 I was just saying to General Houghton that one of the casualties of having a long name and lots of titles is you get very small print on your name tag. And Nate, you are nobody, so you've got a very short name, so you've got a lot of big type here. Welcome everybody, we're delighted you're here. My name is John Hammering, I'm the president at CSIS. Just very pleased that General Sir Houghton was with us today. Let me just get some ring in this. Let me say why I think it's so very important. We're obviously interested in what you did, but we're really interested in what we're going to do. And we don't know what we're going to do. We're in some sense facing the very same structural strategic problem that you face. You know, every society has to design defense at two levels, a capital D and a small D. The capital D is the health of your economy, the vitality of your society, the shared conviction of your population as to causes that you're prepared to undertake. That's capital D, you know, defense. And then there's the small D defense, which is the kit. It's the equipment that you buy. It's the training program you have, the people you recruit, how many people you put in arms, et cetera. You know, and occasionally these things get out of faith. And my sense is that, of course, in the United Kingdom, that was in good measure what that last election was about. And the government, as General Houghton said, you know, had crystal clarity in what they knew they had to do for the big D defense. They had to get the underlying health of the economy reconfigured so that it was sustainable over time. And of course, that then brings into tension what do we do, small D defense, the details. Both of them are very important. The second one can't exist without the first. And so the kingdom went through a very interesting process. Many of us here have been watching it for some time. And now we're seeing its results and we're thinking to ourselves, we may not go down this road, but it is a road map that very, very good people have taken and we need to pay attention to it. And I think that's the spirit that's brought out so many people and so many cameras and such a willingness to share time today. So thank you all for coming. General, thank you for being with us. We're very honored that you're here. And Nate, you're going to do the real introduction. Thank you all. Thank you, Dr. Hanbury. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Nate Fryer, a senior fellow here at CSIS as well as a visiting research professor at the U.S. Army War College. Again, on behalf of CSIS as well as Rolls-Royce North America, let me welcome you to today's military strategy forum on the United Kingdom Strategic Defense and Security Review. Before we proceed, a small admin note if you could please silence all electronic devices. If you haven't done so already, that would be much appreciated. As you may or may not be aware, the military strategy forum is graciously supported by Rolls-Royce North America and we're also fortunate today obviously to have this beautiful facility at the St. Regis Hotel and their support as well. Through the strategy forum, CSIS invites senior defense and military leaders to offer unique perspectives on key defense issues of the day. Clearly, the subject of this afternoon's MSF event, the Strategic Defense and Security Review, is important on both sides of the Atlantic. Today we are pleased and honored to have General Sir Nicholas Houghton with us to address the SDR and its implications for the UK's military future. In that capacity, excuse me, General Houghton is currently the UK's Vice Chief of the Defense Staff and in that capacity he's been a key player in the SDSR and its deliberations. Prior to his service as the Vice Chief of the Defense Staff, General Houghton held a range of key posts in the British Army, the British Joint Military Community and multinational formations. These assignments include Chief of Joint Operations at the United Kingdom's Permanent Joint Headquarters, Deputy Commander Multinational Forces Iraq, Assistant Chief of the Defense Staff for Operations, Chief of Staff for the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps and the Director of Military Operations in the Ministry of Defense. General Houghton was commissioned in the British Army in 1974 as an infantryman in Yorkshire's Green Howard's Regiment, ultimately commanding the regiment's first battalion. From 1997 to 1999, General Houghton commanded the United Kingdom's 39th Infantry Brigade on operations in Northern Ireland. In honor of his distinguished military career, General Houghton has been honored with both the titles of Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Knight Commander of the Order of Bath. General Houghton, we are very grateful for you being here with us today. Let me also extend our collective gratitude at this time for all the sacrifices that you and the members of the British Forces have made in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade. We're truly very grateful for that and a special relationship. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming General Sir Nicholas Houghton. