Podcasts about defence studies

Ostap Kryvdyk is Royal College of Defence Studies member, MA (King's College London) and Chair, Ukrainian Strategic Initiative think tank, Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. ----------LINKS:https://x.com/ostapkryvdykhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kryvdyk/https://cepa.org/author/ostap-kryvdyk/https://fpc.org.uk/three-years-on-what-peace-should-be/https://cepa.org/article/the-dangers-of-chicken-kyiv-thinking/----------SUMMER FUNDRAISERSNAFO & Silicon Curtain community - Let's help help 5th SAB together https://www.help99.co/patches/nafo-silicon-curtain-communityWe are teaming up with NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade to provide 2nd Battalion of 5th SAB with a pickup truck that they need for their missions. With your donation, you're not just sending a truck — you're standing with Ukraine.https://www.help99.co/patches/nafo-silicon-curtain-communityWhy NAFO Trucks Matter:Ukrainian soldiers know the immense value of our NAFO trucks and buses. These vehicles are carefully selected, produced between 2010 and 2017, ensuring reliability for harsh frontline terrain. Each truck is capable of driving at least 20,000 km (12,500 miles) without major technical issues, making them a lifeline for soldiers in combat zones.In total we are looking to raise an initial 19 500 EUR in order to buy 1 x NAFO truck 2.0 Who is getting the aid? 5 SAB, 2 Battalion, UAV operators‍.https://www.help99.co/patches/nafo-silicon-curtain-community----------Car for Ukraine has once again joined forces with a group of influencers, creators, and news observers during this summer. Sunshine here serves as a metaphor, the trucks are a sunshine for our warriors to bring them to where they need to be and out from the place they don't.https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/summer-sunshine-silicon-curtainThis time, we focus on the 6th Detachment of HUR, 93rd Alcatraz, 3rd Brigade, MLRS systems and more. https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/summer-sunshine-silicon-curtain- bring soldiers to the positions- protect them with armor- deploy troops with drones to the positions----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain----------TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND:Save Ukrainehttps://www.saveukraineua.org/Superhumans - Hospital for war traumashttps://superhumans.com/en/UNBROKEN - Treatment. Prosthesis. Rehabilitation for Ukrainians in Ukrainehttps://unbroken.org.ua/Come Back Alivehttps://savelife.in.ua/en/Chefs For Ukraine - World Central Kitchenhttps://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraineUNITED24 - An initiative of President Zelenskyyhttps://u24.gov.ua/Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundationhttps://prytulafoundation.orgNGO “Herojam Slava”https://heroiamslava.org/kharpp - Reconstruction project supporting communities in Kharkiv and Przemyślhttps://kharpp.com/NOR DOG Animal Rescuehttps://www.nor-dog.org/home/----------PLATFORMS:Twitter: https://twitter.com/CurtainSiliconInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconcurtain/Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4thRZj6NO7y93zG11JMtqmLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finkjonathan/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain----------Welcome to the Silicon Curtain podcast. Please like and subscribe if you like the content we produce. It will really help to increase the popularity of our content in YouTube's algorithm. Our material is now being made available on popular podcasting platforms as well, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.le Podcasts.

In this episode host Iain Ballantyne and returning guest Dr Gary Blackburn convene to discuss the substance, or otherwise, of the UK's recently published Strategic Defence Review (SDR) paper. They also tackle topics relating to the Israel-Iran War, the British reaction to it and also what President Donald Trump may or may not do next. Gary proposes that the UK SDR paper was more of a template than anything else, and in fact amounted to a rather big fudge.  Iain suggests that UK politicians have not yet woken up the to the sheer scale of effort needed - and also urgency required - to properly defend the nation. For example, submarines appear fundamental to the SDR's vision of national defence and yet the Submarine Service itself is not really getting what it needs to be ready to operate future vessels. In sharing his considerable expertise on how Defence economics work, Gary touches on the UK's creative accounting - ‘cooking the books'. It sees things that are not really part of Defence slotted into the UK's supposed proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) devoted to creating robust and capable military forces (plus what it needs to qualify for NATO membership). The worth of drones and A.I. versus the need for more frigates and submarines is among other things weighed up during a lively chat that also considers the viability of the UK's new ‘Atlantic Bastion' concept. •Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull. He has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security. Follow him on X at @gjb70 •Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR (first published in 1998) along with its ‘Guide to the Royal Navy' (since 2003) and ‘Guide to the US Navy' (since 2018). Iain is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, plus ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' (published by Canelo). In 2017 Iain was awarded a Fellowship by the British Maritime Foundation, which promotes awareness of the United Kingdom's dependence on the sea and seafarers. Visit his web site Bismarckbattle.com and follow him on X @IBallantyn For more on Warships IFR www.warshipsifr.com 

On June 7, on the eve of Eid ul Azha, the Chief Adviser to the interim government in Bangladesh, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, delivered a televised address to the nation, promising to hold elections in April 2026. He also announced that the country would witness the launch of the ‘July Proclamation', which had been earlier planned by student activists to “bury” the Constitution of Bangladesh, as it is linked to the founder of Bangladesh and Awami League co-founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Prof. Yunus said that the document will “include a list of reform proposals, agreed upon by all parties, aimed at building a welfare-oriented state.” As the interim government of Bangladesh has announced that there could be constitutional reforms, there are concerns that the country is slipping into authoritarianism. Is Bangladesh slipping into authoritarianism? Here we discuss the question. Guests: Smruti S. Pattanaik, Research Fellow, Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses; Sanjay Pulipaka, Chairperson of the Politeia Research Foundation Host: Kallol Bhattacherjee Audio edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian You can now find The Hindu's podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Stitcher. Search for Parley by The Hindu. Write to us with comments and feedback at socmed4@thehindu.co.in

What does China's unassailable lead in terms of naval power, the wording of recent US statutes and the adaptability of shipping, all have to do with how a chief financial officer eats their breakfast? It's all about how shipping perceives risk and uncertainty right now. Uncertainty has dominated the shipping industry in the past months. But this narrative that shipowners are paralysed by the geopolitical volatility is only part of the story. The global economy is at a crossroads. We are entering an era of superpower rivalry between the US and China that will fundamentally upend established trading assumptions and fragment shipping down geopolitical lines. Now, depending on who you are talking to, the response to that uncertainty results in either a barely concealed fist-bump of joy as they mentally run through the profitable opportunities ahead, or near term paralysis as they conclude that there is no value in strategic investment in the face of such unknowable odds. And that's because this isn't just the long -term disintegration of a rules-based order that we are talking about, although that is part of it. Near term that uncertainty is created by the fact that it is now security not economics that is driving the bus when it comes to US decision making, and that's confusing everyone. Agility is the new currency for shipping. We have to adapt to all these challenges – shipping's bullish elite told us. Volatility is the lifeblood of profitable shipping and certainty has never been a prerequisite for making decisions. So, why complain about exogenous shocks now? On stage, the message was defiant: shipowners paralysed by the geopolitical swings risk losing out. Off stage, their commitment to specific questions of progress and investment was generally more hesitant. But they still need to make decisions – and that's the focus of this week's podcast. Joining Richard this week on the podcast are: Øystein Tunsjø, Professor of International Relations, Head of Security in Asia Program, Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, Norwegian Defence University College Brian Maloney, Partner, Seward & Kissel Annicken Kildahl, CFO, Grieg Maritime Group Hing Chao, Executive Chairman, Wah Kwong Maritime Transport

In this episode of Talking History, we're debating one of the most dramatic episodes of the Second World War: Operation Dynamo, the incredible evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk in May 1940.Featuring: Prof Eunan O'Halpin, Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College Dublin; Dr David Jordan, Co-Director of the Freeman Air and Space Institute and Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London; and Prof Jonathan Fennell, Professor of the History of War and Society at KCL, and president of the Second World War Research Group.

India Gears Up for Worst-Case Scenarios As Indo-Pak tensions soar post the deadly April 22 Pahalgam terror attack that claimed 26 lives, India's Ministry of Home Affairs has ordered nationwide civil defence mock drills on May 7. These include air raid sirens, crash blackouts, evacuation rehearsals, and camouflaging critical infrastructure—measures not seen at this scale since the Kargil conflict. The drills follow India's sweeping diplomatic retaliation: suspension of visas for Pakistani nationals, revocation of the Indus Waters Treaty, sealing the Attari border, and banning Pakistan Airlines. Pakistan hit back by halting all trade and closing its airspace. PM Modi has granted the military full operational freedom to respond. As cross-border ceasefire violations stretch into their 10th day, India is clearly preparing for all possibilities. Cyber Frontline: Hackers Hit Indian Defence SitesA digital war is brewing alongside border tensions. Pakistani hacker groups have claimed to breach key Indian defence-linked websites, including the Military Engineer Services and Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses—claims the institute denies. One group alleged access to 10GB of user data. Meanwhile, defacement attempts were made on websites like Armoured Vehicle Nigam and Army Public Schools. Another group, Internet of Khilafah, targeted welfare platforms for ex-servicemen. While cybersecurity teams have foiled most attacks, these waves of digital aggression are adding another layer to the Indo-Pak crisis. Union Territories Join Centre's Capex Push Starting FY26, India's Union Territories (UTs) will finally be eligible for the Centre's 50-year, interest-free capital expenditure loan scheme—originally introduced post-pandemic for states only. With ₹1.5 trillion allocated for FY26, 60% of funds will go toward infrastructure, while 40% will be linked to reforms. UTs like Puducherry and Delhi can now tap into this pool to fund critical projects. States like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh already top the borrowing list under this scheme. Economists say the move aims to spur public investment and balance development across regions amid slow private capital inflow. Taj Hotels Bets Big on India's Travel Boom Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHCL), owner of the iconic Taj brand, is doubling down on India's tourism wave with a ₹1,200 crore investment plan for FY26. After a 53% jump in FY25 net profit to ₹2,038 crore, the company plans to open 30 new hotels, most under an asset-light model. TajSATS, its catering arm, added ₹716 crore to revenues. With rising demand from leisure, business, and MICE segments, IHCL is eyeing higher occupancy rates and room prices, forecasted to cross ₹10,000 by 2026. From legacy luxury to next-gen growth, IHCL is charting a bold path forward. Skechers to Go Private in $9.4 Billion Deal Footwear giant Skechers is being acquired by 3G Capital in a $9.4 billion all-cash deal, valuing shares at $63—a 30% premium. Shareholders can also choose $57 cash plus equity in a new private entity. The move comes as global shoemakers brace for US tariffs under President Trump's trade reset. Despite record revenues of $9 billion in 2024 and $640 million in earnings, Skechers hopes that going private will help it weather geopolitical headwinds, especially as China contributes 15% of its revenue. CEO Robert Greenberg and team will stay on, with headquarters remaining in California.

In this episode of the Warships Pod Dr Gary Blackburn returns to have a chat with host Iain Ballantyne about the impact of the second presidency of Donald Trump. Topics discussed include the transactional fashion in which the returning POTUS runs domestic and foreign policies along with defence matters, plus how he seems intent on creating a tripolar world in which the USA, Russia and China have their spheres of influence and every other nation must fall in line. Gary points out that none of it should be a shock and while a sense of moral outrage is understandable over some aspects, Trump made no secret of what he intended to do and why. Touching on NATO and its future, Gary suggests it may not be ‘a dead duck'. Iain asks Gary if a major difference between how the Trump administration operates and other US Presidents (and their teams) is that they put everything out there, rather than have big falling outs with allies behind closed doors? Among the other things Iain and Gary talk about are: the UK's habit of taking ‘capability holidays' and expecting the USA in years past to fill in the gaps; concerns about UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's ‘boots on the ground and jets in the air' proposal for peace-keeping in Ukraine; the UK defence budget and its inclusion of sea-based nuclear weapons and military pensions to ‘cook the books'; the global proxy war between the West and its allies on the one hand and Russia/China/N. Korea on the other; the importance for the UK staying militarily engaged beyond Suez. Looking at the UK's new Strategic Defence Review, Gary ponders whether or not raising the defence budget to 2.5 per cent by 2027 is enough and the dubious move to cut amphibious warfare vessels from the Royal Navy at this turbulent time. The April 2025 edition of Warships IFR magazine, which is mentioned during this podcast episode, is out on March 21st. For more details of Warships IFR and its various editions visit http://bit.ly/wifrmag  Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull. He has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security. Follow him on X at @gjb70 Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR (first published in 1998) along with its ‘Guide to the Royal Navy' (since 2003) and ‘Guide to the US Navy' (since 2018). Iain is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, plus ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' (published by Canelo). In 2017 Iain was awarded a Fellowship by the British Maritime Foundation, which promotes awareness of the United Kingdom's dependence on the sea and seafarers. Visit his web site Bismarckbattle.com and follow him on X @IBallantyn

The Israeli security cabinet has ratified an initial six-week deal with Hamas for a ceasefire in the war that will see some of the hostages held in Gaza being released.The breakthrough marks the cessation of 15 months of fighting since the Hamas terror attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023, and also brings hope of border crossings being reopened for aid to ease the Palestinian humanitarian crisis.The US-brokered ceasefire on Sunday will see the exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails and comes a day before president-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. The Standard podcast is joined by Dr Rob Geist Pinfold, lecturer in international security in the Defence Studies department at King's College London.In part two, amid food shortages, toxic air and price-gouging, how Angelenos are supporting each other in the aftermath the deadly LA wildfires.We're joined by Kenia Alcocer, an organiser with Union de Vecinos, part of the Los Angeles Tenants Union. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For this episode of the Global Exchange podcast, Colin Robertson talks with Adam Chapnick about the lessons from his recent book, coauthored with Asa McKercher, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy. You can find his book here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/canada-first-not-canada-alone-9780197653715?cc=ca&lang=en& // CGAI is grateful for all donations from our supporters. Please use this Stripe link to donate: buy.stripe.com/28o29deEmeCH1ck8ww // Participants' bios - Adam Chapnick is Professor of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College and the Royal Military College of Canada. // Host bio: Colin Robertson is a former diplomat and Senior Advisor to the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, www.cgai.ca/colin_robertson // // Reading Recommendations: - "Canada's Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity", by Raymond B. Blake: https://www.ubcpress.ca/canadas-prime-ministers-and-the-shaping-of-a-national-identity - "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis", by J.D. Vance: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hillbilly-elegy-j-d-vance?variant=40999190167586 // Recording Date: December 17, 2024.

In the long and lamentable history of human conflicts, the Cod Wars have to be among the most bizarre. And what was the catalyst for them? You guessed it - fish. These 20th-century confrontations pitted hardy British fishermen and ships of the Royal Navy against the unwavering Icelandic Coast Guard. They involved medieval inventions and tactics like ships ramming each other, and even live fire. The conflict would shake the very foundations of NATO, and threaten to upend the balance of power in the Cold War between East and West.William Reynolds is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London and joins us to explain these bizarre confrontations that came to shape maritime law and British-Icelandic relations.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.

#190: General Robert F. “Bob” Dees served for 31 years in the U.S. Army in a wide variety of command and staff positions culminating in his last three assignments as Assistant  Division Commander for Operations, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault); Commander,  Second Infantry Division, United States Forces Korea; and as Deputy Commanding General,  V (US/GE) Corps in Europe, concurrently serving as Commander, US-Israeli Combined Task  Force for Missile Defense. Bob is a graduate of numerous military schools including the  Command and General Staff College, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and the Royal College of Defence Studies in London. He has authored and taught Management Science topics in the Department of Engineering at West Point, as well as multiple Resilience courses at Liberty University. Following military retirement in January 2003, Bob served as a Microsoft Corporation executive; followed by leadership of a non-profit outreach to the military. He authored the  Resilience Trilogy (Resilient Warriors, Resilient Leaders, and Resilient Nations) and pioneered resilience programs for the military as Vice President for Military Outreach at Liberty University.  In the 2016 Presidential cycle, Bob served as National Security Advisor and Campaign Chairman for Dr. Ben Carson. Bob now heads Resilience God Style, a national movement to restore resilience to every area of American life, including recent publication of the Resilience  God Style book, study guide, video series, and training game (www.ResilienceGodStyle.com). Bob is a senior advisor for the newly formed Faith-based Veterans Support Alliance (FBVSA). Bob is also President of the National  Center for Healthy Veterans (www.HealthyVeterans.org) with the mission of “Returning Healthy  Veterans to America.” This broad and comprehensive Healthy Veteran initiative ranges from trauma recovery using best practices, faith-based programs to veteran microbusinesses which afford dignified work, skills training, and economic opportunity. Community is a critical element of the initiative, including veteran tiny home villages for formerly homeless Veterans and others.  While the Healthy Veteran initiative will help Veterans, the real winner is America with Healthy  Veterans positively impacting culture as role models for our youth, as experienced leaders in business, and as standard bearers in every walk of life. Bob speaks at numerous seminars and conferences, as well as commentary on national security, leadership, and resilience in a wide array of media, military, business and church venues. He was featured as one of 30 “Master Leaders” in America by noted author George  Barna and was awarded the Council for National Policy George Washington Military  Leadership Award in 2018.  For more on General Dees check out www.ResilienceGodStyle.com as well as www.HealthyVeterans.org Enjoy the show 

THE ZOOMER SQUAD: HOW CANADA POST STRIKE IS IMPACTING SENIORS  Libby Znaimer is joined by Rudy Buttignol, President of CARP,  Anthony Quinn, Chief Operating Officer of CARP, John Mykytyshyn, Conservative Activist, Political Consultant and President of Bradgate Research Group. The Canada Post strike is still on. How is it going to impact the senior demographic? And, we continue the discussion about OAS. HOW WILL OTTAWA AND TRUMP APPROACH IMMIGRATION POLICY Libby Znaimer is joined by Guidy Mamann, a Toronto immigration lawyer and Partner at Mamman & Sandaluk LLP Immigration Lawyers, and Kelly Sundberg, an Associate Professor at Mount Royal University and a former CBSA Officer. We unpack what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in his short video over the weekend that detailed Ottawa's shift in regards to its immigration policy. And, what will the Canada-U.S. border look like under a second Trump Presidency?  BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ALLOWS UKRAINE TO USE LONG-RANGE MISSILES INSIDE RUSSIA  Libby Znaimer is joined by Andrew Rasiulis with The Canadian Global Affairs Institute and Dr. Eric Ouellett, Professor in the Department of Defence Studies at Royal Military College of Canada. The war between Russia and Ukraine reached the grim milestone of 1,000 days over the weekend. The Biden administration is now allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS inside Russia. How will this development be received by Russian President Vladimir Putin and how impactful will this be for Ukraine?

