, they will be writing a report of some sort.
Professor Sir David Omand: My hunch is that the process of putting it together will have proved to be enormously important, when you think of the number of stakeholders there are to get an all-of-government, all-of-nation response to some of the challenges we face. You are bringing people of very different cultures together and getting them to understand each other’s positions and so on. As was mentioned earlier by Dr Johnson, our Nordic friends have been rather better at this over many years and we have to catch up.
Dr Rob Johnson: One thing that I have found very helpful when teaching strategic consciousness at Oxford is sometimes to just delete the word “strategy” and insert the word “decisions”. It is very interesting how that demystifies a lot of our problems. The document itself—you are absolutely right, David—is not the product as such that would be condemned. It is the process you go through in order to develop those thoughts.
I love the idea of a national school of government. I hope I can enlist in that. I would add to that a national strategy research group. We need a proper Cabinet-level organisation that looks over the horizon in an integrated way, because we have lost sight of that a little more recently. It is going to need to look at budget, operations, logistics and enablement.
The new thing I would dearly hope it can do is to take in the round the problem of political warfare, as it used to be known. We tend to look at cyber and information manipulation or disinformation as two entirely separate things. They do not in Russia. They are the same thing. We have struggled a little as a nation with disinformation, because it impinges upon the idea of our freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. We have talked a lot about cyberattacks, but the majority of cyberactivity appears to me to be intelligence collection, rather than an attack.
We face a situation at the moment where China, let us be clear, has been purchasing the loyalty of individuals in the United Kingdom who will speak its doctrine, its ideas. We are not really prepared for that, yet that is central to Chinese doctrine. It is central to Russian political warfare doctrine as well. That is central to what they do and yet, in Britain, we seem to be a little slow sometimes in dealing with it.
I would dearly love to see that our national security strategy addresses that holistically and sets out how we are going to compete, not to simply sit and take it, but to push back, using all the instruments of our national power, within the bounds of legality and international law, and to actually compete. That would be a really new thing that we could do with that strategy.
Baroness Fall: Do you think the National Security Council process is the right umbrella for this? You talked about new structures.
Dr Rob Johnson: We do need to have a bit of a think about the wonderful institutions we have. We invented most of them in the 18th century and we still have them. We need to think about how we can be more responsive to what I call the “swipe right” generation. They want things responded to quickly, and yet we come across sometimes with the way that we operate, particularly in the information environment, as a little ponderous, because we are being deliberative and thoughtful.
There are grounds for us to consider whether the institutions we have are the right ones for a wartime setting or, in this case, a highly competitive and frankly coercive international environment.
Professor Ciaran Martin: I am intrigued by the question as to whether all this will be dead on arrival, given how tumultuous everything is. If you are dealing, in my space of technological and economic security, with the threat picture I described in my exchanges with Lord Hutton, any of those threats could come to pass, or none or some of them could. There is a chance that that could happen on the threat side but, on the capability and response side, there are plenty of things that can usefully be there.
I will just pick three quickly. The Government would have to be careful about how they present this in public, but one is what digital defences look like with reduced US capabilities. The US is, in the words of its recently departed cybersecurity head, at risk of dangerously degrading its own defences through all the firings and through the sanctioning of and appalling treatment of her predecessor Chris Krebs, which has had a chilling effect on not just government agencies but the private sector. What does it look like when you are trying to source digital defence capabilities more broadly? That is one thing about the US.
Secondly, how do we then relate to the wider tech sector, including the cybersecurity private sector? Thirdly, how do we ensure resilience and what measures are we taking—including, but not confined to, the forthcoming legislation—to build up resilience, both in the cyber space and everywhere else? Those could be usefully timeless contributions to whatever comes out.
Q12 Bill Esterson: I have been sitting here thinking about the cost of everything you have been saying we are going to need to do. Can you give us any sense of how much we should prepare for defence spending to rise by?