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Nate, for your very kind introduction. I'm delighted to be back in Washington. I bring with me a bit of a London bug, but I'm confident I will survive the next 20 minutes. It's great to have the opportunity to catch up with old friends, to speak to Americans, both within the administration and without, about our strategic defense and security review, what it means for the United Kingdom's military, but also importantly for our relationship with the United States. I'd like to thank very much CSIS and John Hamry for hosting this event, and I know assembling a very impressive panel. I'm going to try and keep my comments relatively brief so that there is plenty of time for what I'm sure will be a fascinating discussion. So let me just go back two weeks. Two weeks ago was a busy week for the UK government with the publication of three key documents. On the Monday, we published our new national security strategy. On Tuesday was the document I'm here to talk about today, the strategic defense and security review, and on Wednesday was the spending review, which set the budgets for all UK government departments. Taken together, these three documents represent three of the essential elements of strategy, the policy ambition on Monday, the military capability on Tuesday, and the financial resources on Wednesday. The fourth essential element is that the three are in coherent balance, but I sense that that is never the work of a single day. Indeed, to me, the maintenance of that coherence between policy ambition, financial resources, and military capability is the art of strategy, because coherence is not the natural state of things. The fundamental elements of strategy, to me, are a little bit more like helicopter flight, inherently unstable, needing constant attention. So our SDSR is a start point and not a finish. Now, some did accuse the UK government of having conducted a somewhat rushed process. I have to say I don't hold to that. The UK Ministry of Defence has been preparing the intellectual groundwork for a defence review, certainly for the past two years, particularly with our work on global strategic trends and on the future character of conflict. We also recognise that the military instrument of national power entered a strategic review in a difficult, or perhaps more accurately, what I might term a vulnerable position. And I say vulnerable for three main reasons. The first, the UK fiscal position, as you are aware, was and remains acute. And the government's determination to close the fiscal deficit in a single parliament added to the challenge of curbing government spending. But that was very clear, the grand strategic intent. Second, I think it fair to say that an existential threat to the United Kingdom in hard defence terms seems increasingly, for the moment at least, unlikely. The SDSR therefore correctly conflates defence and security for the first time. During a period when many were correctly questioning the relevance of some of our traditional military capabilities. But third, and I would doubt that this is a particularly British condition and John referred to it, the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan have bequeathed an immediate legacy of political caution and societal nervousness over the purposes to which the military instrument of national power has most recently been put. The British are perhaps in one of our typically ambiguous moods where armed forces have never been held at least recently in such high regard, but the purposes to which they have been put have never been so seriously questioned. So the military instrument of national power entered our defence review in a vulnerable position with many in what I call the Whitehall village viewing it as big, dangerous, expensive and occasionally attended by unforeseen consequences. Now given that context, I believe that defence has emerged from the process remarkably well. Its resource position has been defended, its utility to the strategic context is actively being reshaped and the political context for utility has significantly matured and I'll return to that comment towards the end. The review was based around the development of what we are calling the Future Force 2020. So we are working on a transformation programme to deliver a Future Force in a 10 year time frame and today I'd like to talk you through the thought process behind that Future Force. But first I'd just like to make some general points about where our SDSR leaves our relationship with the United States. As the SDSR makes explicit, our relationship is deeply rooted, broadly based, strategically important and mutually supportive. And the UK's intention is to remain America's most capable and reliable ally. We recognise that we benefit a great deal from the relationship, but in return we will retain the ability to operate independently or in support of the US across the full spectrum of domains and capabilities. The partnership is a real and an active one. The British Major General, Nick Carter, hands over command of RC South tomorrow, having led the US, UK and other multinational troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Helmand, we operate alongside the US Marine Corps every day and every night. General Petraeus' deputy is a British Army officer and our special forces work as closely with their American counterparts as any force in recent history. Now, this is not the occasion to speak on Afghanistan, but I want to make clear that the UK's commitment to the campaign was a constant theme throughout our review. The Prime Minister has made clear that the mission is vital to our national security and the commitment to the ISAF strategy is unequivocal. Every decision we took in the SDSR, we took had to be Afghanistan-proofed. There is no change at all to our presence. We will remain the second largest troop contributor with around 9,500 troops in theatre and we will continue to send our best people to leadership positions of ISAF and our national expertise to the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team. But the SDSR had to look beyond today and the immediate years' operations. Our analysis of future threats matches closely that of the United States. No doubt a reflection of our shared perspectives and priorities. We have worked closely with the Department of Defence during its drafting. There have even been Department of Defence officials working within our strategy unit, just as we have in yours. The relationship has been based on working extremely closely in the