Nick Lloyd, Professor of Modern Warfare in the Defence Studies at King's College London and author of The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918, joins the show to discuss the critical role of the eastern front in World War I. ▪️ Times      •      01:43 Introduction      •      02:09 “The soul of the war”     •      04:00 Before the fighting     •     05:59 War aims     •      10:51 Tannenberg     •      15:54 Hindenburg and Ludendorff     •      19:57 Scale     •      22:40 Combat     •      27:14 Munitions scarcity      •      32:10 Russian collapse     •      36:45 Lenin returns     •      40:42 Brest-Litovsk     •      44:16 Proto-lebensraum     •      47:20 The West     •      52:30 War as a way out Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today's episode on our School of War Substack

Why is Canada's foreign policy so tepid? Guest: Dr. Adam Chapnick, Professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What sparked our fascination with ghostly photographs? Guest: Andrea Kaston Tange, Professor of English at Macalester College View From Victoria: The history of close call elections We get a local look at the top political stories with the help of Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer Why is Canada's foreign policy so tepid? Guest: Dr. Adam Chapnick, Professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada How researchers decoded plant-to-fungi communication Guest: Dr. Shelley Lumba, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell & Systems Biology at the University of Toronto Should faith-based groups use their land for housing? Guest: Rebecca Bligh, Vancouver City Councillor Will Liberal MPs pressure Trudeau to step down? Guest: David Akin, Chief Political Correspondent for Global News National Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ORIGINAL AIR DATE: APRIL 2, 2016Since I reference this book a lot, I felt it was time to remaster and re-upload this show, with it's short Patreon segment as well. Eric Ouellet joins me for a fascinating discussion of his new book, Illuminations: The UFO Experience as a Parapsychological Event. He proposes that we should examine the UFO Phenomenon as we would a poltergeist case. It's a novel way of looking at it, and may ultimately play a part in solving this enigma. ERIC OUELLET is professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, and at the Canadian Forces College (Canada's Joint Staff and War College). He has a Ph.D. in sociology from York University (Toronto, Canada), and he is the liaison officer for Canada with the Parapsychological Association. He has published parapsychological work in the Australian Journal of Psychology, EdgeScience, and the Bulletin Métapsychique. His other research works focus on military sociology and war studies.You can check out his blog at parasociology.blogspot.com

Originally aired on April 2, 2016Since I reference this book a lot, I felt it was time to remaster and re-upload this show, with it's short Patreon segment as well.Eric Ouellet joins me for a fascinating discussion of his new book, Illuminations: The UFO Experience as a Parapsychological Event. He proposes that we should examine the UFO Phenomenon as we would a poltergeist case. It's a novel way of looking at it, and may ultimately play a part in solving this enigma.ERIC OUELLET is professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, and at the Canadian Forces College (Canada's Joint Staff and War College). He has a Ph.D. in sociology from York University (Toronto, Canada), and he is the liaison officer for Canada with the Parapsychological Association. He has published parapsychological work in the Australian Journal of Psychology, EdgeScience, and the Bulletin Métapsychique. His other research works focus on military sociology and war studies.You can check out his blog at parasociology.blogspot.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

By Jared Samuelson Dr. Ian Bowers re-joins the program for a third tour to discuss Task Force 448, United Nations Interim Forces-Lebanon, and maritime peacekeeping. Ian is Senior Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. Download Sea Control 533 – Maritime Peacekeeping with Dr. Ian Bowers Links 1. “Exploiting the Water: Naval Involvement … Continue reading Sea Control 533 – Maritime Peacekeeping with Dr. Ian Bowers →

By Jared Samuelson Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Deborah Sanders join us to discuss coalition navy operations during the Korean war. Ian is Senior Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. Deborah is a Professor of Contemporary conflict and strategy at the Defence Studies Department at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. … Continue reading Sea Control 532 – Coalition Naval Operations during the Korean War with Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Deborah Sanders →

