Rt Hon Luke Pollard MP, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Speech for Long War Conference
Defence Minister, Luke Pollard MP delivers a speech at RUSI on long warfighting readiness.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you to RUSI for convening this very timely discussion about preparing to fight a longer war, it goes right to the heart of the security challenges that we face.
They’re right to the heart of the recommendations in the Strategic Defence Review.
And you will have heard from some of your speakers earlier in the day that are quite punchy as to how they’re talking about this. This is to be welcomed to deliver all the ambitions in the Strategic Defence Review.
We need people to be punching. We need people to be impatient. Certainly, I’m impatient as a minister, and we need people to be driving new behaviours and new ways of working into deliverance.
We will not deliver the Strategic Defence Review without any change, and that is not our ambition.
That’s why we embarked on a series of deep reforms to defence, to look at not just how we procure, how we invest in skills, how we retire more technologies and bring on new to deliver the Strategic Defence Review, we need a fundamentally different route to rearming our nation and to creating the deterrence we need to prevent the conflict that you’ve spent your day talking about and effectively our job is to move to warfighting readiness.
That is not something you can simply do overnight. It is a process that gets us to a new destination, because if we want to deter Russian aggression, we have to be ready to defeat it, and that means fundamentally re-examining our core structure, our posture and the way that the brilliant men and women in our armed forces are supported, not just by military defence, our procurement, but by industry and by society as well and alongside our allies, we have to have the ability to demonstrate that we win that fight, because ultimately, that is the best way to create the deterrence necessary to deliver peace.
But this government has always been clear about the size and urgency of the task ahead of us. We inherited a military that was underfunded, hollowed out armed forces, and a defence program that was unaffordable and frankly unfit to counter the rising effects we face.
Some of you may have read last week’s Commons Defence Committee report warning about the state of military readiness, broadly chimed with what was set out in the Strategic Defence Review.
And as the Minister for readiness, more discussion about how we accelerate our readiness helps us across all domains and across all parts of society. So, it’s a debate that I welcome and one that I want to encourage more not shy away from.
Now we should be under no illusions that the pace of change needed to deliver those goals is considerable, and that new era of threats that the SDR and George Robinson has set out need to be matched by new era for defence as well, and that’s why we’re focused on assessing Britain’s military medicine to set out a strategic and comprehensive plan to transform defence.
It’s why we argued for and secured the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War. There’s an extra 5 billion pounds in the defence budget this year, rising to 2.57% of GDP by April 27 and 5% by 2035 and a stat that I always think helps illustrate what is just very large numbers is there’s not a single person in uniform in the British Armed Forces Today who has ever known 10 years ahead of them of increasing defence spending, not a single person in uniform.
So we get it, and we have to lead that speed to get there, but we can’t do that alone. And so to win any war or to deter anymore, be that short, or we as the United Kingdom and across our allies, need to radically up our game in terms of onboarding new technologies, transforming and building industrial resilience at the same time.
And we can see that from our lessons from Ukraine, our Ukrainian friends have fundamentally changed the way that they fight over the course of Putin’s forced game invasion. And it teaches some really useful lessons to UK.
Not all those lessons are directly comparable, but many of them are, and I think it is important that there’s normally a lesson to prove every argument from Ukraine. But in particular, the ones that I take are the ones that challenge the status quo, because fundamentally, Russia’s illegal war against the Ukraine has challenged that status quo, and that’s why Ukraine has become a laboratory for war.
We can see the tactics that are working. We seem to see the ones that aren’t. We can see the tactics that work, and we can see the ones that we are not getting the results of and our unique place as Ukraine’s leading friend within the NATO Alliance provides us access to information and IP through our new IP agreement that many of our allies do want to have.
So, there’s opportunity to not just learn the lessons from Ukraine, but to bring them and onboard them into our armed forces, into our industrial base faster, as we seek to encourage more of our allies to do the same as well. Now, instead of being overwhelmed after three days of invasion, as Putin originally planned, the war in Ukraine has become a war with industrial production, particularly a race to manifest and manufacture the best drones at pace with little prospects of winning a fight for territory alone, nearly half a million of Putin’s troops are dead, and 40% of all Russian government spending is now spent on the war effort. Putin nevertheless, seems to have concluded that he must continue the fight.