military intelligence and nuclear spheres. All of that will continue and benefit from the rebalancing towards future threats. The United Kingdom has a long and interesting history, but we don't intend to live in it. A striking feature I think of the review for the British media and people was the greater focus on cyber. We announced an extra $1 billion of investment in cyber across government. From a defence perspective, we're working on growing the cyber skillset and mainstreaming cyber into our training, education and doctrine. We're also working with the Department of Defence to enhance our already close operational relationship. And we've set ourselves the goal of signing a UK-US memorandum of understanding on cyber to formalise current and future cooperation in this field. We will continue to expand mutually beneficial relationships, countering terrorism and organised crime, reducing nuclear proliferation and preventing conflict through early intervention in failing states. Capacity building is a key tenet of our new government's approach. And we're already working closely with the United States in some countries in this area and now plan to do more. In parallel with the SDSR, we've been undertaking a review of the cost-effectiveness of our nuclear deterrent. Many thought that the deterrent might be a fault line in our new coalition government, but it has not been. The review has confirmed that a continuous submarine-based system will continue to provide the most effective minimum deterrent. And we will therefore proceed with the renewal of the Trident delivery system and the submarine replacement programme. And timetables are now more realistic, but that now brings us into line with US programmes and our cooperation with you is as close as ever. Overall, the future force will be capable of dealing with the sorts of challenges which we are likely to face together in areas of the world where we have common interests. Now the main feature of the future force is that it is adaptable. Our National Security Council decided on this posture because of the essentially unpredictable nature of the world. With resources and the range of threats broad, we decided to hedge against a range of potential outcomes. So the government asked the Minister of Defence to produce a force able to perform across a range of tasks without focusing exclusively on either the defence of the homeland or on expeditionary activities. I personally led the force development and testing process so I can confidently tell you that what we have produced does just that. We tested this future force structure 2020 against seven types of operation. Reflecting the range of tasks we think the UK military is most likely to have to do in the future. And military judgment and analysis panels tested a range of potential force structures against different scenarios to generate the future force. Just touching on them briefly, we firstly looked at our ability to restore freedom of navigation in contested waters. In a globalised world dependent upon trade, disruption to shipping lanes has wide-ranging effects to a large number of countries. So our thinking assumes that the UK would want to be capable of contributing to coalition operations of this sort. The second scenario was a stabilisation and count and urgency operation of the sort we've recently become familiar with. There were two main issues we tested here. The first was scale, where we concluded that we needed to remain capable of deploying and sustaining indefinitely a brigade-sized force. The second was self-sufficiency. Although we expect to conduct this sort of operation mainly in coalition, we took the view that we needed to remain self-deploying and self-sustaining. So the future force delivers enablers to avoid us being a burden on others. We also considered a similar scenario which the UK leads a coalition which intervenes in a civil war and conducts a follow-on counter-insurgency operation. With the UK in the lead, this tested us our logistics and command and control capabilities. The results can be seen in the force structure we've come out with and it justified our retention of the theatre command capability. Another scenario put weapons of mass effect into the hands of a non-state group and required the rapid and precise deployment of a high readiness force supported by strategic intelligence and rapid decision-making. And here we judged that we needed to be capable of operating on a national-only basis as well as part of a coalition. Fifth, we tested our ability to carry out a complex, non-combatant evacuation operation and the UK military has performed this function most recently in Lebanon in 2006, rescuing British nationals and citizens from other allied nations as tensions increased and led to war. This scenario tests our ability to deploy rapidly to disparate parts of the world with reach and sustainability as key issues. Perhaps the most challenging scenario was an operation to liberate an ally from an occupying state. And here we judged that we need to be capable of putting a divisional-sized force in the field with substantial maritime and air support. Our multi-role brigade concepts allows us to configure this sort of force for the threat it is likely to face at the time. And this represents, if you like, the best effort of the future force 2020 and it could operate alone or with allies. And then finally, we considered the ongoing requirement to deter the use of force against the UK. And here presence is key. So our decisions to develop a new carrier strike capability, to continue with hunter-killer submarines equipped with Tomahawk missiles, also support this. And in the final analysis, our ultimate guarantor of security is the Trident-Armed Submarines providing continuous at-sea deterrence. Now, none of the scenarios specifically covered our Article 5 commitment to