 Bio: Pete Newell Pete Newell is a nationally recognized innovation expert whose work is transforming how the  government and other large organizations compete and drive growth.  He is the CEO of BMNT, an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage tech accelerator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in national security, state and local governments, and beyond. Founded in Silicon Valley, BMNT has offices in Palo Alto, Washington DC, Austin, London, and Canberra. BMNT uses a framework, called H4X®, to drive innovation at speed. H4X® is an adaptation of the problem curation techniques honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the best practices employed by successful Silicon Valley startups. The result is a disciplined, evidence-based, data-driven process for connecting innovation activities into an accountable system that delivers solutions and overcome obstacles to innovation. Pete is a founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic program taught at 47+ universities in the U.S., as well as universities in the UK and Australia. H4D® focuses on solving national security problems. It has in turned created a series of sister courses – Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Oceans, Hacking for Sustainability, Hacking for Local and others – that use the H4X® framework to solve critical real-world problems while providing students with a platform to gain crucial problem-solving experience while performing a national service. Pete continues to advise and teach the original H4D® course at Stanford University with Steve Blank. In addition, Pete is Co-Founder and Board Director of The Common Mission Project, the 501c3 non-profit responsible for creating an international network of mission-driven entrepreneurs, including through programs like H4D®. Prior to joining BMNT, Pete served as the Director of the US Army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF).  Reporting directly to the senior leadership of the Army, he was charged with rapidly finding, integrating, and employing solutions to emerging problems faced by Soldiers on the battlefield. From 2010 to 2013 Pete led the REF in the investment of over $1.4B in efforts designed to counter the effects of improvised explosive devices, reduce small units exposure to suicide bombers and rocket attacks and to reduce their reliance on long resupply chains. He was responsible for the Army's first deployment of mobile manufacturing labs as well as the use of smart phones merged with tactical radio networks. Pete retired from the US Army as a Colonel in 2013. During his 32 years in uniform he served as both an enlisted national guardsman and as an active duty officer. He commanded Infantry units at the platoon through brigade level, while performing special operations, combat, and peace support operations in Panama, Kosovo, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an Army Ranger who has received numerous awards to include the Silver Star and Presidential Unit Citation. Pete holds a BS from Kansas State University, an MS from the US Army Command & General Staff College, an MS from the National Defense University and advanced certificates from the MIT Sloan School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Bio: Dr Alison Hawks Dr. Alison Hawks is one of the leading experts advancing public sector innovation. A researcher and academic-turned-entrepreneur, she is the co-founder and CEO of BMNT, Ltd., the innovation company that is changing how public sector innovation happens; and Chair of the Common Mission Project UK, BMNT's charitable partner that guides mission-driven entrepreneurial education in the UK. Dr. Hawks co-founded BMNT Ltd with (Ret) Col Pete Newell, the CEO of BMNT, Inc., in 2019 to bring BMNT's proven innovation approach to the UK market. Under her leadership BMNT has become a trusted innovation partner across all single Services of Defence, the Cabinet Office, and the national security community. She has also helped change how real-world government challenges are addressed in the UK, launching the “Hacking for” academic programmes created in the U.S. These courses that teach university students how to use modern entrepreneurial tools and techniques to solve problems alongside government at startup speed. As a result of her efforts, 14 UK universities are offering Hacking for the Ministry of Defence, Hacking for Sustainability and Hacking for Police. More than 480 students have taken these courses, addressing 103 real-world challenges. Dr. Hawks teaches mission-driven entrepreneurship at King's College London, Department of War Studies and at Imperial College London's Institute of Security Science and Technology. She was named the Woman of the Year for Innovation and Creativity at the Women in Defence Awards in 2022. She serves on the Board of Directors of BMNT, leading development of BMNT's innovation education programs while also guiding the integration of BMNT's rapidly expanding international presence. She was previously Director of Research at the Section 809 Panel, a U.S. Congressionally mandated commission tasked with streamlining and codifying defense acquisition. She was also an Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, as well as King's College London, Department of Defence Studies where she taught strategy, policy and operations in professional military education. Dr. Hawks' doctoral thesis was in military sociology. She received her Ph.D from the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and her MA in Strategic Studies from the University of Leeds. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. She has multiple peer reviewed publications on her research. Interview Highlights 03:50 BMNT 06:20 Serendipity 10:00 Saying yes to the uncomfortable 11:20 Leadership 15:00 Developing a thick skin 20:00 Lessons of an entrepreneur 22:00 Stakeholder success 25:00 Solving problems at speed and at scale 28:00 The innovation pipeline 29:30 Resistance is rational 34:00 Problem curation 38:00 Dual use investments 43:00 Accelerating change 47:00 AUKUS 52:20 AI   Contact Information   ·         LinkedIn: Ali Hawks on LinkedIn ·         LinkedIn Peter Newell on LinkedIn ·         Website:  The Common Mission Project UK ·         Website: BMNT US ·         Website: BMNT UK   Books & Resources ·         Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less: Robert Sutton, Robert , Huggy Rao ·         Value Proposition Canvas ·         Business Model Canvas ·         Hacking for Defense ·         Hacking for Allies ·         AUKUS DIN ·         Impromptu : Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman ·         Huberman Lab Podcast ·         Allie K. Miller ·         Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification: Gene Kim, Steven Spear ·         The Friction Project - Bob Sutton, Huggy Rao Episode Transcript  Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku My guests for this episode are Pete Newell and Ali Hawks. Pete Newell is the CEO and Co-founder of BMNT, an innovation consultancy and early stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest problems facing the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. Ali Hawks is CEO of BMNT in the UK and also a Co-founder of BMNT in the UK. In addition to this, she is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Common Mission Project, and she Co-founded the Common Mission Project in 2019 and drove its growth as a Startup charity in the UK. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Pete and Ali, I found it very insightful and I'm sure you would as well. Pete, thank you Ali, thank you so much for being with us on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here.  Pete Newell  Thanks so much for the invite.  Ali Hawks  Yeah. Thank you for having us.  Ula Ojiaku Right, this is the second time ever in the history of my podcast that I'm having two people, two guests. The first time was fun, and I know this one would be as well, and informative. I always start with asking my guests to tell us a bit about themselves. So your background, any memorable happenings that shaped you into the person you are today?  Pete Newell  So I'm a retired army officer. I enlisted when I was 18 and was commissioned when I left college in the mid 80s. I spent most of my career as an Infantryman in tactical units. I spent a great bit of time in the Middle East and other war zones. Towards the end of my career, I ended up as the Director of the Army's Rapid Equipment Force, which is essentially the Skunk Works that was stood up at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to accelerate technology to solve problems that were emerging on the battlefield, that weren't part of something else, somewhere else. And in that three-year journey, it probably exposed me to first and foremost, the speed at which new problems are presenting themselves, not just on the battlefield, but in the rest of the world. It exposed me to the speed at which technology is changing, being adopted and then being adapted for other purposes. So it's almost like chasing technology as it changes is a whole new sport, and it exposed me to  the challenges of large bureaucratic organisations and their inability to keep up with the speed of the changes in order to remain competitive, whether it was on the battlefield or in the commercial markets or something like that. Those epiphanies really drove, first, my decision to retire from the military, because I became addicted to solving that problem, and second, drove the impetus to launch BMNT in 2013. And in fact, you are right square in the middle of our 10th anniversary of being a company. So it really is, I think, a big deal because we started with four people on a driveway in Palo Alto, California, now we're a global company with multiple companies and are grateful, but that's the history of how we got started.  Ula Ojiaku  Congratulations on your 10th anniversary, and it's an impressive background and story. Ali, what about you?  Ali Hawks  So, my background, a little bit different than Pete's, by training I was an academic, so my training and my PhD was in military sociology. I was really interested in understanding people's experiences in the armed forces, both in the US and the UK. That is what my PhD was focused around, my thesis, and I went on to be an academic at King's College London here in the UK. I've also been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. But it wasn't until I then took a job with the US DoD, in something called a Congressional Advisory Panel called the Section 809 Panel, which was tasked with overhauling all of defense acquisition, and that's where Pete and I met. I think one of those formative experiences in my career was meeting Pete and going to the non-profit that Pete started and spun out of BMNT, it's called the Common Mission Project with a really big program, Hacking for Defense, and Steve Blank also Co-founded that as you know, and Joe Felter. I went to an educator course for this program in Fort Belvoir as a part of my job to understand, could we take these types of methods and put them into congressional legislation or DoD regulation as a way to change how people think about problems? And when I met Pete, it was the intersection of all of the things that I really love, academia, entrepreneurship, defense and national security. I went up to Pete and pitched him and said, I want to take this back to the UK and launch it. That was the start of what has been thousands of conversations about the value that we can add both in the US and the UK.  I worked in some law firms before I did my Master's and my PhD, but mainly my career has been in academia.  Ula Ojiaku  Wow. Thanks for sharing. And would you say it was serendipity that made your paths to cross and how are you finding the journey so far?  Ali Hawks  I think, yes, I think it's serendipity. I have a really different life journey than Pete. And I think in my career at the time when I met Pete, I hadn't really found what it is, what I felt like my purpose should be, or hadn't really found passion or joy in my work to that day. I found things I loved, I loved academia and I love teaching, but it just still didn't hit all of those things that you kind of get up every day and are like, this is what I'm meant to do. And I had done a lot of work on reflecting of what that would feel like and what that would look like and the elements it had to have. So by the time I met Pete, it was almost as if someone was flashing a huge sign at me saying, don't miss your turn, this is your turn. So I think serendipity, but also really understanding what it is that I wanted to do and the type of people I wanted to work with and the journey so far. I'll hand over to Pete in a second, but it's been nothing short of incredible. Pete has an amazing reputation, but as a business partner and as a leader, he allows people to truly learn, experiment, make mistakes, and he pulls everyone along by building confidence and empowering people that work for him. So in terms of kind of coming from academia and becoming a researcher turned entrepreneur, it's been the most formative experience of my career. Being able to work along Pete is like being able to work alongside that kind of guide or that guru, and you're like, wow, I can't believe I get to talk to this person every week and learn from them and be in business with them. So that's how it's going for me. Pete, how's it going for you?  Pete Newell You know, Steve Blank and I had a long conversation about serendipity when he and I met 2015 and here's my advice in serendipity. It really is if you have an active curiosity and a willingness to say yes to things that you wouldn't normally, and you're not adverse to taking risk, the chances of serendipity smacking like lightning greatly go up. And then I go back to my first trip to Stanford University in 2011. Well, I was still a military officer and saying yes to a number of things that people asked me to do, and just one conversation after another led to a meeting with two guys who were Stanford graduate school instructors who were writing a book. Those two decided to write a chapter in that book about the work I was doing at the Rapid Equipment Force. Now, when Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton decided to write a book and hire a case study writer who spent six months digging into your life, you learn all kinds of things about yourself and about the world, and when that's followed by a chance coffee with Steve Blank, who had no idea who I was, and I had no idea who he was, that 15-minute coffee turned into a four-hour discussion between the two of us. I typically would not have been at the Fort Belvoir thing that Ali was at, and I think our meeting was very brief, but it was, I think, six months later when I found her in the library at Georgetown University at some social event and we both decided that we wanted her to do something, and we wanted to do something in the UK, and we wanted to see something between allied countries come together. There was no strategy or grand business development, there was nothing that drove those conversations. It was simply in the spur of the moment, the curiosity takes over and you start to say I can see where this might work. Now, Ali will be the first to tell you, it has not been easy, but it has been a privilege to work with her and to continue to work between the two governments and the countries to see absolutely brilliant things done. And so I just say, I come back to, it's that curiosity connected with the desire to, the willingness to accept a little bit of risk, but learning how to say yes to things that you're uncomfortable with and digging just a little bit more. That opens up that opportunity so much more.  Ula Ojiaku I could see, it's evident to me the way Ali was talking about working with you, Pete, and your leadership, I'm wondering, could there have been anything about your military background that has influenced your leadership style as a whole? Pete Newell Yeah, everything in my background does. I can tell you, even growing up as a kid that the way my parents raised me influenced me positively, and negatively in some cases. My military background, I have been fortunate to work for a group of fantastic military leaders, I spent time in the Special Operations community, I spent time working for Stan McChrystal, I spent time in the Pentagon working for brilliant people. I also worked for some of the absolute worst bosses in the entire world, and I rarely say this about people, they were just bad human beings, and I will tell you in many cases what I learned watching a leader in a just really horrible environment influenced me more than watching the really brilliant guys out there. If you think about it, it's really hard to pattern yourself after somebody who is brilliant and driven and successful and kind and they do all that, but I'll tell you what, you can look at somebody who is really a bad boss and say, I don't want to be like them, and it happens in an instant, that I do not ever want to be like that person. That teaches you a lot about the environment that you want to create that people are going to work in. I have some hard areas, and Ali will acknowledge some of them, in the way people are treated in the workplace. Also as a graduate of the Special Operations community, I have strong feelings about how high performing people should be allowed to perform, and also expectations of how they work. I think the military left me with a high degree of not just respect, but you want to hire people, there's a certain degree of dedication to their success, whether they stay in your company or whether they leave, or they go someplace else, whether they're challenged or something else. And I'll tell you, if there was something hard about transitioning from the military to the business world is, in the military, you're given people and you're told to make them successful no matter what. In the business world, you tend to just fire people who are unsuccessful and not invest time and energy in them. I have never been able to make that change, and it's a bit of a struggle sometimes, because in the business world, you can't afford to hang on to people who are subpar performers, if you want to run a high-performance organisation. So if there's one of the things that I have learned is I am challenged in letting somebody go because I see it as a personal failure if somebody fails to thrive in my organisation, that has been built and imprinted by my past. I think Ali has a very different opinion, because she comes from such a great different place. Here's the beauty of it, the work with people like Ali and some of the others, we can argue and disagree and fight like cats and dogs sometimes, but we still love each other, and it is still an absolutely amazing environment to work in. That's really what, if you get it right, that's what life's like.  Ula Ojiaku What's your view, Ali?  Ali Hawks So we clearly have different backgrounds, I think that I was a bit of a late bloomer in terms of leadership style. Being in academia, you're not really in a leadership position because you're responsible for yourself, and in a way, it's a really good test bed for being an entrepreneur, because in academia you have to have such thick skin, because you turn in your peer reviewed journal publications, you turn in your papers and people write back and slash, and no one's trying to make you feel good. In fact, they want to help you, but also they're quite competitive. So that was a really good proving ground for being able to develop the thick skin for critical feedback or any feedback and really all of the knocks that come with being an entrepreneur. What I took into starting BMNT here four years ago was, things that I took from Pete and from the U.S. was really allowing people and high performers to work in the way that they feel best. One of the things I hated when I was younger in certain jobs, and working in law firms is punching your time card at 8 am, and you punch out at 5, and an hour for lunch, and it never felt right that that was the way to measure someone's productivity or to really enhance or empower people. And so the way that I approach it is we consider everyone to be an adult and to do their job, and also to be as curious as possible. So on our Standup this morning, with two new team members coming back into BMNT, one of the things that we agreed on is if no one's asking for time off to be creative or to have a day or two days to read a book that will enhance their knowledge or make them a better BMNTer, then we're failing. If no one has asked for that time by the end of this calendar year. So the way that I really approach leadership is how can I empower, but also invest in every single person, because it's not me delivering the everyday work, it's the people in my company, so they're building it alongside of me. I hire smart young people who will give feedback and we action that feedback. So we change things based on what we get from a 23-year-old, so everyone in the company feels really valued. And I think, learning from Pete, is also being really honest and transparent with everyone in the company when your chips are down and you have to say, guys, this is what's going on, and I found it has built such a strong cohesion in the team that we have now, that this year going into it is the most excited I've ever been about running BMNT. So taking a lot of what I learned from Pete and also my own experiences of feeling really caged, actually, in most of my jobs, and being able to understand that people work in very different ways, and if you allow them to work in the ways that are best for them, you really do get the best of everyone.  Ula Ojiaku That's very inspiring and insightful. Now, there was something Pete said earlier on about you, Ali, walking up to him and sharing the vision that you wanted to take back what BMNT is doing to the UK and so what made you go for it, what pushed you towards that? Ali Hawks Again, it was a lot of work on my part of really understanding what I wanted to do, and when I approached Pete that day, I was really excited and exuberant and I said, I want to take this back to the UK and I want to run it. And Pete is, as you get to know him, he's very calm and he's quiet, and he kind of looked at me and he said, you should talk to some people. And I thought, okay, I'll go talk to people. So I went out and I talked to people and I got Pete on the phone a few weeks later and I said, Pete, this is my dream job, this is what I want to do. And Pete said, prove it, do a Business Model Canvas. So I then hung up the phone, I googled Business Model Canvas, I watched YouTube videos on how to complete it. I was still working at the 809 Panel, so I was getting up really early to talk to people back in the UK, make phone calls, pulling on all of my contacts because I've been in defense and national security for gosh, since 2009, and I was canvassing everyone I knew, I filled out the Business Model Canvas, I sent it to Pete, he was going to be in DC about a week later, and he wrote back saying we should meet. So we then met and had an initial conversation around what it could look like, but it really wasn't until as Pete said in that library at Georgetown for a reception that we came together and having had both time to think and think about what I put down in the Business Model Canvas, but also how we got along, I think, and gelled as business partners, we decided, let's do it. So when we said we didn't have a plan, I had an idea of what we could do, and I have unfailing determination to make things work, and so I just knew, and I think we both knew if we tried it, that something would come of it, and if not, we would learn a lot from it. So we went from there and it took a while before we got a plan, to be honest, but we got there. Ula Ojiaku Well, here you are. Ali Hawks Exactly. Pete Newell You know, if there's one thing I have learned as an entrepreneur is that the plan you thought you were going to have, is never the one you actually execute. So the faster you begin to test it, usually by talking to people and doing things, the faster you will get rid of bad ideas. And it's not about finding the good idea, but it's about creating all the ideas you could possibly have and then killing them off quickly so that you understand the core of the value that you think you're going to deliver. Everything after that is the mechanics of how to build a business. I mean, that's not easy stuff, when you're launching a company, more importantly when you're launching one in a country you haven't been in in a while, but getting there is really about getting the thought process moving and getting people to disabuse you of the notion that every idea you have is brilliant. Ula Ojiaku I mean, I agree setting up a business isn't easy. I can't imagine the additional challenge of setting it up in the defense sector, the Department of Defense in the US, Ministry of Defence here in the UK. What sort of things would you say would be the additional? Do you have to go through hurdles to go through approvals, clearances and all that? Ali Hawks From the MOD experience, it's less about clearances and those types of things, it's more about understanding, winding your way through what feels like a maze, to find the right stakeholders that you can bring together at the right time to make a decision. So while there are individuals that hold budgets and can make decisions, there's a constellation of people around them that need to be aligned in concert with that decision. If you went to a business, of course, you'll have to have a couple of people on board, but the time to sale or the cost to sale is relatively straightforward. When you go into the government, you have a group of highly motivated people, highly mission-driven people who experience the pain of their problems every day, and they are trying to fight just as hard as you are in order to change something for the better. So in the first instance, you have great allyship with your customers, because you have a shared mission, and you're both working towards it, which is fantastic. The second is really trying to understand if that person has the budget and they need to sign off on it, how much do they need to care about it, or is it their chief of staff that needs to really care about it? Or is it their engineer? So I would say the difference is the amount of discovery that you do and doing that stakeholder mapping, is fundamental to success, but also knowing that people change jobs in the civil service and the Armed Forces every few years, that is a critical skill as a business working with the government, that stakeholder mapping and that discovery with your customers, customer development never ends. So I think that that is the longest pole in the tent in terms of finding the right people, and sometimes people say that's the person that has authority, you go talk to them and they say, no, I don't have any authority, so it's really trying to wind your way through the maze to align those key stakeholders. Pete Newell I would add to what Ali said, is that it's like climbing into a very complicated Swiss watch and you need to understand not just how things work, but you need to understand why they work the way they do, and how they work with other things, and then you need to understand who's responsible for making them work and who the beneficiary of the work is, and who possibly might want to make them not work. So, Ali's comment on stakeholder development, it's at the heart of everything you do -- you talk about more sociology and anthropology than it is anything, it truly is understanding why things work the way they do and what drives people to behave one way versus another. Once you figure that out, then you can figure out how to motivate them to behave one way or another, and where you might fit to help them in their daily job or whatever else. But that stakeholder development and understanding who's in charge, who benefits, who doesn't benefit, why something might be counter to something else is so critical in any consulting business, but in particular, if you are trying to get something done inside a government organisation. It, in many cases, it's archaic, but it still operates underneath a very definitive culture that you can map if you've been at it long. Ula Ojiaku So BMNT, you help government organisations to solve hard problems at speed and at scale. Can you expand on this? Pete Newell It's both I think. I go back to my experience, way back in the Rapid Equipping Force and 2010 is first and foremost, there are tens of thousands of problems that prevent the government from doing what it wants to do. The government is challenged, first, in being able to identify those problems; second, in translating those problems into plain English that other people might understand; third, in using that translated thing to find ever bigger groups of people, to then redefine the problem one more time, so that it makes sense for the rest of the world; and fourth, creating the policies and process that will attract people to come to them and work with them to solve those problems fast enough to build a solution before the problem changes so much that the calculus is completely out of whack again. And in all this there's a complicated long answer, but the impedance difference between the speed at which you develop and acknowledge a problem and your ability to get people to work on it, if it's out of sync with the speed at which technology is being adopted and adapted, you will constantly be perfectly solving the wrong problem, and you'll be constantly delivering things that are antiquated before the day they land in somebody's hands, so that's really the speed issue. I go back to what I said about sociology. This is the speed of your ability to get people to come together to work on something, and then the scale is determining, scale how fast, and scale how big. The scale how fast is, I can start to deliver a solution to this, but I know the solution is going to change every 6 months. So I don't need to commit to building tens of thousands of these over a 5-year contract, but I do need to commit to changing what I deliver every 6 months, or this is going to scale to some big end and it goes into a much different system, you have to be ambidextrous about your approach to scale, and unfortunately most procurement laws, both the United States and in the UK are not built to be ambidextrous. They're built to do one thing and one thing very efficiently only. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works anymore. Ula Ojiaku Any thoughts, Ali? Ali Hawks As Pete said, and as a sociologist, the most often thing, and I think Pete said this a long time ago when we first met, is the government doesn't have a tech adoption problem, it has a people problem, and a lot of our work, a lot of our customers will come and say they have a tech problem, and they have a huge degree of urgency, but the things that get in their way are they have no common language, and they have no repeatable and scalable process in which to think about and work on their problems. And the framework that we developed, the innovation pipeline, is that process for them to do it. It's not complicated, it's methodology agnostic, and so it allows you to develop an entire workforce around a common language of innovating, mission acceleration, agile transformation, whatever you want to do, recognising that people are at the heart of it. The Head of Innovation at UC Berkeley and during one of our Lean Innovators Summit, said something that has stuck with me for several years now, ad he said, and it really hit home with our customers, because sometimes when I first started BMNT here, I was such an evangelist that I forgot to listen to the customer. I was just so convinced that they needed what we had, and I think the customer was telling me something else and I would get frustrated, and when I heard this, it was resistance is rational. When we go into a room with a group of people, we usually have a customer who is an evangelist of ours, or an early adopter, a huge supporter, and they have a couple of other people who feel the same way they do about change and innovation and moving rapidly, and then 70 percent of the team don't feel that same way. So approaching it and really empathising with the customers and understanding resistance is rational, why would they want to change? Things for them work, the way that they have always done, it works, and that is a rational response. So being able to then develop a service where you're connecting with them and saying, I understand that, and that's a rational response, and then using tools, like one of my favourite tools, the Value Proposition Canvas, to really understand, what are the jobs to be done, and the pains and the gains, and when you speak in that type of language, there are so many times that I have seen this kind of aha moment of like, oh, so if I did that, then I wouldn't have to do this anymore, or I would be able to do this different thing. And this is not complicated, these are not complicated tools or processes we're talking about, but the common denominators of it are discipline, consistency, and hard work. And I think, coming off what Pete said, when you want to get pace and speed, you have to be consistent and you have to be disciplined, and people have to understand what you're saying in order to get over that resistance is rational piece. Pete Newell I think Ali's spot on in terms of the problem with the problem. Oftentimes is, we can put a problem in a room and 10 people work on it and get 10 different versions of the problem, and so part of the art that's involved in the process is to get a group of people to agree to a common definition of a problem and use the same words, because many times we're inventing new words. It's new technology, new problem, but the first thing we do is get everybody to say the same thing the same way, and then start to talk to other people about it, because part two of that is you learn that your problem is probably not the right problem, it's a symptom of something else, and that whole process of discovery is a very disciplined, I would say it's a scientific methodology applied to how we communicate with people. You have to get out and test your theory by talking to the right people in a big enough diverse crowd to truly understand that whether you're on the right track or the wrong track. That's hard work, it really is hard work, and it's even harder to get what I would say critical feedback from people in the process who will challenge your assumptions and will challenge your test, who will challenge the outcomes of that. That's what our team does such a great job of, working with customers to teach them how to do that, but listening to them and helping them come together. At the same time, we're looking at the quality of the work and because we're a third party, we can look over the shoulder and say I see the test, and I see the outcome, but I don't think your test was adequate, or I don't think you tested this in an environment that was diverse enough, that you may be headed down the wrong path. The customer can still decide to go with what they learn, but in most cases, at least they're getting honest feedback that should allow them to pause and relook something. Ali Hawks I think for this particular reason, this is why BMNT is a leader in this space, is because the kind of jurisdiction around that front end of the pipeline, of are we making sure that we're choosing from enough problems and we're not stuck with a couple of investments that might be bad, so to speak, really validating that problem to decide, is it worth working on, is this even progressible, does anyone care about it, can it technically be done, does the organisation care about it, before spending any money on investment. Now that front end of the pipeline is gradually becoming a stronger muscle, and I'll speak for the UK, is gradually becoming a stronger muscle because of the work that BMNT has done, and both in the US and the UK, there is incredibly strong muscle memory around experimentation and incubation, which is fantastic. There's a lot of structure around that and frameworks and a lot of common language, which is amazing, because when you have that developed, going back to the beginning to refine before you put into the machine, so to speak, that's where what we call curation, really validating that problem, that's a single most determining factor on whether a problem will transition to an adopted solution. Most of government starts in experimentation and incubation, so they don't get the benefit of de-risking investment in a solution, and they don't necessarily get the benefit of all the learning to expedite that into incubation and experimentation. So I think where BMNT comes out and really owns that area is in that front end of the pipeline, and when you do that front end, you would be amazed at how fast the other part of the pipeline goes through discover incubation experimentation, because you've increased confidence and really de-risked investment in the solution. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that Ali, would you say you're applying lean innovation amongst other things to the framework you're referring to, or would that be something else? Pete Newell No, I think that it's all part of the process. We use a variety of tools to get to the data we want, and then it's a matter of doing analysis, and this is why Ali's background as an academic is so critical, because she's keen on analysis, and looking at the data and not skewing the data one way or another, and that's an incredibly important skill in this process. Again, this is really the application of a scientific methodology, and you need to be able to do that, but you need to understand how to get the data. So whether it's Lean or it's Scrum or it's some Google tool or something else. We have become really adaptive in the use of the tools and a mixture of the tools to drive a community of people to create the data we need to make an assessment of whether something's going the right direction or not. And that's the beauty of being involved with the Lean Innovation Educators Forum, the beauty of the time we spend with folks like Alex Osterwalder or with Steve Blank or with the folks from the d.school at Stanford or any of those places that are developing tools. It is understanding how to use and adopt the tool to fit the circumstances, but at the end of the day, it's all about creating the data you need to use the analysis that will drive an insight, that will allow you to make a decision. Too often I find people who are just overly enamoured with the tool and they forget that the tool is just a tool. It's about data, insight, and decisions, and you have to get to a decision at some point. Ula Ojiaku Data, insight, decisions. Amazing. So, if we shift gears a little bit and go into your Strategic Innovation Project, SIP, I understand that one of the shifts you're driving in the DoD and MoD respectively is about their approach to involving private investment in defence technology. Could you share a bit more about that? Pete Newell As part of the innovation pipeline, you have to eventually transition out of the discovery phase and at the end of discovery, you should know that you have the right problem. You have a potential solution and you have a potential pathway that will allow you to deliver that solution in time to actually have an impact on the problem. At that point, you start incubating that solution, and if it's a tech or a product, then you're talking about either helping a company build the right thing, or you're talking about starting a new company, and that new company will have to do the thing. Our work in terms of early-stage tech acceleration is really now focused on what we call dual-use technologies. Those technologies that are required to solve a problem in the military, but also have a digital twin in the commercial world. There has to be a commercial reason for the company being built that's actually going to solve the problem, and so as we looked at that, we found really interesting conversations with investors in the United States and then eventually overseas who were looking for a way to help defense get the technologies it wanted, but have portfolios that don't allow them to just invest in a defense technology, and they were looking for an opportunity to engage one, with like-minded investors, but two, in honest conversations about problems that existed in the military and in the commercial world so they can make better decisions about the deployment of their capital to create the right companies. I think it's probably been five years now we've been working on the hypothesis around this. we started to develop a very strong language around dual-use investments in early-stage tech acceleration and adoption, and we started to build new tools inside government programs, as well as new groups of investors and other folks who wanted to be involved. All that was fine in the United States, but then we found it was a slightly different application outside the United States, particularly in Europe, which is not necessarily the most Startup friendly environment in the world in terms of investment, but at the same time, understanding that the United States has an unequalled appetite for technology to the point where that technology doesn't necessarily exist within the United States, nor do the best opportunities to test that technology exist for the United States, so we had to come up with a way that would allow us to do the same type of investigation with our allies, which turns into this incredible opportunity amongst allied nations and companies and vendors and things like that. And I know that from Ali's standpoint, watching NATO DIANA and other programs start, that it is more challenging, it's a different environment in Europe than it is in the United States. Ali Hawks Picking up there and in terms of the way that we think about investment, and what Pete is talking about is a program we run called Hacking 4 Allies. We currently work with Norway and take dual-use Norwegian Startups into our incubator and accelerator called H4XLabs in the US and we help them enter the US defense market and the commercial market, and one of the things that we're starting to see over here is it is a pathway that doesn't really exist in Europe. So when we think about NATO's DIANA, what DIANA is focused on, which is dual-use and deep tech and what they are overly focused on, and I think is correct, is how do you raise investment in the countries themselves to help booster a whole range of effects around being able to raise money within the country? Ultimately, though, and a lot of what DIANA was doing, in terms of the concept and its focus on dual-use and deep tech, was before the invasion of Ukraine, and so at that time before that, I think in terms of the NATO Innovation Fund and thinking about investment and NATO, it wasn't as comfortable with dual-use and investing in dual-use as the US is, not only is the US comfortable, but you have things like we helped a private capital fund, where people feel a great deal of patriotism, or that it's a part of their service to be able to contribute in that way. That feeling doesn't exist, it exists here, but it manifests itself in a different way, and it doesn't manifest itself as let's invest in dual-use technologies to help our defense and national security. So there's different understandings and cultural feelings towards those things. Now, having had the invasion of Ukraine and now the war in Israel and Gaza and now in Yemen, I think that the change is accelerating, insofar as what are the capabilities that we need to rapidly develop within NATO to be able to feel secure on our borders, and what type of investment does that take? Now, US investment in Europe has dropped about 22 percent in 2023, and so they're a little bit nervous about investing in these companies, and so the strength that being able to change the investment paradigm, which is ultimately, the companies that are going to receive the investment from the NATO Innovation Fund and NATO DIANA, they want to develop in the country, but ultimately all of those companies and their investors want them to get to a bigger market, and that bigger market is the US. So, what we are able to do is to connect real dollars, government dollars and commercial dollars, to those companies. We are one of the only pathways outside of export regimes for the Department of International Trade here in the UK. We are one of the only private pathways that has not only been tested and proved, but that we are able to take more companies year on year, take them to the US and prove that model. Now that's really exciting, especially as we see some of the investment declining, because we're able to identify those companies, we're able to connect them to problems that matter that people are trying to solve, develop the use cases, and then help them on the commercialisation side of things in terms of going into a new market. I think that the way that we think about investment in the US from a BMNT perspective, and the US is a little bit different from Europe and the UK, but the exciting thing is now that we have this proven pathway to enhance and accelerate concepts like DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund. Ula Ojiaku So it sounds to me like it's not just about the localised investment into the innovation, it's also about BMNT building pathways, so European Startups, for example, that want an inroad into the US, maybe vice versa. Pete Newell I think the AUKUS DIN, the Defense Investor Network really is the collection of the US Investor Network, the UK and Australia. All three countries had Defense Investor Networks that had been set up over the last several years and primarily focused on, one, allowing investors to engage other investors about topics that are of common interest when it comes to this dual-use paradigm; and two, being able to engage with people in the government about things the investors were concerned about. I'm very clear when I talk about the Defense Investor Network, it is about defense investors, not about the government's problem. I've had to redefine that multiple times, as this is about enabling investors to be more proactive and participate in building the right kinds of companies, not about the government telling investors what they need to do, or the government telling the investors how they need to do it. It really, it was built from the investor perspective, and then we found is that the investors were prolifically honest about their feedback to senior people in the government, which I think has been hard for people in the government to get that kind of feedback, but when an investor with a portfolio of 30 and 40 companies looks at the government and says, I will never do it the way you just described, and here's why. Until you change that quantity, it makes no sense for us to participate, invest in, do, you'd be amazed. Sometimes it is the first time somebody's been able to articulate why something isn't going to happen, and then people nod their heads, well, I'll quit asking for that, or I'll go back and change something to see what it is we can do. So, we went from Hacking 4 Allies, which started out as a BMNT program with the Norwegians, to Hacking 4 Allies with the UK, Australia, Norway. At the same time, we had set up the Defense Investor Network, but as soon as we started the Allies program in the UK, the UK-based investors raised their hands and said, what you're doing in the United States, we want to do here, and then the same thing happened in Australia. When they made the AUKUS announcement, it just made too much sense to be able to look at, if we really want a free flow of technology and problems across the AUKUS governments, then surely we should be building ecosystems of like-minded people who can help drive those conversations. So it was super, super easy to bring the AUKUS Investor Network together, it was just too easy. The part that I think is not so easy, but we need to do work on is we, those investors need to be fed problems that are of an AUKUS nature, and at the same time, the governments need to listen to the investors when they tell them they have problems investing in companies that aren't allowed to participate in exercise or training or contracting or acquisitions in a different country, and if you really want to make AUKUS a real thing, there are a lot of policies that have to change. There's been a lot of progress made, but I think there's a lot more left to do to, to really get the opportunity to happen. Ula Ojiaku And would you say some of the problems would be related to what government officials would call national security, because if it's a dual-use spec, whilst it has its secular or commercial use, in the military, you wouldn't want other people knowing how you're deploying that technology and the ins and outs of it. So could that be one of the issues here? Pete Newell My definition of national security really touches public safety all the way up to military, so it's both. I think if you dig into it, it touches everything from supply chain, to access, to raw materials, to manufacturing, to education and workforce development, and you name it. There's a paradigm shift that has to happen if we're going to build more things, more often rather than long term ships and things like that, that as allied nations, we have to be able to attack all of the underlying foundational problems, and that's my supply chain, raw materials, manufacturing, and workforce that's necessary for the future. No one country is going to get that fixed all by themselves, and I think, to me, that's the absolute brilliance of what AUKUS should be able to focus on. Ali Hawks I agree, and I think that to being able to co-invest as well, the opportunity for investors to come around and understand what are the opportunities to, not only co-invest and coordinate, but to be able to scan their companies and their deal flow to see where their companies can partner and secure greater work and contracts and scale. So I think that it's a really important initiative in terms of being a steward of an extremely important ecosystem, not only being a steward, but being able to build that ecosystem of support and development. How we look at national security in the UK is really no different than what Pete talked about, and when we think about working with companies and the willingness to work with big tech companies or small tech companies or whatever it is, it's not just simply one transaction where, here's the money and here's your software. So obviously the kind of employment and the skills, but what is the ecosystem around that technology that is necessary? Does it require sensors and chips, and what is it that it requires that's going to bring in multiple different industries to support it, and that's really what the agenda here around prosperity is. How do we invest in these types of technologies and their ecosystems around it to have a more prosperous Britain? So you have a wider spread of skills as opposed to just investing in one thing. I think that's where AUKUS brings three very important allies together to be able to do that individually, but then the option to do it across in terms of the broader strategy and the policy around AUKUS, is a once in a lifetime chance that I think has come up. Ula Ojiaku So I think the key thing here is, this is a space to be watched, there's lots of opportunity and the potential of having the sum being greater than the parts is really huge here. One last question on this topic. So you said deep tech, and with Open AI's launch of ChatGPT earlier on last year, the world seems to have woken up to, generative AI. Do you see any influence this trend would have, or is having, in the military space in the Defense Innovation space. Pete Newell I think the world has woken up and is staring into the sun and is blinded. The challenge with AI in general, and I would say that it's not the challenge, AI has a long way to go, and by and large, folks are really focused on the high end of what AI can do, but people have to learn how to use AI and AI has to learn. What we're not doing is using AI to solve the mundane, boring, time wasting problems that are preventing our workforce from doing the high end work that only a human being can do, and I don't care how many billions of dollars we're pouring into building robots and other things, it's all great, but we still have government people managing spreadsheets of data that, they become data janitors, not analysts, and it is particularly bad in the intelligence world. I quote the Chief Information Officer of a large logistics agency who said data is not a problem, we have tons of data, it's just crappy, it's not tagged, it's not usable, we have data going back to the 1950s, we have no means of getting that data tagged so it's useful. Now, if we put time and energy into building AI products that would correctly tag old data, it'd be amazing what we can do. In the cases that we have helped develop tools with our clients, they'll save anywhere from a million to 300 million dollars a year in finding discrepancies in supply chain stuff, or finding other issues. So imagine if we put that kind of work in place for other people, but free people up to do more, better, smarter things, how much more efficient the use of the government's time and money would be, so that that money and that time could be invested in better things. So when I say, yeah, the AI is out there and people's eyes are open, but they're staring into the sun. They're not looking at the ground in front of them and solving the things that they could be solving at the speed they should be doing it, and unfortunately, I think they're creating a gap where legacy systems are being left further and further behind, but those legacy systems, whether it's finance, personnel, supply chain, discipline, things like that, aren't going to be able to make the transition to actually be useful later on. So I would describe it as an impending train wreck. Ula Ojiaku And what would be, in your view, something that could avert this oncoming train wreck. Pete Newell I think a concerted effort, really just to have the government say we're going to use AI to get rid of as much of the legacy brute force work that our populations are doing so that we can free them up to do other things. Part of this is we're then going to take the money we save and channel that money back into investment in those organisations. Right now, the money just goes away, that's great, you did better, therefore, your budget's reduced. There's no incentive to get better that way, but if you look at an organisation and say, you know, if you can save 10 million dollars a year, we'll give you that 10 million dollars to reinvest back into your organisation to do better and something else. Now, you have some incentive to actually make change happen. Ula Ojiaku Any thoughts, Ali? Ali Hawks I think the exciting thing for us, the way that I look at it in terms of government is that that government enablement to be able to use AI, here they are building large language models for the government based on the data that they have, and there's a lot of excitement around it and there should be. It's a pretty exciting thing to do. I think where we're in a really strong position and what I find really exciting is being able to do what we do best, which is help them understand what is the query and how do you validate that query? So what are the basic skills that you need to be able to interact, and then to be able to retain the skills of critical analysis, so when the answer comes back, you do not take that as the end all be all. It is a tool. So within your decision-making process, it's decreasing the amount of time it takes you to gather a certain amount of information, but just as you would if you were doing a book report, you still have to validate the sources and understanding, and you have to apply your own judgment and your own experience to that packet of information, which is what we all do every day, but it's not really thought about that way. So I think that the way that people are looking at it here is it will be able give us the decision and it will be able to kind of do our job for us, and for some tools, yes, and I completely agree that we need to free up all of the mundane work that hoovers up the time of civil servants here, because it's extraordinary how they're bogged down, and it completely disempowers them and it contributes to low retention rates and recruitment rates. But I think also it's developing the muscle to be able to do that critical thinking in order to leverage human intelligence to engage with artificial intelligence. And I think that's where we are uniquely positioned to do that because that is the bulk of our work on the front end of the pipeline, which is how are you going to validate what you know, how are you going to get the problem statement in order to query what you need to query and then having the judgment and the analysis to be able to look at that answer and make a decision, based on your own human intellect. That's where I see it playing here. I completely agree with Pete, we have people looking into the sun being like LLMs and they're going to solve everything, but you sit, let's say a hundred people down in front of an LLM and tell me how many people know what to ask it, or how to use it and integrate it into their everyday workflow. There's a long way to go, but I feel really excited about it because I feel like we have something so incredible to offer them to be able to enhance their engagement with AI. Ula Ojiaku That sounds excellent, thank you. Just to go to the rapid fire questions. So, Ali, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most? Ali Hawks So I don't read a lot of work books, in terms of like how to run a company or anything like that, sorry, Pete, but, and I have a 4-year-old and three stepchildren, so I don't actually read as much as I used to, but I have read over in the last few weeks, the book Impromptu by Reid Hoffman about AI, which is great, and I listen to a lot of podcasts on my commute into London, so the Huberman Lab podcast I listen to a lot, but if you're looking for workplace inspiration, I'm afraid I look at Instagram, listen to podcasts, and then I follow Allie K. Miller, who writes a lot about AI, came out of Amazon, and she is fantastic for breaking things down into really bite sized chunks if you're trying to learn about AI, if you don't come from a technical background. Ula Ojiaku Thanks, Ali, we'll put these in the show notes. And Pete, what about you? Pete Newell I will give you two new books. One of them is a fun one, Wiring the Winning Organization written by Gene Kim and Steven Spear. Steve Spear is a good friend of ours, he's been a great mentor and advisor inside BMNT for a long time, I've known Steve since way back in my early days. The other one is by Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton, and it's called The Friction Project, and it's just like you say, it's all about friction in the workplace. I think both of those books tend to lend themselves to how to drive performance in organisations, and I think, knowing all of the authors, that they are phenomenal books, but I think the experience the four of them bring to the dialogue and the discussion of what the future workplace needs to look like and the things we need to solve will all be buried in those books. In terms of podcasts, I'm all over the map, I chase all kinds of things that I don't know. I listen to podcasts about subjects that I'm clueless about that just spark my interest, so I wouldn't venture to pick any one of them except yours, and to make sure that people listen to yours. Ula Ojiaku You're very kind, Pete. Well, because you're on it, they definitely would. Would you both be thinking about writing a book sometime, because I think your story has been fascinating and there are lots of lessons Pete Newell Only if Ali would lead it. So I have picked up and put down multiple proposals to write books around the innovation process within the government and other places, and part of the reason I keep stopping is it keeps changing. I don't think we're done learning yet, and I think the problem writing a book is you're taking a snapshot in time. One of the things that we are very focused on for the military, we talk about doctrine, what is the language of innovation inside the government workplace? It's the thing that we keep picking up, we've helped at least one government organisation write their very first innovation doctrine, the Transportation Security Administration of all places, the very first federal agency to produce a doctrine for innovation that explains what it is, why it is connected to the mission of the organisation, and describes a process by which they'll do it. I think within the Ministry of Defence, Department of Defense, there needs to be a concerted effort to produce a document that connects the outcome of innovation to the mission of the organisation. We call that mission acceleration. We look at innovation as a process, not an end state. The end state is actually mission acceleration. There's probably a really interesting book just to be written about Ali's journey, and I say more Ali's journey than mine because I think as a woman founder of a defence company in the UK, all of the characters in the book are completely unlikely. So somewhere down the road, maybe. Ula Ojiaku Well, I'm on the queue waiting for it, I will definitely buy it. So where can the listeners and viewers find you if, if they want to get in touch? Ali Hawks We're both on LinkedIn, so Pete Newell, Ali Hawks, our emails too are on our various websites, bmnt.com, bmnt.co.uk. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Any final words for the audience? Pete Newell I'll say thank you again for one, having us. Like I said, it's the first opportunity Ali and I have had to be on a podcast together. Any opportunity I get to engage with the folks and have this conversation is a gift. So thank you for giving us the time. Ula Ojiaku My pleasure. Ali Hawks Yes, Ula, thanks very much for having us on together. It's been great. Ula Ojiaku I've enjoyed this conversation and listening to you both. So thank you so much. The pleasure and the honour is mine. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Back for a second discussion of hot topics are guests Dr Gary Blackburn and Dr David Blagden. With host Iain Ballantyne, they weigh up the prospect of European NATO nations being forced to cope with a bigger burden of defence, if a re-elected President Trump decides to to pull American land forces out of the Continent. It is a policy that is being called ‘Dormant NATO' by some commentators. They also consider whether or not the confrontation between missile-firing Houthi rebels and Western navies in the Red Sea is becoming a forgotten contest, with warships that were once committed to protecting sea trade now diverted elsewhere. With European taxpayers getting a subsidy on their own defence - due to the USA carrying the NATO burden -  it is suggested that (even if America did not pull out or scale back forces in annoyance) its strategic and military rivalry with China - which is building a huge navy - may force Washington to concentrate even more on Asia-Pacific. In discussing the fact that certain sanctions on Russia, for invading Ukraine in 2022, may be less than waterproof, the subject of whether to directly confront Moscow or stick to a long, hard policy of containment - in ‘Cold War 2' - is also touched upon by the trio. •The next (July) edition of Warships IFR is published on June 21 in the UK and globally. Visit the magazine web site http://bit.ly/wifrmag  Also, follow us on X @WarshipsIFR Facebook @WarshipsFR and Warships IFR TV on YouTube @warshipsifrtv3668 For more on various editions of the magazine https://bit.ly/wifri •Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull. Gary has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security. Follow him on X at @gjb70 •Dr David Blagden, is Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Strategy and Security Institute (SSI) and in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Exeter. Dr Blagden has worked in - and subsequently consulted for - the UK Cabinet Office, provided evidence for a number of Parliamentary Select Committees and HM Government policy reviews.  He is also a Visiting Fellow of the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, an Associate of the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies. He has written for outlets including The Guardian, The Spectator and the New Statesman. Follow him on X @blagden_david •Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR (first published in 1998) along with its ‘Guide to the Royal Navy' (since 2003) and ‘Guide to the US Navy' (since 2018). Iain is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, plus ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' and ‘Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom' (published by Canelo). In 2017 Iain was awarded a Maritime Fellowship by the British Maritime Foundation. Visit his web site Bismarckbattle.com and follow him on X @IBallantyn