That’s a disaster for Ukraine, and ultimately, it’s a disaster for Russia and its people as well. However, the conflict and the way to progress has taught us valuable lessons about how a nation can mobilize and adapt to a lot more in the face of an unrelenting, powerful enemy.
Now, first of all, it’s taught Ukraine’s allies to organize and integrate more closely than ever before. Britain has built on that drive and created a coalition of the willing. If you think about even a year ago, there was no UK EU Defence Partnership. There was no UK leadership of the UK defence contact group, no historic transit house agreements with Germany. No Lighthouse projects that came to that trading house agreement, no reboots of the Lancaster house treaty with France.
Today, all those measures are in place, and many more. We’re working with our new NATO members Sweden and Finland and the JEF alliance of nations much more closely to be truly interoperable and interchangeable.
And we have an increasingly developed and thriving relationship with Australia and the US, through AUKUS. We’re developing GCAP in Italy and Japan, and that we are leading from the front, because our allies are looking to us more than they were 16 months ago.
This is the unique position we find ourselves in, that a challenge we must rise to now we have a NATO first defence policy, but it’s not only NATO. So, while we are prioritizing securing our own backyard, we also have defence relationships, especially industrial relationships the world over, and they also form a part of what we can learn from the lessons from Ukraine.
I think when the nation knows the full scale of what we have done, I think the British public will be enormously proud of the men and women in the Ministry of Defence and industry, that will be a story that one day will be able to tell in full, but not yet.
But we are increasing our Ukraine support, military support for this year is a significant contribution, the most the UK has ever spent. We’re on track to boost the number of drones delivered by a factor of 10 in just one year.
In 2024 we provided 10,000 drones to Ukraine. It’s 100,000 in 2025 and that’s remarkable achievement, but just the start of the scaling ability we need to deliver.
We’re backing valuable industrial experience and how we can coordinate a rapid service defence production. And in the eight months since John Healey, the Defence Secretary took on the role as co-chair of the UDCG, we have raised international pledges for Ukraine to more than 50 billion pounds.
British manufacturing is helping Ukrainian engineers build British storm shadow drones to Thales in Belfast and supporting Ukraine to triple production of lightweight, multi role missiles, supporting hundreds of jobs in United Kingdom, in a deal worth £1.6 billion
And when our Prime Minister and President Zelenskyy said they signed the historic 100 year partnership in January, it immediately opened up opportunities for UK defence SMEs to work with Ukrainian counterparts.
One of Ukraine’s biggest drone manufacturing companies, Ukrspecsystems, recently invested £200 million to produce the latest technologies here, creating another 500 jobs.
And these contracts are testament to defence of how to act as an engine for growth and for the UK to react decisively, increasingly, towards a wartime pace. Now we’re benefiting from the things that only trans defence sector can bring to the table, that creativity, those capabilities that have been tested and refined are the most difficult of conditions, and we’re applying those increasingly to our forces.
The defence investment plan later this year sets out some of those lessons learned and how we’re adapting to those capabilities, but you will already be able to see some of those and the commitments made in the SDR, in particular, the massive increase in spending on autonomy that seeks to learn the lessons and the importance of increasing lethality that comes from the experience of what we’re seeing in Ukraine.
To get to war fighting readiness, we need a whole of society approach. And actually the whole of society, part of the Strategic Defence Review is, I think, one of the most challenging parts of the SDR. We need to make the case that more people need to understand why defence important.
More businesses that are not yet a defence business need to understand that there is a market for them within defence. That’s especially true of technology businesses that are able to sell in their products, their AI code, their data analytics, the autonomy advantages, dual use technology in a way that is not previously available even two three years ago in defence procurement, it’s a big challenge to harness the skills that we can see across society.
That’s what Ukraine has done, but it’s what we need to do a lot more. That’s why, when we appointed Rupert Pearce, former FTSE 100 chief exec as a new national armaments director, his mission is very clear, to drive procurement change at pace, to make a defence of engine for growth.