NATO, but we judged that the force structure that can deal with these scenarios can meet our NATO commitment as well. Now, these options, I think, demonstrate that those who have interpreted the SDSR as a step back for Britain are a long way off the mark. Britain does expect to continue to play a major role in world affairs. Otherwise, the government would not have justified spending 2% of our GDP on defence at a time of critical financial difficulty. William Hague, the foreign secretary, said before this process started that there would be no strategic shrinkage. The Prime Minister, in his speech at the House of Commons on the SDSR, described Britain's significant assets, the sixth largest economy in the world, the fourth largest military budget, one of the biggest international aid programmes, a unique set of alliances and relationships and one of the largest global diplomatic networks. And we retain an ambition to sustain all these. The range of scenarios we have considered is indicative that we will remain a first-rate military power capable of conducting full-spectrum operations. The scenarios range from a significant deployment of tens of thousands of troops supported by the most modern maritime and air capabilities to an extremely precise deployment of a small number of our world-class special forces. We've tested our ability to lead a large coalition, to act in support of an ally or multinational organisation, and to deploy alone in the most challenging circumstances. We've tested capabilities from the deployment of sheer boots on the ground to the covert deployment of cutting-edge technologies. Across all of these areas, we're confident that the future force 2020 will provide the UK with the military required to face the threats of the 21st century. But it is worth dwelling on this question of 21st century military. It would be dishonest to pretend that the SDSR process was the painless formulation of a future strategic vision. The defence budget has decreased, and there have been cuts. We simply cannot do everything. Some platforms have seen big reductions, and a few have been cancelled. We are reducing the number of tanks in our inventory by 40%, and the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft is being cancelled. These were difficult decisions, but in the context of budgetary challenges and changing threats, it has been necessary to procure only equipment which is absolutely necessary for 21st century conflicts. Armour and artillery are less relevant today than they were 25 years ago. But because we cannot be sure that they will not be needed, we've decided to maintain some capability and to be ready to regenerate it should the future require it. And the Nimrod was part of a suite of anti-submarine capabilities and an expensive one at that. We judge that the risk is manageable given that we have next generation frigates, submarines and helicopters. It was, I think, against this background that one of the more difficult decisions was taken. Anyone following the SDSR would have seen that we had a major debate about carrier strike. Contractually, we were heavily committed to buying two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers and which we intend to equip, which we intend to equip with Stovall JSF. But shaping the Navy around two routinely operational carriers could not have produced a balanced force. In the short term, basing for the sort of operations we are likely to conduct is not a major concern. And the commitments to Afghanistan means that we are unlikely to mount a carrier task group operation in the near term. So we took the decision to commit to one operational carrier and keep the other at extended readiness. We've also decided to buy the carrier variant of JSF, which enables future operational cooperation with the U.S. Navy and with the French. Our judgment on basing in the short term means that we're going to take H&S Arc Royal and the Harrier Fleet out of service before our new carriers and JSF come in. Some have said this looks odd and in some ways it does. But Future Force 2020 needs to look beyond the next few years and set us on a sustainable footing to be ready to do the full range of operations. The carrier strike decision means that we will have the next generation of ships and jets in service for the long term at the expense of older less capable platforms, which we judge are not likely to be needed in the very short term. And importantly, we can retain the ability for further regeneration of that capability. Regeneration and modernization are recurring themes. What we've tried to do in this review is take significant steps away from a force structure dominated by Cold War capabilities for Cold War threats. Over the next 10 years, we'll be bringing new capabilities and platforms in across our armed forces. The Future Force is based on next generation equipment. We're not replacing like for like. The fleet of fast jets will be smaller, particularly until the Joint Strike Fighter comes into service. But when it does, we will have a very capable combination of Typhoon and F-35. We're going ahead with programs to buy new strategic lift, air to air refuelling, and helicopter capabilities that we need now and which retain our global reach. It's easy to overlook these sorts of platforms, which is why many nations do have aging fleets. We recognize the need to invest in enablers if we want to be capable of acting around the globe, alone if necessary, and as a credible major player in coalition operations. Type 45 frigates, Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, astute submarines, all represent a much more capable set of maritime platforms. The Royal Navy is not standing still. It will continue to commit to the range of tasks it does today, but with a more capable set of forces. The Army has enjoyed significant improvements in capability