Do India and Ukraine share common ground for cooperation? What shared interests might emerge from their unique contexts? And in the face of Russian aggression, how can these nations forge relations that benefit both sides? In this episode, UkraineWorld's Deputy editor-in-chief Anastasiia Hersymchuk spoke withSwasti Rao, Associate Fellow at the Europe and Eurasia Center, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses and Olha Vorozhbyt, an affiliated expert with the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism”, deputy editor-in-chief of the “Ukrayinskyi Tyzhden” news website. This episode is part of a joint series “Ukraine's global partnerships” made as a partnership between UkraineWorld and the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism”. UkraineWorld (ukraineworld.org) is brought to you by Internews Ukraine, one of the largest Ukrainian media NGOs. SUPPORT us at www.patreon.com/ukraineworld. We provide exclusive content for our patrons. You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontlines at PayPal: ukraine.resisting@gmail.com. This podcast series was created with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the International Renaissance Foundation.

Our guests for this episode are Dr Gary Blackburn and Dr David Blagden who, with host Iain Ballantyne, discuss a recent proposal by the UK Government to introduce a new National Service scheme for 18-year-olds. Iain asks if it is just a case of blatant electioneering by the incumbent Sunak administration, which looks set to lose a summer General Election to the Labour Party? Or does the proposal offer some merit amid a recruitment crisis for the Royal Navy? Likewise, was the other recent big defence announcement by the Conservative government - of taking Defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 - another gambit to try and win votes? Also discussed is the state of the Royal Navy, with frigate and destroyer levels now cut to just 15 and yet with warnings of the UK being confronted by a pre-war state. Things may improve in the 2030s, with new warships entering service, but in the meantime it leaves Britain with a small, tired ‘jam tomorrow' Navy. The effect of sea blindness is also touch upon during the conversation. And can drones really replace people and warships? Or are they just a seductive illusion? This is just the first helping of discourse between the trio as in the next episode – out very soon – they tackle the topics of ‘Dormant NATO' (under a possible second Trump presidency), the wars in the Red and Black seas and whether to directly confront Russia or contain that nuclear state. •The next (July) edition of Warships IFR is published on June 21 in the UK and globally. Visit the magazine web site http://bit.ly/wifrmag  Also, follow us on X @WarshipsIFR Facebook @WarshipsFR and Warships IFR TV on YouTube @warshipsifrtv3668 For more on various editions of the magazine https://bit.ly/wifri •Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull. Gary has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security. Follow him on X at @gjb70 •Dr David Blagden, is Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Strategy and Security Institute (SSI) and in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Exeter. Dr Blagden has worked in - and subsequently consulted for - the UK Cabinet Office, provided evidence for a number of Parliamentary Select Committees and HM Government policy reviews.  He is also a Visiting Fellow of the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, an Associate of the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies. He has written for outlets including The Guardian, The Spectator and the New Statesman. Follow him on X @blagden_david •Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR (first published in 1998) along with its ‘Guide to the Royal Navy' (since 2003) and ‘Guide to the US Navy' (since 2018). Iain is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, plus ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' and ‘Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom' (published by Canelo). In 2017 Iain was awarded a Fellowship by the British Maritime Foundation, which promotes awareness of the United Kingdom's dependence on the sea and seafarers. Visit his web site Bismarckbattle.com and follow him on X @IBallantyn

David Aaronovitch and guests assess the latest developments in Ukraine. In 2022, Russia was expected to win the war easily. That didn't happen. But is Russia gaining the upper hand now? Guests:James Waterhouse, BBC's Ukraine Correspondent Polina Ivanova, FT correspondent covering Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia Michael Clarke, Professor of Defence Studies at Kings College London and Specialist Advisor to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy Ann Marie Dailey, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and policy researcher at RAND Production team: Sally Abrahams, Kirsteen Knight and Ben Carter Editor: Richard Vadon Production Co-ordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound engineers: Neil Churchill

The war in Ukraine has reached a pivotal moment. After months of an apparent stalling on the frontlines, Russia has recently made a series of critical breakthroughs.Now the race is on for Kyiv to get newly approved military aid to the front line before Russian forces attack Ukraine's second largest city, Kharkiv.The 60 billion dollar bill passed in America's congress at the end of April allows for Ukraine to push back against Russian forces and prepare to mount an offensive next year.But a gap in the supply of missiles has left Kyiv dangerously exposed and huge questions remain about how Ukraine's President will act next. So, on this week's Inquiry, we're asking ‘Has US military aid come in time for President Zelensky?'Contributors:Gustav Gressel, senior policy fellow with the Wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations' Berlin office. Max Bergmann, Director, Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program and Stuart Center, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in the US. Dr Marina Miron, post-doctoral researcher in the War Studies Department and an honorary researcher at the Centre for Military Ethics and the Department of Defence Studies, Kings College, London. Professor Olga Onuch, Professor (Chair) in Comparative and Ukrainian Politics at the University of Manchester, UK.Presenter: Tanya Beckett Producer: Lorna Reader Researcher: Matt Toulson Production Co-ordinator: Liam MorreyImage credit: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service via Reuters via BBC Images

GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Gareth Icke is a presenter, a singer/songwriter, an author, a former international beach soccer player, and the presenter of ‘Gareth Icke Tonight'. www.garethicke.com  GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: Godfrey Bloom is a former Member of the European Parliament (MEP), political commentator, and Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies. He has been awarded the Parliamentary Armed Forces Medal and the Territorial Defence Medal.

GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Godfrey Bloom is a Former MEP, political commentator, Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies, Parliamentary Armed Forces medal , Territorial Defence Medal. GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: Josh Rom is an Entertainment and Royals Journalist based in London who has worked across both international broadcasters and multiple newspapers. He's interviewed the likes of Keira Knightley, Renee Zellweger, Samuel L Jackson and others. Find out more at http://www.joshrom.com/

Dr. Malcolm Davis discusses the Australian perspective on AUKUS, American extended deterrence, and the views of China as a potential threat. He highlights the evolving relationship between Australia and the United States, the importance of the US alliance, and the role of AUKUS in strengthening defense capabilities. Davis emphasizes the need for a realistic and balanced approach to China, recognizing its strategic ambitions and the challenges it poses to Australia's security. He also discusses concerns about US commitment and the importance of strengthening extended nuclear deterrence.Dr. Malcolm Davis joined ASPI as a Senior Analyst in Defence Strategy and Capability in January 2016. Prior to this he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in China-Western Relations with the Faculty of Society and Design at Bond University from March 2012 to January 2016, and he currently retains an Honorary Assistant Professor position in the Faculty. He has worked with the Department of Defence, both in Navy Headquarters in the Strategy and Force Structure area, and with Strategic Policy Division in the Strategic Policy Guidance and Strategic External Relations and Education sections from November 2007 to March 2012. Prior to this appointment he was a Lecturer in Defence Studies with King's College London at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, in Shrivenham, UK, from June 2000 to October 2007. He holds a PhD in Strategic Studies from the University of Hull as well as two Masters degrees in Strategic Studies, including from the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. His main research focus is on defense strategy and capability development, military technology, and the future of warfare. Socials:Follow on Twitter at @NucleCastFollow on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/nuclecastpodcastSubscribe RSS Feed: https://rss.com/podcasts/nuclecast-podcast/Rate: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nuclecast/id1644921278Email comments and topic/guest suggestions to NucleCast@anwadeter.org

TOI's Rudroneel Ghosh speaks with Lithuania's foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis and Dr. Rajorshi Roy at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses to decode where the Russia-Ukraine war is headed and its continuing impacts.

On today's show, the perilous state of western finances, the move to war economies, and the recent UK by-elections in Wellingborough and Kingswood, are discussed. GUEST OVERVIEW: Godfrey Bloom is a Former MEP, political commentator, Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies, Parliamentary Armed Forces medal , Territorial Defence Medal.

Sashko and his mum were separated after being captured by Russian soldiers in Mariupol. Now 13, Sashko hasn't seen or heard from his mother for almost two years. Along with his grandmother, he tells Victoria and Irena their story and how they've not given up on their search for her. And are Nato members pulling their weight when it comes to defence spending? Donald Trump claims he'd encourage hostile states to attack Nato countries who he says aren't paying enough. Victoria and Irena discuss this with Professor Katarzyna Zysk, from the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, and put some listener questions to her. Today's episode is presented by Victoria Derbyshire and Irena Taranyuk. It was made by Keiligh Baker. The producers were Arsenii Sokolov and Ivana Davidovic. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The series producer is Lucy Boast. The senior news editor is Jonathan Aspinwall. Email Ukrainecast@bbc.co.uk with your questions and comments. You can also send us a message or voice note via WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram to +44 330 1239480.You can join the Ukrainecast discussion on Newscast's Discord server here: tinyurl.com/ukrainecastdiscord.

On today's show, Lord Prem Sikka discusses his role in speaking up for people and holding both Big Business and the Government accountable. He highlights his involvement in questioning the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, shedding light on the Fujitsu/Post Office scandal, advocating for issues like fuel poverty and sewage water, and addressing government actions related to pension rights. Later, Godfrey Bloom delves into the topic of war conscription and the prevalence of war-related discussions in national and international news. GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Lord Prem Sikka, whose full title is The Lord Sikka, His full name is Prem Nath Sikka, he is a current member of the House of Lords and an Emeritus Professor of Accounting. GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: Godfrey Bloom holds several notable recognitions, including being an Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies and receiving the Parliamentary Armed Forces Medal and Territorial Defence Medal.

Welcome to our weekend edition of free speech and straight talking as Godfrey Bloom is back with us for some news driven chat and discussion, giving his unbridled opinions on some of the top stories bouncing around this week on the web, in the tabloids and on his social media. Topics under the spotlight... - Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved bitcoin ETFs.  - Why it seems like everyone is sick right now? — and Covid isn't to blame. - Thousands of Polish patriots take to the streets of Warsaw to protest the illegal jailing of conservative MPs by globalist puppet Tusk. - Not my King? Royal Family faces breaking point as support drops below 50% for the first time. - How disgraced ex-Post Office chief nearly became the Bishop of London after being 'supported' by the woke wet-wipe, Archbishop Canterbury Justin Welby. - Huge blow to EV car revolution as sales to Brits plummet – with electric cars just a quarter of new purchases. - Bus go BANG! Electric double decker bus in London bursts into flames after huge 'bang' heard. - WHITEWASH: Covid inquiry postpones vaccine investigation. - Almost 4,000 migrants caught pretending to be kids to sneak into Britain — with some in their thirties. Godfrey Bloom is a libertarian author with six books published on both military history & Austrian School Economics. He worked in the City of London where he won an international prize for fund management (fixed interest) with Mercury Asset Management. Bloom finished his city career as General Manager of a life assurance company. He represented Yorkshire & Lincolnshire in the European Parliament & was a staunch campaigner for Brexit for twenty five years. During his term of office he attracted over sixty million views on his chamber speeches exposing State bank & tax malpractice on Facebook & You Tube. Thought to be an all time record. He brought experience if not influence to the mainly lay EU Parliamentary Monetary & Economic Affairs Committee, putting both members & European Central Bank President under unaccustomed pressure. Godfrey Bloom passed out of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1976 & served as logistics liaison officer to 4th Armed Division in Germany. He is an Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies & has presented papers & lectures to The RCDS, Joint Services Staff College, National Defence University Washington & too many universities to list. His speciality is procurement & geo political military strategy. Godfrey Bloom is holder of the Territorial Decoration & bar, Sovereign's Medal, Armed Forces Parliamentary Medal & European Parliamentary silver medal. Connect with Godfrey... WEBSITE:              https://godfreybloom.uk/ X:                           https://x.com/goddersbloom?s=20 SUBSTACK:          https://godfreybloom.substack.com/ Interview recorded 12.1.24 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE               https://heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS           https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA     https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts....  SHOP                  https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ Episode links... bitcoin https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/11/bitcoin-etf-approved-sec-explained-meaning-securities-regulator-tweet everyone is sick https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/07/seems-like-just-everyone-a-cold-right-now-20077354/ Polish patriotshttps://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1745461397037998519?s=20 https://x.com/EvaVlaar/status/1745425877461037509?s=20 Royal Family https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1853699/royal-family-support-drops-poll-king-charles Post Office chief https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12944243/How-disgraced-ex-Post-Office-chief-Paula-Vennells-nearly-Bishop-London-supported-application-Archbishop-Canterbury-Justin-Welby.html EV car https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/25269522/electric-car-sales-decrease/ bus banghttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12950765/London-electric-double-decker-bus-fire-Wimbledon.html Covid inquiry https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67935037 migrants https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/25273358/migrants-pretending-kids-britain/#:~:text=NEARLY%204%2C000%20asylum%20seekers%20have,turned%20out%20to%20be%20adults.&text=That%20includes%20887%20rumbled%20from%20January%20to%20September%20last%20year

A National Audit Office (NAO) report on ‘The Equipment Plan 2023 - 2033' in the UK makes for grim reading, revealing a massive so-called ‘black hole' in the Defence budget, which means there is apparently no money for key projects, including future warships. In part two of the discussion, host Iain Ballantyne and guests Gary Blackburn and James Bosbotinis weigh up the shortfall in funding. They also ponder what the Labour Government-in-waiting might do to fill in the ‘black hole' if it succeeds in coming to power in 2024.  Are we going to see the Navy-led Indo-Pacific ‘tilt' by the UK axed and would that be a wise move in our interconnected world? Surely there cannot be another British retreat from East of Suez?  With so many threats looming globally, might a UK government be foolish enough to follow the example of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review and further hollow out the Armed Forces to save money with big item cuts?  Aside from contemplating the above issues, the discussion addresses whether or not the long-feared New Cold War is here, with the Western liberal democracies confronted by a global existential threat from authoritarian states (not least Russia and Iran). • For more on Warships IFR magazine http://bit.ly/wifrmag  Follow it on Twitter @WarshipsIFR and on Facebook @WarshipsIFR The topics discussed during our podcast episode are often also looked at in the magazine itself. It is available in digital and hard copy formats. To find out where it is available from UK shops bit.ly/searchdist  Our new Warships IFR 'Guide to the Royal Navy 2024' is out now in the UK in shops bit.ly/searchdist or order direct from Sundial Magazines https://bit.ly/GRN24e  Guests: • Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, which seeks to enhance understanding on the nature of war and strategy while also providing guidance on best practice in war and strategy to professional stakeholders. Gary has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security. Follow him on Twitter @gjb70 • Dr James Bosbotinis is a freelance defence and international affairs analyst, specialising in maritime strategy and force developments. He is a regular contributor to Warships International Fleet Review, and is the Book Reviews Editor of The Naval Review. For more information about Dr Bosbotinis visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbosbotinis He is on twitter @JamesBosbotinis Warships Pod host: • Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR (first published in 1998) along with its ‘Guide to the Royal Navy' (since 2003) and ‘Guide to the US Navy' (since 2018). Iain is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, with his most recent books being ‘Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom' and ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' (Canelo History).  For more details on Iain and his books visit the web sites  http://iainballantyne.com and https://www.bismarckbattle.com/ Follow him on Twitter @IBallantyn