It’s a good soundbite, but it happens to be true. If you think about the uptick in defence contracts that we have signed. There’s more than 1000 major contracts signed since the last general election. 86% of those have gone to British companies.
The new Office of Small Business Growth stands up in the new year, meaning more small businesses will be able to navigate the somewhat complicated initial routes finding the contracts within defence, just as we seek to simplify those contracts, a procurement that currently takes six years needs to take two years.
Two years needs to take one year, and those contracts that currently take under the year to take only a few months, you don’t deliver that improvement in output without attacking culture, without culture change within an organization, it is very tempting for a minister in my position to talk about process and platforms, and indeed, that’s what most people want to talk about, but to deliver process and platform improvement, greater availability, greater spiral development, we need a different culture within defence, both in the MOD, within the new NAD group, and within our interactions with business, both from the investor community, from SMEs, the big primes to an entire supply chain.
That’s a fundamentally different challenge. And I haven’t heard many defence ministers for a very long time, talk about the importance of culture, because culture change is about how we adopt a different preference to risk.
It’s how we adopt a different preference and approach to spiral development. It’s about how we challenge the existing technologies versus new technologies. It’s about removing a romanticism, which we’re good at in Britain, or polishing old platforms that have been around for a long time, and we keep them because they have been around for a long time, not because of the battle hidden effect they can deliver, and the deterrent effect they deliver.
These are big changes, and just as we want to increase the number of cadets by 30% there are things we can do that expands the surface area of defence so the public can see us much more as well.
Because if we are to get ready for any conflict large or small, we will need the support of the nation. Will need the mobilization of individuals, and will be continually the mobilization of the defence industry to deliver that.
Now, the final point I just want to say is that progress is being made, but I’m an impatient minister and I want to see it changing faster, and to do that, we have to be more comfortable with risk.
We have to be more comfortable with embracing new technologies, challenging so many orthodoxies that defence is good about embedding.
You can probably think of many of those, and one of those orthodoxies is accepting the level of stupid rules that we have across our procurement system, the way that our military operates and the way that defence operates with society as well.
If you look at some of the agility that we can see where we have given the right permissions to our people to support them on Ukraine.
When we talk about learning the lessons, there are some big geo strategic lessons we can learn, but there are also culture lessons, micro process lessons, efficiency lessons that we can learn as well, and that is about us being bold enough to take the risk of that change.
To be clear, if we want to move to war fighting readiness, in our case, we need to do things differently. That does carry more risk, but it carries a calculated risk. Safety matter is not, will not compromise that, but we do need to make sure we’re learning the lessons from Ukraine. Indeed, as we seek to bring together our export offers, we can see that British industry is popular worldwide, the Norway frigate deal, the typhoon deal with Turkey. It’s not just our own backyard opportunities, but developing the technology that secures our own backyard provides opportunities to secure those for allies around the world.
And the final thing I just want to say is we are not at war, but nor are we at peace. We’ve seen that.
As a new government, we took the decision to declassify the activities of the spy ship Yantar, I think the words that I’m allowed to use was we serviced a Royal Navy submarine alongside and Yantar left.
By simply calling it out, we did something that previous governments would not do. They would not talk about submarine activities in public, and they will not talk about the activities of the nuclear submarine in public.
There’s a different approach as to how we can help the public understand the threats we’re facing and at the same time reinforce the leadership of the United Kingdom, working with our allies to call out Russian behaviour, to build more international support for the measures that are necessary.
There’s a lot of work to be done to deliver more war fighting readiness. We’re making good progress. The defence investment plan will show what can be invested in what platforms we are looking to focus on the development in the future.
But this is a collective effort. This is a collective effort of everyone in defence, everyone in this room and industry as a whole, that is a correct decision we all must make to be part of that journey.
So thank you. Please use that experience to look at all systems, our systems, if there are obstacles in the way, if there are stupid rules that are getting in the way, let us know what they are, because they cost time, energy, money and strategic advantage. So let’s knock them down. Thanks very much.