Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton speech at DSEI
DSEI is a showcase for British industry and British ingenuity
Firstly, I just want to say it is a great pleasure to be here today and to have the opportunity to give my first major speech as the Chief of Defence Staff here at DSEI 2025.
I am hugely honored to take on this role at such an important time for our security. I want to start by saying and paying a huge tribute to my predecessor, Tony Radakin, whose truly exceptional leadership over a remarkable period of CDS has played a vital role in delivering the security of our nation, and particularly in supporting Ukraine.
I also want to congratulate Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth on his appointment as the Chief of the Air Staff, he’ll be speaking tomorrow. The RAF is in great hands, and I’m very much looking forward to working with him to build on the future of the Royal Air Force.
Now, regular visitors to DSEI might know that I have spoken here several times before, but it was a speech I made here as an Air Marshal in 2019 that perhaps provides the most appropriate starting point for today.
So my themes that day were increasing global uncertainty, the imperative of modernizing our armed forces to meet new threats, and how private sector innovation must be fired up to catalyze that renewal.
Now, those themes seem just as relevant in 2025 as they were six years ago. And I know that the cynics in the audience might say well, what have you done about it, not a lot has changed. But I think what’s remarkable looking back to 2019 is just how fast things have changed.
We had no idea that Ukraine would teach us such clear lessons on the importance of adapting our Armed Forces quickly, the need for speed. I don’t want to sound too Top Gun with Gary on stage.
This pace of adaptation will be of critical importance to our Armed Forces and of critical importance to me during my time as CDS. So the uncertainties I spoke about in 2019 and let’s remember that was before Covid, before Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, and before the unravelling of peace in the Middle East. They seem almost mundane in comparison to those of today.
We didn’t know how much impact new weapons would have on a major conflict on European soil, and we didn’t know that a British Prime Minister would make the biggest sustained increase in defence spending for generations.
So when I gave that speech in 2019 the servicemen and women of my generation had only ever known wars of choice. We’d optimised our Armed Forces for the type of conflicts we saw in the Balkans, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, conflicts where our people serve with courage and professionalism, but where we could rely on unimpeded logistics chains, air supremacy and significant operational advantage.
But today, six years later, it’s clear to me that we need to be ready for a different kind of conflict. We’re now confronted by a resurgent, aggressive Russia probing our defences, backed by an economy on full war footing, seeking to extend its borders westwards.
And we’ve seen the character of conflict changed irrevocably, I think, expanding into new domains and increasingly embracing new digital technologies, robotics and artificial intelligence.
So as I reflect on my time in service, I can confidently say that I have never known a more demanding security environment than the one we have today. So this unfortunate legacy of six short years is far more uncertain, risky and dangerous, and as I contemplate my new and expanded responsibilities as the Chief of Defence Staff, there is a lot to do on my to do list.
It’s an incredibly wide ranging manifesto to deliver, from designing and building an integrated force to leading the newly formed MSHQ, delivering SDR and implementing defence reform. But all of that is in service of our first duty in defence, which is to be ready to deter, fight and win.
That is why, as CDS, I will focus on our readiness, our people and our modernisation. That way we will be ready to deter, fight and win today and tomorrow.
All of us across defence have got a part to play, and we certainly cannot do it without the help of industry. So while there is a lot to do, and a lot I could say about my priorities at CDS, I want to focus here at DSEI on how we work together, and most importantly, about how we go faster.
So I think I know what we need to do. I’ve got my orders, the parameters and objectives for modernising defence have been clearly established in the Strategic Defence Review published this summer. But while the SDR is crucial, reviews do not deliver capability or deterrence, so talking about what we need to do is easy.
The same might also be true of the why. That becomes clearer with every Russian attack on Ukraine and every frame of a picture we saw from Beijing last week. So while talking about why and the what might be easy, success depends on us working out how we do it and how we do it more quickly.
The Defence Industrial Strategy published on Monday is an important step in making defence an engine for growth, and it will strengthen our industrial base, which will increase the deterrent effect.
But it is the implementation and delivery that matter. The importance of this, how we deliver has been brought into sharp focus by Ukraine.
Now, throughout history, warfare has been a catalyst for transformation. Today, Ukraine is providing that crucible of change, a tragic and terrible test bed for a new era of military confrontation.
I’ve been to Ukraine twice in the past two weeks, and I’ve witnessed the remarkable ingenuity, spirit and bravery of its people. I’ve seen how the existential threat the nation and its soldiers face has driven innovation far beyond anything we’ve achieved in peacetime, even with all of our experience and knowledge and world leading science and engineering institutions.
I’ve seen how the cleverest minds from Ukrainian universities and industry are manipulating and exploiting technology to solve specific tactical problems and overcome the numerical and economic advantages that Russia enjoys.
There is much we can learn from Ukraine, but we must also remember that this is a fight often more reminiscent of the First World War trenches than the 21st Century. It’s a conflict where incredible advances in technology and intervention innovation have not proved decisive for either side, but that said, there are important strategic lessons for us to draw about how a nation mobilises and adapts in the face of an unrelenting enemy.
When we think in the UK about how we want to fight, we ideally want to deter that fight by being able to win quickly and decisively with the forces we have. But history tells us that if we don’t win quickly, we must also be ready to sustain that fight and adapt faster than our adversary to win over the long term.