This episode begins with a discussion by host Iain Ballantyne and guests Dr Gary Blackburn and Dr James Bosbotinis about the bid by Venezuela to annex a major part of neighboring Guyana. How might navies attempt to prevent escalation as the communist client state of Russia and Iran considers its next move against an oil-rich Commonwealth nation? How the Venezuelan Navy stacks up against Guyana's forces is part of the discussion. Then there is the Red Sea situation where the Houthi faction in Yemen is letting fly with Iranian-supplied drones and missiles against merchant ships and warships in international waters.  Do the Houthis have the capacity in weaponry and also the capability to cause serious damage and disruption? Gary and James provide their perspectives on the above issues and more including the broader canvas of the Iranian-led resistance to Western involvement in the Middle East. The historical context of today's events is also considered, with reference to the Tanker War of the 1980s and the importance of Red Sea trade to the global economy. • For more on Warships IFR magazine http://bit.ly/wifrmag  Follow it on Twitter @WarshipsIFR and Facebook @WarshipsIFR Guests: • Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, which seeks to enhance understanding on the nature of war and strategy while also providing guidance on best practice in war and strategy to professional stakeholders.  Gary has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security. Follow him on Twitter @gjb70 • Dr James Bosbotinis is a freelance defence and international affairs analyst, specialising in maritime strategy and force developments. He is a regular contributor to Warships International Fleet Review, and is the Book Reviews Editor of The Naval Review.  For more information about Dr Bosbotinis visit  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbosbotinis He is on twitter @JamesBosbotinis Warships Pod host: • Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR (first published in 1998) along with its ‘Guide to the Royal Navy' (since 2003) and ‘Guide to the US Navy' (since 2018). Iain is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, with his most recent books being ‘Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom' and ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' (Canelo History). For more details on Iain and his books visit the web sites  http://iainballantyne.com and https://www.bismarckbattle.com/ Follow him on Twitter @IBallantyn

'Suella Braverman, former Home Secretary to United Kingdom, was caked for her “hateful” article regarding the Pro-Palestinian protesters. Prime Minster Rishi Sunak gave Braverman's portfolio to James Cleverly who was foreign Secretary. However, David Cameron was brought in as Foreign Secretary which is a good news for India and might help expedite much awaiting Free Trade Agreement between India and United Kingdom', says Swasti Rao, Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.----more----Read full article here: https://theprint.in/opinion/bravermans-exit-and-camerons-entry-is-good-news-for-india-it-can-fast-track-fta/1848397/

Freedom of expression is under the gun in the Land of the Free. We look at what media in the United States is missing in Israel's war on Gaza - and why it matters.Contributors:Noura Erakat - Associate Professor, Rutgers UniversityAbdallah Fayyad - Journalist; Former Member, Boston Globe Editorial BoardAlex Kane - Senior Reporter, Jewish CurrentsJack Mirkinson - Acting Senior Editor, The NationOn our radar:The vast majority of mainstream outlets in the US are corporate-owned. Nic Muirhead reports on how publicly-funded broadcasters in the Anglosphere are taking heat over their coverage of the Gaza story.‘India Stands With Israel':Indo-Israeli relations have been on the upswing for the past few years. And in this war, Indians have been showing their support through posts online, and rants on TV with some disinformation thrown in, to skew how this conflict is understood. Meenakshi Ravi reports.Contributors:Azad Essa - Author, Hostile Homelands; Journalist, Middle East EyePooja Chaudhuri - Researcher and Trainer, BellingcatSwasti Rao - Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and AnalysesSubscribe to our channel http://bit.ly/AJSubscribeFollow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/AJEnglishFind us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/aljazeeraCheck our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/Check out our Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/aljazeeraenglish/Download AJE Mobile App: https://aje.io/AJEMobile@AljazeeraEnglish#Aljazeeraenglish#News