as we have equipped it to fight the war in Afghanistan. We will retain the two high readiness brigades, 16-air assault brigade, and three commando brigade. We are investing more in our enablers for special forces to ensure that they remain self-deploying, supporting and sustaining. And despite pressure to cut back, we will remain capable of re-rolling to produce land forces for the full range of combat missions. All this means that the future force 2020 will be leaner, it will be meaner, but we'll be able to carry out the full range of missions required. Now just by way of conclusion, I just want to go back to where I started and make two final points. The first is strategy is about sustaining the coherence of policy, ambition, resources and capabilities. And we will not have got the 2024 structure absolutely right. By 2015, the world will look different. Afghanistan may be resolved. The fiscal position we hope will be better. And in 2015, we will conduct another SDSR and a further recalibration of strategy will take place. I say this because one of the big lessons of our SDSR is that it is a mistake to leave them too long. The context moves too quickly and strategy does need active management. My second concluding point relates to the context I described at the outset and particularly that element of context which relates to political caution and societal nervousness over the use of the military instrument. Please do not read into that a judgment that our government lacks conviction or our society lacks what we call bottle. It's very clear from our SDSR outcome that our government wants us to be proactive in helping to shape a more stable world. It sees the military instrument as an essential element of this working with an incomprehensive approach and with international partners. But what I should also tell Americans from a societal and political perspective, a feature of the SDR with which you should recognise is that the UK government has no intention of misusing its armed forces. It will as a priority seek to help to stabilise the world, to prevent and contain conflict and to use all elements of national power and international partners to shape and maintain a more stable world. Whilst of course recognising that ultimately circumstances may arise when the resort to the legal use of lethal force is a national necessity. But the scrutiny which attends the commitment to lethal force will be very rigorous indeed and I think appropriately so. So thank you for giving me this opportunity to expand a little on our SDSR and explain why I think that the relationship between the US and the UK remains as close and important as ever. I do now look forward to participating in what I'm sure will be an interesting discussion. Thank you very much, General. Thank you. There should be microphones if you want to sit, sir. If you want to stand, so either way is up to you. There are microphones throughout the crowd so please raise your hand and we will call on you as your hand is available and we'll go from there. Questions? Right here please, then you. I'll go yourself. Hello, Bill Sweetman from Defense Technology International Magazine. The decision regarding the change from the Stovall to the carrier-based version of the F-35 and the reduction in numbers down the delay, that represents a big change in a commitment to the biggest transatlantic defense program. Can you go into a little of the background behind this? Was one factor, did it relate to confidence in the availability of the Stovall aircraft? Did it relate to performance issues? Did it relate to uncertainty about how that program was going? And can you kind of give an impression of what the US-UK discussions preceding that decision were like? I think there was a capability dimension and a cost dimension to it. There was a sense that the Stovall variant may be more costly, that was the initial view, and clearly in straightforward capability terms in terms of range and payload, the carrier variant is a superior variant. But I think that there is a wider context to why we went the way we went. Some of it was to do with the requirement to get down quite quickly to just two fleets of aircraft, and that was clearly in the short term going to be the typhoon and the tornado. And in that context, we could take a little bit of time to consider the best and the optimum regeneration of the carrier capability. And it was quite clear that in terms of wider interoperability, both with the US Navy, but also with the French, to go for a carrier variant, which would involve the fitting of cats and traps to our Queen Elizabeth class, gave us a greater interoperability internationally than just going the Stovall route. So I think the combination of international interoperability and the issue in terms of the cost and performance of the variant all played into the discussion and the ultimate decision. Hi, Vagram Radian from Defense News. Thank you very much, sir. You've produced an SDSR that's very outward looking. You talked about foreign development aid and that funding went up and defense spending classically went down, but it's to engage for a safer world earlier interaction. There's going to be likely a big political change tomorrow in the United States where there is a prevailing sense that it will be much more inward looking and a lot less conducive to more international spending, rather further constrict international spending. What does that apparent mismatch between what the United States might be spending and be willing to spend and what you're interested in spending? Is that a potential disconnect? I can't authoritatively speak about what the United States might in the future be prepared to spend by both in terms of its defense budget and its foreign aid, but perhaps from a UK context here. And something that a number of British taxpayers have to come to terms