That is what Ukraine has done and what Ukraine is doing today, harnessing the skills of people, industry and data to build an ecosystem that is agile and responsive rapidly. The UK has done this before. RV Jones’s book ‘Most Secret War’ describes how the Second World War’s brilliant scientists work with the intelligence communities, industry and war fighters to solve the most pressing military challenges of the day.
More recently, we stepped up to the challenges of Covid, and we are doing it today in support of Ukraine. Many of you here are integral to that effort, providing critical capability at scale, driving the pace of change and forcing the enemy to respond.
We should expect the same focus on UK capability in the future, but we cannot leave it to chance. So I think we’ve got to do two things in parallel. First, we need to build credible forces today to deter our adversaries and ideally enable us to win a decisive victory. And we need to do it fast to continue to deter the adversary over the next few years.
Second though, we need to build the system and nurture the institutional foundations that will drive that rapid innovation and scaling we’ll need in wartime. So as I consider the design of the integrated force, another of my jobs, I’m thinking about a force that can conduct integrated action across cyber, space, land, sea and air, which, alongside our allies, can win quickly and decisively.
But I’m also thinking about how we build a thriving industrial base where collectively, we have the culture, the relationships and the system to deliver the force more quickly, and a force that’s ready to adapt in war.
Clearly, this is a team game. That’s why I talk about being ready to fly, to deter, fight and win today, tomorrow, and together, those of us in uniform know that we cannot do this alone. We cannot do it without support of industry.
The capacity, capability, creativity and resilience of industry is an important component of our national strength and our ability to deter our adversaries. The problem is we have spent the last 25 years driving through efficiency, making our systems leaner, inexorably seeking greater assurance and adding more process.
We have prioritised cost and perfection over time, delivered through firm price contracts and a transactional approach between us, that approach will not deliver the rate of change and adaptation we need.
It’s a system optimised for the past, not the needs of the future. So achieving the required speed demands that we change our relationship with industry to innovate at a wartime pace and make defence the engine for growth.
Commitments to improve things a useful rallying cries, but we have to be specific about what needs to change and how.
Now I’m very conscious that industry is not one monolithic block. One size does not fit all, but there are some key characteristics that I think that future relationship will have.
We have to open up our systems and architectures to allow the best in the market to play with old and new defence industries working together, like we’ve seen in the Royal Air Force’s Stormshroud. This model might be uncomfortable for the primes, but without it, we won’t apply our best talent to the hardest problems that we face now and in war.
For our part, in government, we must ensure companies can make money in this new model. We can’t put our faith in the venture capital fairy without a route to bigger profits. This will mean closer relationships between the Armed Forces and industry, with the aim of delivering outcomes and solving problems, not awarding contracts for specific system requirements.
And as part of that, we need to simplify and speed up our approvals and value time much more in Ukraine right now, where industry works directly with the war fighters.
They were right there in the factory I visited last week, demanding refining and testing, and industry moves money where it needs to be and does it fast.
Under UK defence reform, funding for research development and delivery will all come under the National Armaments Director. This provides a remarkable opportunity to tune the whole system of capability development, end to end, but we won’t seize that huge opportunity if we don’t put our warfighters at the heart of our thinking on capability development.
Like so much in defence, success will come from working across organisational boundaries, not in our stovepipes. That will be a key focus for me as we implement defence reform.
Now the Industrial Strategy recognises these pressures and the need to change. That’s why it stresses the need for industry to be brought much closer to UK defence through a new strategic partnership built on reform, innovation and growth.
We are in an era none of us in the Armed Forces today or industry have known. I was speaking to a group of officer trainees on my last day as the Chief of the Air Staff two weeks ago, and I explained to them that they are entering a period of historic growth in defence spending, which means for the first time in decades, we can plan for a stronger, more resilient military.
The opportunities for businesses of all sizes to scale up are enormous. So I welcome the focus on British jobs, British enterprise and British ingenuity, which we see all around us here at DSEI.
These are the people and the institutional foundations that we need to nurture so we’re ready to adapt in wartime, but we need you to be world class. We need you to compete with the very best in the world, not only so the UK Armed Forces have the best kit in the world, but also that you can sell your stuff to our allies. That’s what will drive real growth, and that means we need you to invest too.
Three and a half years on from Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine and with massive, massive planned increases in defence spending right across Europe, I’m surprised that I don’t see shareholders investing to grow capacity and develop new proper products right across the enterprise.
We need to see industry partners step up, just as we are asking the taxpayer to step up, and we’ll do what we can to support you in every way.
So to conclude with the benefit of six years of hindsight, the themes in my 2019 DSEI speech have proved enduring, but I’m not sure that many of us quite saw how urgent the modernisation of the Armed Forces would become.
So if we project ourselves six years into the future for a moment, how would the Chief of Defence Staff in 2031 react to the speech I have given today, I hope they would say that we embraced the why,answered the how and delivered the what.
I hope they say we accelerated the pace of change, working in partnership, by opening architectures, by digitising our acquisition systems, by simplifying our processes, by taking risks, and by blending the very best of the old and new in the defence industry.
I hope that they say, alongside the huge increase in defence spending, industry invested to improve its productivity and competitiveness, and this has led to rapid growth.
I also hope, as we build a force ready to deter, fight and win, we will have developed a system that applies the skills and capabilities of this remarkable nation to adapt faster and prevail against any adversary.
The Strategic Defence Review charts the course for defence reform, the Defence Industrial Strategy tells us how to progress, and the rising budget gives us the means.
So our task is clear. We have to get on with it so that we are ready to deter, fight and win today, tomorrow and together.
Thank you very much.