Show notes and Transcript Godfrey Bloom is well known for his time as a UKIP MEP in the European Parliament where he served 3 terms, but he joins Hearts of Oak today to discuss all things finance.  Godfrey's career was in the military, financial economics and he spent many years as an investment banker.  He has written many books including 'The Magic Of Banking: The Coming Collapse'.  Godfrey discusses how he has managed to fuse together a life in the army, in politics and in finance.  He then then delves into the shadowy financial institutions which control all our lives and have pushed every government into a spiral of debt that will sooner or later collapse the global financial system.  We finish by looking at gold and why Godfrey believes it is the perfect store of wealth. Godfrey Bloom is a libertarian author with six books published on both military history & Austrian School Economics. He worked in the City of London where he won an international prize for fund management (fixed interest) with Mercury Asset Management. Bloom finished his city career as General Manager of a life assurance company. He represented Yorkshire & Lincolnshire in the European Parliament & was a staunch campaigner for Brexit for twenty five years. During his term of office he attracted over sixty million views on his chamber speeches exposing State bank & tax malpractice on Facebook & You Tube. Thought to be an all time record. He brought experience if not influence to the mainly lay EU Parliamentary Monetary & Economic Affairs Committee, putting both members & European Central Bank President under unaccustomed pressure. Godfrey Bloom passed out of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1976 & served as logistics liaison officer to 4th Armed Division in Germany. He is an Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies & has presented papers & lectures to The RCDS, Joint Services Staff College, National Defence University Washington & too many universities to list. His speciality is procurement & geo political military strategy. Godfrey Bloom is holder of the Territorial Decoration & bar, Sovereign's Medal, Armed Forces Parliamentary Medal & European Parliamentary silver medal.  Connect with Godfrey... WEBSITE:     https://godfreybloom.uk/ X:                  https://x.com/goddersbloom?s=20 SUBSTACK: https://godfreybloom.substack.com/ Interview recorded 19.9.23 *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more... https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts.... https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ Please subscribe, like and share! Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Godfrey Bloom, it is wonderful to have you with us today. Thank you so much for your time. (Godfrey Bloom) A pleasure to be here.  Great to have you and people can follow you @GoddersBloom on Twitter. Godfreybloom.uk is the website and godfreybloom.substack.com. On the website you can get about gold and your wealth, the great reset, climate and green energy, COVID, military, all topics that I know our viewers and listeners will be interested in. But for our viewers who may not have come across Godfrey Bloom, he has a long and varied career encompassing financial services, army, politics. It was the politics where I first came across you serving two terms, I think for UKIP in the European Parliament. And one of Godfrey's books, all available on the website, but is The Magic of Banking, the coming collapse paperback. Now Godfrey, how did you manage to fuse together finance, military and politics? It's an interesting mix. Well, of course, it's the only advantage of being very old is that you get lots of opportunities to do lots of stuff. So it's not because I'm particularly clever, it's because I'm particularly old. So just to bear in mind my background in the 1960s, I went into the city with a very prestigious Broking House in the 1960s, about 1966-67, in those days. Now, in those days, if you were going to get anywhere in the city, it was, first of all, you had to wear a bowler hat. You had to have a bowler hat, and it seems a long time ago now, but you didn't have to wear it, you just had to make sure you had it on the hat stand. I still got it. And the other thing, a couple of things, all the senior directors were wartime officers. All the middle management were National Service officers. So you had to have some kind of military connection. Shore Service Commission, Territorial Army Commission, perhaps with a prestigious regiment. And so on and so forth, and you had to play rugger, as we called it in those days. I ticked every box in a fairly modest kind of way. That all fused together. As you go through life, something pops up. My main life was an investment fund manager, a pension investment fund manager, specializing in fixed interest with a view to pension investment. Dull, very un-prestigious. The equity boys were the glamour boys. It was a bit like the difference between a fighter pilot in the war and coastal command. I was more coastal command. So that's what you had to do. And then I was in a territorial regiment and I was then attached, I did a short service with regular back to the territorial army, so on and so forth. Started in life armoured reconnaissance with 4th Armoured Division in Germany. Where we had the sort of stuff that you see now in old black-and-white movies was actually state-of-the-art stuff when I was soldiering. It was all a very long time ago. Then, when I worked for a very prestigious investment house in the city, I was asked to investigate the implications of becoming the common currency, as it was called then in the late 80s and early 90s, what did it entail, so on and so forth. I had a very good team of statisticians and people. I looked at that and I saw the implications. I dug deeper into the implications of our membership of the European Union. And the deeper I dug, the smellier the whole thing got. And that drew me into politics in 2004, where I resigned from the board of financial service companies and went into politics, which was an eye-opening experience. So that's why I came to do all these things. You couldn't do that now, I don't think, because the world has changed and everything is really too focused on micromanagement and micro career patterns and so on and so forth. So I was very lucky to be born when I was, you could have a really holistic kind of career pattern, which gave me my army and politics and business. So I had all three. I don't think you could do that now.  Very true. And I think that connection with the military and our politics public service has gone as well. And I think that's a shame for our country. But let me talk to you. Many people think they are free to vote for what they want. They're free to go where they want. They're free to use their money as they want. But it's that financial freedom or maybe lack of it. I want to talk to you about. There are financial institutions that can operate in the shadows that control our lives. And I know you've written about this, you've done videos about this. Do you want to kind of touch on that and maybe pull the veil slightly back on that? Well, I think it was Jacob Rothschild who actually got it dead right, for better or for worse, and I would suggest worse. And that was, he said, it doesn't matter who you vote for, it's who controls the money. And of course it's been the Rothschilds being part of the cabal that controls money. Since I don't know, probably 120, 130 years at least, not just in this country, in Europe as well. So he who controls the money. And of course, as we become a more secular society, money becomes the primary goal. It is the religion. It is the religion of Western Europe, it's the religion of North America. It's how much money. In a secular society, of course, you lose any form of moral compass. If indeed, perhaps there was any moral compass, I don't know, but I'm sure there was more moral compass in yesteryear than there is now. So the deal is, and which means you can buy any journalist and you can buy any politician. And almost every single journalist and every single politician is bought. There are very few exceptions. It isn't always overt, but you've only got to look at certain responses from journalists. And I'll give you one very easy example of that. In Syria, for example, when the CIA and the Washington neo-cons are trying to destabilize Syria in order to get their pipeline coming from Qatar, it's all about money, it's all about money and influence, and this is what was happening. Then of course you would find the CIA would put out a press release saying Assad has dropped poison gas on his own people and he's a very bad guy. That would be a CIA press release. Now, people like Andrew Neil on BBC TV would read that out within hours of it being circulated. There was no possible question of us checking whether it was true or not. And Andrew Neil, who was a sort of dwyan of supposedly independent broadcasting, joke, joke, would read that out with a straight face, which meant everybody watching BBC would believe that to be true. And of course, subsequently, we find out that it wasn't true at all. It was CIA propaganda. Or indeed, I have to say, sadly, MI6 or MI5 propaganda. So you're getting a constant stream of lies from legacy broadcasting, and people believe that it was the same in the fake pandemic. 80% of people in this country will believe it if it's on the BBC, and psychologically, I did a course with the Smithsonian Institute on trying to get to the bottom of this psychologically. 80% of the people, I don't think it's just true of Britain, I think it's 80% of most of the Western industrialized countries, will believe anything they're told, and people do. The people who push back against it are kicked out or de-platformed. I mean I'm de-platformed. I used to be a regular speaker at Cambridge University and various other universities. I can't get on now. I haven't been interviewed by the BBC now for years. Dissent is verboten. So there's no concept of dissent. But if you do an audit trail of all of it and you if you go right back and find out why is this. You will find it's about money or political power. There are no exceptions and there are no good guys left in politics. Well obviously in finance we've seen, I mean Nigel Farage just talked about his issues with banking, it's happened to many many others and it seems as though banks can punish people for whatever reason and I think that's a world away from the traditional view of the bank being someone who kind of looks after your money, it's safe, it's cared for, it's maybe invested well, and I think what we've seen in the last few months has been a completely different side from the banks. Yes, but of course the banks have been politicized as well, have they not? You're looking at concepts of ESG, so your ratings for stock holdings by BlackRock and Vanguard, who are the biggest investors in the world, together they own the world, basically. They actually own each other, but that's another long story. So you have Larry Fink and people of this Vanguard, of course, and people you don't even know who voted, because it's not publicly quoted, so you don't even quite know who really owns it. So, it's highly politicized. And, of course, the situation with Nigel Farage was interesting, because NatWest and Coutts are 38% owned by the government. So, you couldn't get more to be more of a political bank than NatWest. It is a government bank. And the chief executive was put there because she was a government appointee. She has no knowledge of anything, finance, whatever. I mean, laughable. I mean, when I was the director of a main investment bank years ago, I wouldn't have employed her to clean the cars. She's utterly hopeless. She's a political agitator with a clean, squeaky-clean record, common purpose, WEF, the whole tutti-frutti. Of course. Expertise went out, and so did discretion and confidentiality. She had to go because she broke confidentiality, which is at the basis of banking, and Coutts in particular, where I also used to be a client when I had enough money to be a client of Coutts Bank. So you have all these problems. Of course, it's interesting enough, she's gone. She went with £2.3 million payoff. And I bet you anything you like, in two or three months, she'll pop up somewhere else in a very senior, very highly paid appointment. That's how the game plan works, all right? So, it's all about money and so on and so forth, but of course, I have to say... This has been going for some time. They did the same thing to Tommy Robinson, they did the same thing to Britain First, they did the same thing with the political platform of For Britain. They were debanked, which means it's very difficult to function in modern society if you have no form of bank. You can't collect subscriptions, you can't do anything. Interesting though, I have to say, this has been going on for some time. But when it happened to Nigel? That's a different game, is it? Oh, that's a much different game. It happened to Nigel. Nigel wasn't bothered about this until it happened to him. It's the old theory, isn't it, of Winston Churchill. You placate the crocodile on the basis that you hope he will eat you last. No, it's true. I thought exactly the same, although I was thankful for a high-profile figure to highlight the injustice. But you're right, it's happened to most individuals don't have the ability to have a nationally out program or a newspaper column to talk about this injustice. So at least it is being aired. But as you pointed out, the madness of a bank being partially government owned and the government said, it's not our fault. And you wonder, well, whose fault is this? And they were blaming past regulation. You mentioned some of those companies, BlackRock and Vanguard, and these are shadowy companies. They own parts of many companies. They're very large shareholders of many institutions. Kind of how has it got to that? Should that worry people? Is this just how financing capitalism works or is there a darker side to this? No, one has to just remind everybody, certainly the younger generation, the difference between mercantilism and capitalism. Capitalism is laissez-faire. It means that you invest, you pretty well do what you damn well like, and the only demonstration of true capitalism post-war, of course, was Hong Kong under John Cooperthwaite, where his view was, it's my job to make sure the drains work and the police aren't corrupt, nothing else is my business. That's capitalism and of course that produced one of the most successful territories on the face of the planet in a very short period of time with no natural resources. Hong Kong has no natural resources. What we have now is mercantilism, which is sometimes referred to as crony capitalism, but it's got nothing to do with capitalism. Now, in a nutshell, how these sort of things work, I used to work for a company called Mercury Asset Management, which was part of the Warburg Empire. It was the biggest pension fund manager in Europe. I was the representative of the National Association of Pension Funds, the institution there, as well as being a fund manager. I wasn't on the main board, incidentally. I was on a junior board, but believe me, I knew how the game worked. Now, when you're doing that, Merck Asset Management then owned 4% of the European stock market. That's a very significant number. It doesn't sound like much, but 4% of the stock market is big. Then they were acquired by Merrill Lynch, a big American investment house, and then Merrill Lynch were acquired by BlackRock, and so it goes on, and so it gets bigger and bigger, almost like a sort of an astrophysicist would talk to you about a black hole. It becomes bigger and bigger, and the gravity pull is beyond human imagination. And then of course the oligarchs are part of that, and they're rich beyond most of our dreams. I mean the George Soros's of this world, the Bill Gates of this world, the Mark Zuckerberg's of this world, all these people are wealthy beyond imagination. And so you'd have to go back to the Rockefellers, to find people who were that rich in comparison. And what is interesting then, they would produce organizations, institutions, like the Bill and Melinda Gates and so on and so forth, and the Rockefeller Foundation. And these also get hijacked politically, and you can go back to the Quaker side in this country, to Roundtrees, for example. Quaker, and they were very good to their employees, and they had an ethos, a Quaker ethos. And now there's a very wealthy Roundtree Foundation, which is hijacked, politically, completely. It's woke. The National Trust is woke. Everything has become woke. And woke is really just part of the World Economic Forum's game plan. And this grows and grows in power. So you end up now with a prime minister who is World Economic Forum, no shame about it. No conspiracy theory yet. You know, somebody's always conspiring. That's absolute nonsense. Look at their website. It's perfectly up front. They boast about this. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the opposition, Starmer, when asked, do you think Parliament or Davos, which was the most important, he said, Davos. The King who gives royal assent to our laws now is World Economic Forum agent. In fact, as far as I understand, he could be the top man. I'm never quite sure whether Klaus Schwab reports to him or vice versa but the principle is the same. So now, of course, they control everything, and Bill Gates is the biggest farmer in the United States. He owns more land in the United States than anybody else. It's very difficult for ordinary people to fight against this, and they certainly can't fight against it with a vote. Vote is totally meaningless, and so you have these huge power blocs, and our elected politicians, are simply stooges. Penny Mordaunt, for example, is a stooge to Bill Gates. He wrote a forward for her book. She's an advocate of Bill Gates. All these people are paid, and we have a CIA, who, with a huge budget, an unaudited budget, they could pay you to interview certain people or not interview certain people in a Swiss bank account. Very significant amount of money. And most people have a price. Most people can be bought. And those who can't be bought are people like Neil Oliver, on a much smaller scale, me. You can't buy me, but I'm few. I'm one of the very few, and you can't buy me because money is not my God. I don't know whether you could buy me with other things. I can't imagine what they would be. So some people are incorruptible, but that's a tiny minority, and that certainly doesn't work in politics. How have you seen, looking back at the industry, how finance works, kind of, how have you seen a change? Has part of it been more scrutiny? Has part of it been the internet opens up the ability to question, with the public going direct? I mean, Neil Oliver, obviously on GB News, but having a huge reach on social media. Kind of, how have you seen a change? and how has social media affected the people's awareness of maybe what is happening? Well, social media is a wonderful thing. You know, it's a wonderful thing that you can get a significant footprint on that. But again, most people, it's still sadly legacy TV. It's still the BBC or ITV or whatever it happens to be that calls the shots. People who follow social media of course are the most informed but then if you look at my whole, just let's take me, my whole footprint is probably, I probably in total have overall something like 160,000 subscribers. That really isn't very many. Obviously, Neil Oliver is much bigger, and I'm glad of that because he's, in my view, a great man, a great historian, and a great leader of thought. So I'm a huge supporter of his. But there's still most people, most people go with the flow, they half watch BBC, they half watch ITV, doing something else, putting a shelf up, doing the ironing, whatever it is. So most people accept what they're told. Most people, of course, when it comes to things like pandemics or so-called pandemics, listen to their doctor. People have this divine faith in the National Health Service, which is, of course, ludicrous if you dig down into it, but most people do.  Again, it's a legacy thing, and it goes back to people being brought up on Doctor in the House, black and white, Ealing movies, funny enough, where you are now. Wonderful things when it worked and when it was incorrupt. Now, of course, that's all gone. The Bank of England, central banks are now political appointees. You have your head of your central bank, Carney is a classic example, brought in as a Canadian, ex-Goldman Sachs, most of them are ex-Goldman Sachs, which is known as the vampire squid in the city. Even hard-nosed investment bankers like mine used to regard them as beyond the pale. These are the sort of Vlad the Impaler of the investment banking world, but they're all political appointees, so Carney was a political appointee. So that this nonsense of the Bank of England being independent. So it doesn't work like that and they go on to other political appointments with the UN or the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of International Settlements which of course nobody ever told us about, which is the most powerful institution in the world. So all these things come together to thwart the ordinary guy. In my experience in Britain, and I don't know what your experience is Peter, but my experience is the true guy who questions anything of this nature is what we used to call the artisan class. You're sparky, you're bricky, you're joiner. People who actually do real stuff for a living, they actually put kitchens in, shelves in, drive a cab. People who actually do a real job for a living are very much more highly critical and much better informed. So for example, my window cleaner is simply miles more informed than my friends who read history or law at Oxford. You know, the dinner party set, your English middle class are so gullible and naive. It's unbelievable. A working man having a pint in the pub who's a sparky or a chippy, he's not so gullible because he does a real job and sees stuff every day. So the divide, you have this divide. And people make a big mistake if they think, and people do, that the divide is somehow between class, particularly, or skin colour, or wealth. Well, it isn't. I can tell you. And 10 years in politics showed me this campaigning for Brexit, for example. The people who really understood these matters were the artisan class, but your divide in society is between those in the wealth-creating sector and those in the public sector. Your public sector, your civil servant, your man at the town hall, anybody who works for the government is protected. They have index-linked pension funds, which have long since gone from the private sector. These people are virtually unsackable, the Quangos. All these people are entitled and have the arrogance of office. There's your divide. It's not old or young or black and white. It's who works for the government in some form and who doesn't. There's your divide. Of course, in the last five years, we've seen over 100,000 new civil servants. One might imagine that they won't be happy until everyone is a civil servant and therefore everybody can be controlled. If only we had a conservative government, but I see the same difference in conversations with friends, with colleagues, and I echo what you said. Everything we knew about finance seems to have gone out the window, gone out of fashion. I mean, saving money, don't spend more than you earn, invest wisely, make sure your repayments are manageable, have cash in hand for a rainy day. Now every government worldwide seems to be in a rush to see who can run the biggest deficit, who can get the biggest debt. And governments, maybe at one time, would have been common sense. It's this rush to spend much more than any other government. What are your thoughts on kind of how we have got to that state of financial madness? Well, the problem we've had is Keynesianism. That's from the 1930s, where personal savings were regarded as a bad thing. Public spending and private spending and consumption was regarded as a good thing, and debt doesn't matter. This is your Keynesian theory which has been taught now to generations of people in universities and schools and they don't teach alternatives, they don't teach Austrian school economics, they don't mention some of the great names of yesteryear like you know some of the great French economic philosophers. So they don't talk about this. Debt doesn't matter. They can print money. Of course, in 1971 when America came off the gold standard, the dollar came off the gold standard, which was the reserve currency in 1971, Nixon closed the gold window, which was the technicality of the problem. You see the spending power of the United States dollar from 1971. That 1971dollar now would buy you six cents worth of services and goods, a complete collapse of paper currency. And of course, sterling's worse, and so on and so forth. So it's the degradation of money and it's the unseen tax inflation. So who does inflation hurt? It holds people on fixed income, old-age pensioners. Mainstream society suffers from inflation, but not your public sector. For example, if you're in the public sector, and certainly if you're a pensioner, I have a small pension for the Ministry of Justice, because I worked for them for a while. I won't go into the details there. It's very small. But last year I got an 8.5 percent increase, and I'll get another 8.5 percent, so I'm protected. I live in a small village, but we have retired civil servants in the village, totally protected. Always got new cars, expensive holidays, and extensions to their cottages or houses. Money is no object to them because they're protected. But if you're on fixed income, you're stuck. And it gets back to what I say, there's this divide in society, some people who are affected by inflation and some who are not. So when you consider debt doesn't matter, and of course, to keep up, try and give a modern veneer to it, they've taken away the term Keynesianism by calling it modern monetary theory. There's nothing modern about it. And that somehow, and this is the great key, and I tried to explain this to undergraduates when I was allowed to speak at universities. And the faculties who don't understand it, believe me, the faculties at universities have absolutely no more idea about the economic supply to the moon. So they have these thoughts that debt doesn't matter, that somehow an individual like you or me or a small businessman. Debt doesn't matter. Debt matters. You can't get into debt because debt will catch up with you and your business will go out or you'll go bankrupt. They'll come and take away your furniture, etc. That's for us. Somehow a government doesn't have this problem. Apparently, governments go on spending and spending more money, and borrowing and printing more money with no great effect. It really doesn't matter. Of course, it does matter as we're beginning to see because actually now in the United States, servicing the national debt is exactly the same amount of money as their military budget, which is $1 trillion a year. They're spending $2 trillion in the United States a year, to no purpose, $2 trillion. And then mainstream media, which of course is bought and paid for by the state, the BBC in particular, if you don't pay the BBC you go to prison and that's a government-sponsored idea. Nobody challenges it. For example, you get to the chancellor of the exchequer interviewed. We now have the highest tax regime that we've had basically since the war. Nobody ever suggests, in either political party or in mainstream media, nobody ever suggests that they cut government spending. It never happens. Nobody stands on the platform of cutting government spending. So you have high-speed rail, 100 billion. You have OECD, which incidentally is unaudited, 1 billion pounds a month. Five billion pounds to the Ukraine. God alone knows where that goes. And so on and so forth. So we spend quangos, probably 600 or 700 billion pounds a year in all these things. They could halve income tax. They could standardize income tax. They could halve VAT if they stopped spending. But stopping spending doesn't happen. It doesn't occur to them to stop spending. So when they say, oh, more money for the national health, we need more money for the national health because it's crumbling and breaking down. They don't need any more money. The national health system is rolling in money. Their problem is that out of the 1.2 million employees that they have, half of those aren't medics of any sort. They're not radiographers, physiotherapists, nurses, doctors, surgeons. Goodness knows what they all do. Yes, you need some administrators, you need some sparkies, you need bits and pieces, but do you need 600,000? Procurement. Procurement. My sister used to work for the Norwich Infirmary. She said, I can buy mattresses online, exactly the same, for a third of the price that we spend on them, because nobody's in charge of procurement. Nobody cares about public money, because it's not their money. We have waste on an unprecedented scale. The concept has gone of the public purse. If you went back to before the Great War, if you were a councillor, first of all, you'd be unpaid, there'd be no expenses, and there was a very serious concern about the public purse, taken very seriously from a moral dynamic. Nobody cares about the public purse now. Nobody cares. Does debt matter? Well, yes, it does matter, and we are going to see in the next few years, we're going to see a collapse of the banking system, and we're going to see a collapse of fiat currency. It's paper. It's intrinsically worthless. Then the people who survive that will be the people who have the foresight to buy gold, gold coins.  Well, I want to finish off on gold, but let me just pick up on the move away from fiat, the restrictions on using cash, often in shops and businesses. It's coming more and more, closing of ATMs, closing of bank branches, and this move towards central bank digital currencies, this move towards a new government control. I mean, how have you viewed this? Give us a little bit more of your thoughts on where it's going. Well, the key, of course, to central bank digitalization, which we have to an extent already, of course, nobody, De La Rue do not print notes anymore. It's created electronically. And, of course, I explain this in my book. If you go in and want to borrow £60,000 for an extension, or you want to buy 20,000 pounds of gold, the bank clerk, if you're a good customer, and they know you, they will simply create that electronically by tapping it out and crediting your account. That's digital money. That's electronic money. It doesn't really exist. Of course, then you send it to somewhere else, the person who's sending you a car, so on and so forth. If you look at the international regulation Basel III, for example, and you have to keep 10% reserves. If you put your money, if you put 100,000 pounds into the bank, they only have to keep. 10,000 pounds of that back as a reserve. They can lend it on. Of course, it doesn't matter to whom they lend it. This is one of the problems that we have. It isn't good lending. It's not sound lending. For example, the Euro bond buying process, when I was there and I was trying to look at what they were actually buying, oh, well, it's Asset Bank. Sell them. No, Mr. Bloom, these are asset-backed bonds. Well, they're not. You get BMW or VW Finance, for example. What you're actually buying is a bond and the asset is an aging BMW or Volkswagen. It's not asset-backed at all. We found this out in 2007, did we not, where people thought they were buying a mortgage from a doctor in Washington with a nice big house at Springpool in Arlington. They weren't, they're buying trailer trash in South Chicago. I didn't fall for it. I was in the game at the time, but I knew what I was doing, because I'm an old man. The children that run the city and run pension funds in some of these councils, they fell for it because they simply didn't do their homework. You can't avoid homework. You have all this degradation of everything, bonds, stocks, deposits, not backed, not guaranteed. You have all these problems. The only way it can go is to destroy itself, to collapse. We saw this in 2007 and 2008, but did we change anything? We didn't change anything. Nothing changed. It's the same thing. They've just printed more and more money and borrowed and spent more and more money. Now we're in a situation where it simply must collapse. They want digital currencies so they can control it. They can program it, and for those of subscribers who aren't familiar with the concept, I'm sure they are, otherwise they wouldn't be watching this program, but let's just take it from there. It's programmable. The World Economic Forum, in line with the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of International Settlement will not want you to spend money on travel or petrol or meat. Are all these things that they think are bad under the cover of saving the planet, which of course we all know is absolute nonsense, its fake, its fake science. But they've got to frighten people to comply with it. The planet will boil if you don't do this. And of course most people don't have the benefit of traditional education. So they're being conned by people because a, they can't be bothered to do the homework, and b, they've probably in the main gone to a state school, this generation or the generation before, where they haven't really had an education at all. They're not educated at all. I mean, I speak at universities. Nice kids. Like a beer, play rugby, play cricket. I love going there. Educated? They're not educated at all. They don't even pretend to be. So these are the problems. You have an uneducated workforce. Programmable. So when you go in and it's programmable and the state can control it, the bank can control it, they will say you've had your ration of petrol this month. Just like the war, you've had your ration of meat this month. You've had your holiday, Mr. Bloom. You've had your holiday. You can't go on another holiday. Think of the planet, you nasty man. Of course, you look around and you see the King flying around in his private jet, the Royal Air, and all of them, Candy, all these people, Soros, Bill Gates...  Sadiq Khan, who's just done a transatlantic flight with his entourage to talk about climate change.  Exactly, so, everybody sees this, the question is what can you do? Now in London they reap what they sow. I have very little sympathy for Londoners. It's the second time this man's been elected. So whose fault is it? Well, did you vote against him? The answer is, you clearly didn't. That's why he's there, it's the same as Mark Drakeford, isn't it? In Wales, beautiful country, just got back there, hosted walking. I love Wales. Wales is a wonderful, wonderful country and they've got an idiot running. Well, why is he there? Who put him there? Well, the Welsh voted for him, didn't they? So it's as simple as that. And they've got a Muppet in Scotland. And who voted for him? The Scots voted for him. So stop whinging. Voting doesn't do much good, but it might because you can make more of an effort for whom you vote. And so it's programmable and we know it's going to be programmable, don't we? Because that's the whole point of it. And if you look at the World Economic Forum's spokesman on banking, they say it will be programmable. We'll know exactly how you spend it and what you can and cannot spend it on and they'll cancel it so you can't save because they are modern monetary theorists they will want for you to consume they will want you to consume so if you've got a hundred thousand pounds worth of savings or fifty thousand they say if you don't spend it by the end of the year it will disappear so that will encourage spending which they think is a good thing not saving but if you look at countries with the most successful systems over the years and over generations. It's savings. We built the biggest empire the world's ever seen and led the industrial revolution from about 1815 to 1913. The British led it, but it was based on sound money. And savings and interest rates, which outpaced inflation, although there wasn't hardly any inflation in those days. Savings made a point. Saving money made a point. There's no point in you saving money now. There's no point in you saving money in the traditional sense of saving money because you know if you were saving money for a car, which costs £30,000 today, it'll be £40,000 next year. You might as well buy it now. That, of course, degrades your entire financial system.  I want to finish off on gold. On your website, one of your tabs is gold. People can find it forward slash gold on godfreybloom.uk. It's intriguing, the more control that is being pushed upon us, the more people have talked about gold, also about crypto looking forward, but gold looking at that traditional store of wealth. Tell us why you believe that gold is an important store of wealth and why people should be taking advantage of that personally. Well, gold is a store of wealth. It's not an investment and it's not get rich quick. And as I always say to my undergraduates at universities, I always hold up a sovereign coin. The date on it is 1905. The date isn't really relevant, but it happens to be 1905. I explained that a gold sovereign in 1905 would buy you bed and breakfast in quite a good hotel in Paris, London, New York, or Berlin. It will today, because a sovereign is worth just under 400 pounds, so it will today, and it will in 100 years' time. Then we went back on to the gold standard after the Napoleonic Wars in 1860 and 1817. The Gold Sovereign became money. That was money. That was a preservation of wealth. That was a medium of exchange, which is what money is. I say, I try to explain money in the book. Most people don't know what money really is. They think they do, but they don't. Now let's just take your staple commodity in the 19th century. Let's go from 1816 or 1817 to 1913, a loaf of bread was the same price in 1817 as it was in 1913. You can't have inflation because if politicians and bankers can't print money, you can't print gold. That's the beauty of gold, but it's not an investment, it's not get-rich-quick. It's where you protect your wealth and you have to squirrel it away to protect your family because nobody can bugger it for you. They can't degrade it. Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin has some of the same attributes. It's significantly more volatile and there are all sorts of, situations where that might not do what you want it to do. But I'm not going to go down that route because there are bigger experts than me on Bitcoin, but gold, it's free of VAT. There's no capital gains tax on it because it's coin of the realm. If, let's say, for example, you are 60 years old, you're retired, you're coming up to retirement, something like that, you've worked hard all your life. Let's say you've got about £100,000 worth of saving or £50,000 worth of saving. It doesn't quite matter what it is. You don't need it at the moment. You've got a bit of a pension. You've got a bit of this, you've got a bit of that. You're perfectly okay. What you're worried about is what happens when you get to my age and you're dribbling down your cardigan and you can't recognize your in-laws and you're deaf as a post and all the rest of it, you've got all these things, then you're going to need care, you're going to need private medical care, you can't drive anymore so you're going to need a cab if you're going to go anywhere, so on and so forth. What you want with that £100,000 or £50,000 when you're 60 is the same purchasing power when you're 75. Only gold will do that for you. Only gold, and it's been proven to do that for you, for 5,000 years. If you dig up a Roman gold coin today, or a Saxon gold coin today, it'll buy you just what it bought when it was buried in the ground or sank in the boat. That's your key. And that's where gold comes in, as it has done for 5,000. There really isn't anything else, to be brutally frank. Some people argue for silver, but it's an industrial metal, some for Bitcoin if you can cope with the volatility, so on and so forth. But that's why I'm a gold bug and I've been a gold bug since Gordon Brown sold our gold at something like 270 pounds an ounce to buy Euros. He's still sometimes brought on TV as an elder statement. The man is a buffoon. He's a buffoon. It's £1,600 an ounce now. And he got rid of our reserves. That's your reserves and my reserves. And anybody watching this clip who's British. That was our gold. So, he got rid of it and, of course, now if you look across the world, BRICS nations, Russia and China, are beginning to view perhaps gold as being the medium of exchange for countries and trade. Not buying a newspaper, not buying a pound of sausages, you'll use whatever the currency of the day is for that, of course, that will continue. For us in smaller gauge, it used to be coppers, copper pennies, silver pennies, all that. Yeah, that won't change. But for big deals, for big deals, for individuals, an exchange of trade and goods, it will be done in gold because that's the way it's been done for 5,000 years and nothing's going to change that. Certainly not Muppets like Jeremy Hunt. There's no bigger Muppet than Hunt. We will end on that. Godfrey, I appreciate you coming on and people can follow you on Twitter godfreybloom.uk on the website and godfreybloom.substack.com Are those the best places to find you? Yeah, absolutely. Yes, you can find me and I just, if I may just put a word in quickly here. It is a not-for-profit website. Everything I do is not-for-profit. I do not turn a buck on anything that I do recommending. Even my books are virtually at cost because I don't need to make any money. Now another advantage perhaps of being an old knacker is that I've got nothing to spend my money on except beer at the rugby club. Well thank you, I've looked at the website and your Twitter and thoroughly enjoy them both for the information they provide. So thanks so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts on finance. Great, Peter. Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Rajeswari (Raji) Pillai Rajagopalan is the Director of the Centre for Security, Strategy & Technology (CSST) at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra. In 2020, she was Co-chair for a thematic group on “Strategic Technologies” for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (STIP 2020) work, attached to the Office of Principal Scientific Advisor, Government of India and Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. Dr. Rajagopalan was the Technical Advisor to the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) (July 2018-July 2019). She was also a Non-Resident Indo-Pacific Fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre from April-December 2020. As a senior Asia defense writer for The Diplomat, she writes a weekly column on Asian strategic issues. Dr. Rajagopalan joined ORF after a five-year stint at the National Security Council Secretariat (2003-2007), Government of India, where she was an Assistant Director. Prior to joining the NSCS, she was Research Officer at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. She was also a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Politics, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan in 2012.Dr. Rajagopalan has authored/ co-authored or edited more than ten books including ORF-Global Policy Journal Special Issue, Future Warfare and Technology: Issues and Strategies (2022), Military Ambitions and Competition in Space: The Role of Alliances (2021), Global Nuclear Security: Moving Beyond the NSS (2018), Space Policy 2.0 (2017), Nuclear Security in India (2015), Clashing Titans: Military Strategy and Insecurity among Asian Great Powers (2012), The Dragon's Fire: Chinese Military Strategy and Its Implications for Asia (2009). She has published research essays in edited volumes, and in peer reviewed journals such as India Review, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Air and Space Power Journal, International Journal of Nuclear Law and Strategic Analysis. She has also contributed essays to newspapers such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Times of India, and The Economic Times. She has been invited to speak at international fora including the United Nations Disarmament Forum (New York), the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) (Vienna), Conference on Disarmament (Geneva), ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the European Union.EPISODE NOTES:Follow NucleCast on Twitter at @NucleCastEmail comments and story suggestions to NucleCast@anwadeter.orgSubscribe to NucleCast podcastRate the show