with, the idea that in terms of the furtherance of UK interests that a healthy amount of spending on overseas aid is a sensible thing. And I think it goes perhaps a wider contextual piece about the way in which Britain aspires to maintain its place in the world. And this plays to the view that investing in a globally independent rules-based world is one of the ways in which the United Kingdom derives its wealth and its relative freedoms and its standard of living. And hence the idea that the instruments of national power should not be held back for reactive use for when crises arise in the world but should in a comprehensive sense across government but also with other international partners be used proactively in an attempt to maintain stability in the world and to prevent conflict where it can and to contain conflict when it can. And I think that the significant use of overseas aid in that cross-government mix between diplomacy, overseas money and the proactive use of the military instrument but not as an instrument of intervention but one of stabilization plays to that overall theme. Now as I say, I can't really comment from the US dimension of that but I would sense that the preservation of a global rules-based order is absolutely in the wider American interest and one would sincerely hope that regardless of potentially the need to have some fiscal constraint in its spending the United States would also embrace that view of the world and one that use the instruments of national power proactively to might to try to maintain well stability. Jerry McGinn. General, thank you very much. Jerry McGinn, Northrop Grumman. I just wanted to ask you on the SDSR there were two kind of up arrows, the big ones that came out of that. One was cyber which was discussed Fairmount in the SDSR and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how do you see the MOD role in cyber versus GCHQ, where do you see, how do you see that developing? And then secondly, the question of unmanned systems was talked about as being a greater emphasis in the UK but it was less kind of, it was a bit vague what kind of investments are gonna be made there. And then I was wondering if you could put a little bit more on the F-35, there's numbers in the press that have talked about the buy going from 130 down to 40 or whatever. I understand you're not probably not at concrete numbers yet but have you have a sense of what you think you're gonna be able to get or the change from the different variants? Okay, in three parts, cyber. I think, yeah, in many respects although cyber has been an issue that we have talked about in security terms internally, I think it was perhaps one of the features of the SDSR that most sort of caught the British public imagination. And I think that they could recognize that in terms of personal security, the fact that cyber attacks could bring down some of our banking systems and those sorts of things, it suddenly sort of personalized this nature of the threat. I think that from a cross government perspective, the defensive nature of cyber is already reasonably established although we do recognize that much more money needs to be spent not just within the government sector but within the civil sector of making sure that our IT systems are as cyber defense proof as possible. The MOD has its own part to play not just within military systems but also within the systems of many of our major defense contractors who share many of our secrets. But I think that the novel element of the MOD part of this, not absolutely novel, but where we will be wanting as it were to operationalize cyber as a capability is in some of the offensive dimensions of the capability. I won't say any more particular on that but I think that the defensive dimension is already quite well established within the government psyche but I think its exploitation offensively is one where we have quite a lot of active thinking to do and that's one of the areas in which I know we're coming to a, hopefully working up a defense MOU with the United States we all wish to explore. I think on the UAV, you are quite right that there are extant UAV programs that we've got Hermes 450 to watchkeepers. We already have some Reaper predators in the Armory based on the Afghan experience. We are here, we are slightly dependent on the amounts of money that we can put into private venture enterprises with our major defense contractors and the speed with which developments then generate genuine capabilities, particularly I would say in the UCAV world, the unmanned combat air vehicles. The time frames for this are now just around the corner. Perhaps the last five to 10 years may generate the sorts of capabilities against which we can determine might the JSF be the last manned fast jet fighter that we need to procure. That in a way plays into your third question and it's to do with the JSF figures. I am not in a position at the moment to give you a definitive statement on numbers, first tranche, second tranche. It is undoubtedly fair to say we have changed the variant and we know the sort of numbers we need to meet the carrier strike capability but we haven't yet fully identified the numbers that we need to meet the ground based capability for our deep and persistent requirements. Those requirements will be worked out in a considered manner and we need to consider it in the context of the lifetime of the typhoon and in the context of what the UCAV sort of system might deliver in what time frame. So the ultimate numbers of the JSF buys over time is under active planning and consideration but you'll forgive me if I can't specify it's this number first tranche, this number second tranche. Yes, back there in the corner. Hi, hello, Walker Hardy from the National Defense University. Getting back to the previous question, the instruments of national power that you discussed. Again, here