Dr Rob Johnson: Since we are talking about it, the United States has, as you know, made a number of interesting announcements, such as expecting 5% of GDP to be spent on defence across Europe. Poland is already over 4% and it is going higher, largely through borrowing, rather than through taxation, which is very interesting.
At the moment, the 2.3% we possess is not sufficient to maintain even the current conventional Armed Forces and/or our nuclear deterrent. That is very evident. It is on the public record. I am not saying anything that is a secret disclosure. What do we do about it? Do we say that continuing to pay for the other public services, which are all very important, has to take priority or do we say that the global situation is now so serious that we can no longer rely on the figures we have?
There was a disclosure by a friend of mine in the Treasury, who said, “We’re going to hold up the increase in defence spending until 2027, because that way we have a delta of savings that we can spend on the other things we need to spend it on”. I do not dispute that Government is a choice; it is a decision you make on what you think the priorities are but, as an independent analyst—having left Defence, I can make these judgments through the evidence I have seen presented—I would argue that our national defence spending is far too low for the threat we actually face.
It is not the threat of 10 years ago, but rather the threat of today and, more importantly, the threat of tomorrow. I would argue that rearmament, for example, is like an infrastructure investment: expensive at the beginning, but the return on investment is much greater further down the line. If we treated it that way, we would be taking a different view of our budgeting.
Bill Esterson: Of course, there are economic benefits from the jobs and the growth that come from investing in defence. You mentioned a figure above 4% for Poland. Is that sort of area what you have in mind?
Dr Rob Johnson: The lowest point during the Cold War was 3.7% and the highest point was 6.5% or 6.7%, depending which year you measure it by and what you include in that figure. We have, over the last few years, for a variety of reasons, included more and more things within the defence budget that we used not to, in terms of just military capability. If you really put a gun against my head and asked, “What is the figure, Dr Johnson?”, I would tell you now it is 3.4% in the next two years.
Q13 Lord Boateng: Dr Johnson, you have clearly studied these things with great care and your analysis is an important one. You have made reference to Poland as having borrowed in order to fund expenditure on defence. We know that Germany changed its constitution so it could do likewise. Looking not only at the contemporary situation but historically, is there any example known to you of a nation that has either prepared for war or paid for war without borrowing?
Dr Rob Johnson: It depends on the duration of the conflict you are talking about, but no is the short answer. You are right. There is no standard case of that nature.
Lord Boateng: Is there, in your mind, a good case for counting that form of borrowing differently from borrowing to meet immediate, day-to-day exigencies?
Dr Rob Johnson: Yes. You are absolutely right. It is always a good idea to take a dual-track approach. There are things that you need to fix today and there are things that you need to invest in over the long term. For example, the hardening of national defences would be something that you can do over a 20 or 30-year period because you can continue to add to the investments that you have already made. On the other hand, spending money now on integrated air and missile defence would be, in my view, extremely wise.
The Chair: From this session, I am not entirely sure whether I should feel reassured or deeply alarmed. I am reassured by hearing from you as expert witnesses. Clearly, the relationship has changed between the US and Europe and, to a lesser extent, between the US and the UK. The point about trustworthiness and credibility is so important. The point that several of you made about the diversification of where we look to partnerships around the world is crucial.
You mentioned GCAP. Having recently come back from discussing that in Japan, there is a need. Other nations are looking to future relationships and just how important they are. AUKUS, of course, has been so important for many decades. To the point you were making about the Nordics and what we might learn from them, perhaps we should think about a further session to hear from some of their experts, given the experiences that they have had. Maybe there is a more holistic approach to our defence approach than we currently have.
The point is taken on board about spend. A lot of us around this table may agree with that.
May I thank our witnesses? Particularly to Dr Vinjamuri, I am sorry that you dropped out, through the fault of our systems, not yours. I extend the same to our colleague, Sarah Champion. Thank you very much, Dr Vinjamuri, for joining us and for your participation at the beginning of the session. Dr Rob Johnson, Professor Omand and Professor Martin, thank you all for your contribution to this, our first session on the UK’s national security posture.