we've talked a lot about in the US the civilian capability, building up those capabilities. Secretary Gates and Secretary Clinton have worked together to try and find ways to move money around to fund that. Has that at all gone into your discussions with DFID with the foreign office to kind of build up the civilian capability for some of those state building scenarios you discussed? It's a very good question. I say that in as much as to me, it's potentially will be either the most exciting or disappointing bit about the outcome of the SDSR. We have talked a good comprehensive approach for a number of years. We can talk a good proactive use of the instruments of national power in order to deliver stabilization. But those effects are not brought about purely by the writing of policy papers. An NSC construct is a novel construct within the United Kingdom system which very heavily relies in defaults to its specific departmental pillars. But the advent of a national security council will make sense when there is an operational apparatus beneath it to turn some of those policy papers into reality and some funding and resources to actually spend. Now then, yes, we are incrementally making our way there. With the advent of conflict pools, so there is shared resource across government to apply the instruments of national power in a comprehensive way and in a proactive way. We are getting there. I'm not yet, and I say this to the detriment of my own a construct of which I'm a part, that there is the right mindsets for proactive and preemptive investment of preventative strategies, which perforce to me, we must see in the timeframe of decades, not months. I think one of the problems of governments is that they tend to operate only in one tense and that is the sort of the present crisis tense rather than the future strategic planning tense. And getting that right as an outcome of this SDSR with the new apparatus of the NSC with pooled budgets and with a better coherence of approach will be one of the litmus tests of whether or not this SDSR, a national security strategy is a good one and is making us in an all of government sense act in the right ways. So I have modest confidence that we have embarked on the right strategy but the challenges to make it a reality are still ahead of us. So thank you very much, Steve Flanagan from CSIS. Coming back to the part of your answer on the cyber question, this as you noted was both the strategic defense and security review and there was a lot of attention given in this review about the armed forces role in responding to natural disasters and also support to civilian authorities in what you call resilience, what of course we call Homeland Security. I wondered if you could discuss, that was an issue that was of course very controversial in several of the recent US Quaternion Defense Reviews. What role, how big a role should the military play in societal security, Homeland Security? And also what role should it play? That debate was kind of resolved after Hurricane, in natural disasters, that debate was kind of resolved after Hurricane Katrina here. But I wondered if you could discuss how that played out in your internal deliberations including within the National Security Council review and whether you're comfortable with the sort of the balance that's now or the expectations that are out there about world the military will play in both supporting resilience and response on natural disasters. I'm comfortable up to a point. I think that there was a lot of active debate within the National Security Council on this particular issue about what the role of the military was domestically. And we have, you may or may not recall, dating back to 1688, the Bill of Rights, which underpends much of our current practices and constitutional positions, which states that it's illegal to maintain an army in peacetime with the consent of parliament because that's the position that we're in. And every year we have a bill that allows the army to exist. And it's born of a dodgy history of some of what the army did internally many hundreds of years ago. And there is an inherent desire to avoid the commitment of the military domestically. However, there are lots of extant practices under the banner of military aid to the civil authority which permits in certain circumstances and for certain standard capabilities, both of a counter-terrorist, a bomb disposal, those sorts of things, the commitment of the military domestically. And there are lots of times in which, in terms of military aid to the civil community, it is actually the responsibility of the military to act first and then seek authority second. And whether on its floods in Cumbria and those sorts of natural disasters which our weather occasionally visits on us, it's absolutely the duty of the military to do these things. There is more sophisticated machinery of government about giving authority if the military is to be used in respect of a fireman strike or an element of civil disorder. The outcome of the review in many ways was to better formalize those things which were expected of the military. But I think if I was saying what is our national expectation of what the military does, it is probably more than what we have preordained and what we are ready to do on any given day. The national domestic resilience side of life is not what we would call a force driver for our force structures. So it is taken out of hide. It is not one of the driving purposes behind the force structure we have, other than a number of niche areas, primarily which relate to bomb disposal and to counter-terrorism. So I think it's where we are comfortable with constitutionally. And I think for most conceivable scenarios, it's the proper place to be. But it never, as it were, avoids the potential scenario where the country might be wanting us to do more than we are actually fully resourced and prepared to do on a given day. And I just sense that with this conflation of hard defense and security, we might, in terms of future calibrations, calibrate a little further towards what we are actually capable of doing domestically as a force driving task. It's a bit of an elaborate answer, but it's so based on the sensitivities and the constitutional position of the British military within society. You've just been through this difficult process of making some of these high level strategic decisions. As you said, looking at everything through a strategic lens and then testing it out intellectually to see what capabilities you're gonna need for the near, medium and long term. What advice do you have for the United States as we embark on this process of trying to right size our defense for our pocketbook and do so in a way that doesn't end up with glaring gaps in military capability at a time you're fighting at least one war? I sort of have this question independent. I thought I gave a good answer that. I'm trying to remember what I know if it was. Yeah, but nobody heard it right. No, no, but I think that the first thing I said and would repeat is I think that you got to get people particularly within the military who are by nature sort of tribal and parochial about their capabilities. First, to buy into the big idea that a grand strategic course of action relates to the strengthening of one's economy and it's the defending of that economy. Because without a strong economy you can't have strong security. And that's where the process of the SDSR took me intellectually, most of the MOD intellectually and I think has got our people intellectually. And so an age of short-term austerity for the right strategic outcome is one. And I think I would also translate that down into the mindsets of the sort of the single service proponences that there may need to be some short-term pains. You may need to have some alliance contributions to cover minor incoherences in seamless capability because of the need to suborn absolute military coherency where actually if you look at it quite often different environments are arguing for similar capabilities but just generated from their environment and sensible risk management can be taken. But I think that the third one I would perhaps say and it is perhaps in many ways if I sort of went off on one, the most complex and that is all about taking your people with you. Because you don't want to enter a sort of a perfect storm where you have armed forces that have come through Iraq and Afghanistan. You have horrible fiscal austerity. You cut back on the military but you don't protect the people dimension of your military because the maintenance of the moral dimension of fighting power as we call it. I don't know if you have a similar doctrinal construct of physical, conceptual and moral elements of fighting power. You can take a capability holiday on a physical piece. You can skip a bit of doctrine but in terms of the moral dimension, risk that at your peril. It's one of the places we are probably treading something of a tightrope ourselves. After all, we are committed to Afghanistan at least for another five years and yet 17,000 of our service people we are either going to waste away or make redundant. We've not tried that before. And at the same time their pay is marking time and some of their allowances might be under threat. So I think that there has got to be political acuity to the moral dimension of a fighting force, particular one that has come out of a sustained period of combat. And I think we need to share our experiences in handling this because I think it is one of the big challenges. We do have one time for one more question. So, right there, yep, Steve Rader. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, Steve Rader from SCIC. Sir, I'd be interested in how the special or strong relationship between the United Kingdom and France influenced the outcome of the SDSR. If I'm honest, I don't think it of itself was a strong influence. I think that the, nevertheless, it was undoubtedly part of the context because the context is part of using capabilities in international alliances and in coalitions. And it is very evident that France's sort of the United Kingdom's equal partner, if you like, as the two most capable countries in terms of their armed forces in Europe, in terms of their ability to genuinely project globally military capability. And there was perhaps a period of time when a united kingdom, France, entombed about military capability might be seen as somehow destabilizing to the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. I think we have considerably matured our way through that. I think now that there is a recognition that the United Kingdom and its relationship within Europe and particularly with France in delivering genuine military capability from the European pillar of NATO can only be a good thing for the United States. And so it wasn't, I don't think, per se a driver, but I think that through the process of the SDSR, France and the United Kingdom has looked at each other and said, look, we need to get on. We need to talk. We need to, in a very sort of considered way, start to build a more meaningful relationship in a security sense. And that is to the benefit of Europe. It's to the benefit of the Transatlantic Alliance. It's the benefit of NATO. So I think a hugely good thing. But I don't want to absolutely presage the detail of what might come out during the balance of the week. But I think it's a sensible and mature thing to be doing to the betterment of the Atlantic Alliance as well. Sir, we greatly appreciate the time you spent with us here today. And on behalf of CSIS, Rolls-Royce North America and all of us here, we would gratefully like to thank you for everything you've done. Thank you very much.