What are the key takeaways from the recently concluded G20 Summit in Delhi & India's G20 Presidency? According to Swasti Rao,Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, the connectivity partnership between the US, EU, UAE, Saudi Arabia, India is a truly big ticket announcement that will be a gamechanger.----more----Read full article here: https://theprint.in/opinion/how-do-you-count-the-takeaways-from-indias-g20-its-as-simple-as-abcd/1754848/

In the ninth episode of Japan Memo season 3, Robert Ward and Yuka Koshino host Ambassador Sujan Chinoy, the Director General of the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi who served as the Indian ambassador to Japan from 2015 to 2018; and Ambassador Masafumi Ishii, a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Gakushuin University who was the Japanese ambassador to Indonesia from 2017 to 2020. Robert, Yuka, Ambassador Chinoy and Ambassador Ishii discuss Japan's relationship with the Global South countries to navigate the complex international security and geo-economic environment amid Russia's War in Ukraine and the US-China great power competition. The guests provide their insights on the evolving significance of the Global South, Japanese policies towards India and Indonesia, and the opportunities and challenges looking ahead.Topics discussed include: The growing importance of the Global South in international affairs; Japan's engagement with ASEAN countries to deal with the Russian and Chinese challenges to rules-based international order; The political motivation of Japan for engaging with India and Indonesia to tackle global security issues; Potential role of Japan as a bridge between the West and the Global South as the chair of this year's G7; and Speaker perspectives on the opportunities and challenges in the future cooperation between Japan and the Global South. The following literature is recommended by our guests to gain a clearer picture of the topics discussed: Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan, The Story of a Nation, (Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1988) Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, (Indianapolis: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1946) We hope you enjoy the episode and please follow, rate, and subscribe to Japan Memo on the podcast platform of your choice. Date of Recording: 24 August 2023 Japan Memo is recorded and produced at the IISS in London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In part two of their podcast discussion Iain Ballantyne and Gary Blackburn provide their opinions on the Hollywood movie ‘Oppenheimer', about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb.' It includes a discussion on the historical context of The Bomb's use to end WW2, especially in light of the US Navy already bringing Japan to the brink of surrender via a blockade enforced by its submarines. So, what were the motivations for dropping the Fat Man and Little Boy nuclear weapons on Hiroshima in 1945? Iain and Gary also weigh up the worth of the latest revelations in the story of UFOs (aka Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs) and how some mystery craft have interacted with the US Navy's jets and warships. The testimony of two US Navy pilots and an ex-US Air Force intelligence officer to the USA's House Oversight Committee in the House of Representatives has produced some fascinating details about the encounters. It even raised the possibility that the mystery craft may have been piloted by “non-human biologics,” according to one of the officers. Might the Warships Pod one day feature an alien life form as a special guest!? The new (September) edition of Warships IFR magazine is OUT NOW!  It includes Iain Ballantyne's reviews of both ‘Oppenheimer' and the latest ‘Mission: Impossible' movie, the latter featuring dramatic scenes involving a Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine. And the September edition offers so much more besides. Warships IFR is available in shops and direct as both a hard copy mag and digital edition. You can make sure that you receive a regular delivery of global naval news and features by subscribing bit.ly/wifrsub  For more information on Warships IFR magazine http://bit.ly/wifrmag  Follow it on X (formerly known as Twitter) via @WarshipsIFR and on Facebook @WarshipsIFR • Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, which seeks to enhance understanding on the nature of war and strategy while also providing guidance on best practice in war and strategy to professional stakeholders. Gary has taught Security Studies and Military History at the universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security.  Follow him on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) via @gjb70 • Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR. He is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, with his most recent books being ‘Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom' and ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' (new editions for Canelo History).  For more details on Iain and his books visit the web sites http://iainballantyne.com and https://www.bismarckbattle.com/  Follow him on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) via @IBallantyn

In part one of this discussion between Dr. Gary Blackburn and host Iain Ballantyne, they investigate the recently published UK Defence Command Paper (DCP).  It was meant to lay out how British national defence and security will be achieved, especially in light of the on-going Ukraine War. However, it is regarded by some as nothing more than a ‘word salad' - an opaquely worded smokescreen to hide the fact that Britain doesn't have enough money to defend itself properly. Gary highlights valid points made by the DCP, while also suggesting its weaknesses. Iain proposes the DCP should actually be called the ‘No Money Command Paper.' Iain and Gary look at ‘wonder technologies' versus traditional combat mass (and how the former has for decades been used as a mask for defence cuts in various UK defence reviews). Other things touched on during Gary and Iain's chat include Russia's moves in Africa and China's ability to build as many warships as it likes with no regard for the sort of political-economic imperatives that Western democracies have to take into account. A hot topic also considered is the Ukraine War at sea, including attacks by maritime drones on Russian vessels and Moscow's ‘Black Sea Grain Gambit' - the weaponization of grain exports to the rest of the world (or lack of them). When it comes to sea drone attacks on Russia's ships, some historical context is provided – basically, the use of such equalising weapons by weaker nations against stronger ones is nothing new, as Gary and Iain point out. So-called ‘kamikaze' maritime drones are just the latest variation on an old weapon… Aspects of this fascinating discussion are covered also in the new (September) edition of Warships IFR magazine, which is OUT NOW!  Warships IFR is available in shops and direct as a both a hard copy mag and digital edition. You can make sure that you receive a regular delivery of global naval news and features by subscribing bit.ly/wifrsub  For more information on Warships IFR magazine http://bit.ly/wifrmag  Follow it on X (formerly known as Twitter) via @WarshipsIFR and on Facebook @WarshipsIFR • In part two of their podcast discussion Iain Ballantyne and Gary Blackburn provide their opinions on the Hollywood movie ‘Oppenheimer', about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atom bomb.' It includes a discussion on the historical context of The Bomb's use to end WW2, especially in light of the US Navy already bringing Japan to the brink of surrender. Finally, in part two Iain and Gary also weigh up the worth of the latest revelations in the story of UFOs (aka UAPs) and how the mystery craft have interacted with the US Navy. Might the Warships Pod one day feature an alien lifeform as a special guest!? • Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, which seeks to enhance understanding on the nature of war and strategy while also providing guidance on best practice in war and strategy to professional stakeholders. Gary has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security.  Follow him on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) via @gjb70 • Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR. He is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, with his most recent books being ‘Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom' and ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' (new editions for Canelo History).  For more details on Iain and his books visit the web sites http://iainballantyne.com and https://www.bismarckbattle.com/  Follow him on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) via @IBallantyn

Our guest today is charming international relations-cum-military historian Huw Bennett! Huw is a Reader in International Relations in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University in Wales. He was previously a Reader and then Lecturer in International Politics and Intelligence Studies at Aberystwyth University and a Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. He was educated at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, earning a degree in International Politics and Strategic Studies, a Master's in Strategic Studies, and a PhD in International Politics. Huw has written two books. The first, Fighting the Mau Mau: the British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency, was published by Cambridge in 2012, and his most recent book, Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975, will be released by Cambridge in October 2023. Huw also co-edited The Kenya Papers of General Sir George Erskine, June 1953 to May 1955, with David French (The History Press for the Army Records Society, 2013). Huw's articles have been published in War in History, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Defense and Security Analysis, to name a few. His work has been supported by the British Academy, The Leverhulme Trust, the Irish Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council. Huw's involvement in the profession is considerable. He is an editorial board member at The British Journal for Military History, Studies in Contemporary Warfare, and War and the British Empire. He is also the Co-Editor in Chief of Critical Military Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The Higher Education Academy and has appeared on BBC World News, Good Evening Wales, Radio France International, and many others. Join us for a fun but, at times, deep chat with Huw Bennett. We'll talk growing up half-Welsh in Surrey, living in Wales, the emotional toll of writing about atrocity, reading War and Peace, the delights of Spaghetti Ice, Barbi, Nirvana, and more! Shoutout to Joe's Ice Cream and Coco Gellato in Cardiff! Rec.: 07/20/2023

Last year, The Guardian did a five-month investigation into “carbon bombs,” or fossil fuel projects that would, over the course of their life, emit over one billion tons of carbon. They found that there are 195 planned oil and gas carbon bombs around the world, and if they proceed as planned, these projects alone would blow past internationally agreed upon climate targets. For our eleventh deep dive on carbon bombs, we take a look at the Bovanenkovo Gas Field: a major natural gas formation in Arctic Russia. The Bovanenkovo Gas Field holds 6.05 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, giving it the potential to emit 11.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. But beyond climate and environmental issues, Bovanenkovo presents another major concern: revenue from that natural gas is funding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today, we explore how Bovanenkovo gas affects the surrounding community, how it ties into the war in Ukraine, and what needs to happen for Russia, Ukraine, and NATO to achieve a more sustainable and peaceful future. With special guest Dr. Katarzyna Zysk: Professor of International Relations and Contemporary History at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. The Sweaty Penguin is presented by Peril and Promise: a public media initiative from The WNET Group in New York, reporting on the issues and solutions around climate change. You can learn more at pbs.org/perilandpromise. Support the show and unlock exclusive merch, bonus content, and more for as little as $5/month at patreon.com/thesweatypenguin. CREDITS Writers: Emma Jones, Owen Reith, Velina Georgi, Ethan Brown Fact Checker: Alia Bonanno Editor: Megan Antone Producers: Ethan Brown, Hallie Cordingley, Shannon Damiano, Owen Reith Ad Voiceover: Maddie Salman Music: Brett Sawka The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of Peril and Promise or The WNET Group.

The Modi State Visit: U.S and Indian Interests In Space and Defense Converge… Big Time! Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's state visit to the United States has produced a more dependable and powerful partnership not only in the Indo-Pacific region, but in space and defense. Laura Winter digs into the commercial, defense, and geopolitical details with Namrata Goswami, an independent scholar on space policy and great power politics and co-author of the book "Scramble for the Skies"; Ajey Lele, a Consultant at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses; U.S. Amb. (ret.) Atul Keshap, President of the United States India Business Council, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and Kranthi Musunuru, Head of Strategy, Dhruva Space.

Links from the show:* The Gendered and Colonial Lives of Gurkhas in Private Security: From Military to Market* Connect with Amanda* Never miss an episode* Rate the showAbout my guest:Dr Amanda Chisholm is a Senior Lecturer researching and teaching on gender and security across both War Studies and Defence Studies. She is also the lead diversity and inclusion representative for the School of Security Studies. Her research focuses on the privatisation and decentring of global war-making.  Her work is located at the nexus of Feminist International Relations, Global Political Economy, and Security Studies. She employs ethnographic methodologies to examine the racial and gendered aspects of private military and security companies' (PMSCs) global operations. Her work is concerned with how gendered and racial logics sustain difference, assign value and reproduce hierarchies amongst these workforces and the ways in which these security market relations involve household labour. Having recently been awarded an Economic and Social Research Council Future leaders' grant, her current work looks at issues of (un)ethical recruitment practices in unarmed and armed global South security workforces and households.Dr Chisholm's research has appeared in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Security Dialogue, Globalizations, Critical Military Studies and International Political Sociology as well as numerous edited volumes on Private Military and Security Companies, Military Research Methods, Gender and the Military, and Gender and Global Political Economy. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

We're going nuclear today with Jayita Sarkar! Jay is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. Before settling down in Scotland, she was an Assistant Professor at Boston University and a Niehaus Fellow at Dartmouth College. She was also a Fellow with Harvard University's Weatherhead Initiative in Global History, an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy, and a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow, all also at Harvard. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Institute Geneva, an MA at the University of Paris IV, Sorbonne, and a BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations at Jadavpur University. Jay is the author of Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell), which was a 2023 Honourable Mention for the Best Book Award of ISA Global Development Studies Section. Her articles have appeared in Cold War History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and the Journal of Global Security Studies, among others. Her 2018 article in Nonproliferation Review entitled “U.S. Technological Collaboration for Nonproliferation: Key Evidence from the Cold War”  (With J. Krige) won the 2018 Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Award. Her second book, Atomic Capitalism: A Global History, is under contract with Princeton University Press. Jay has received grants from the Stanton Foundation, The Hoover Institution, The Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, to name just a few. She was recently granted a British Academy Award to support “Partition Machine,” an upcoming conference she has organized on territorial partitions. Jayita sits on the Editorial Board of Cold War History, the Editorial Advisory Board of Global Nuclear Histories Book Series at McGill-Queen's University Press, and the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. On top of all that, she's a polyglot who speaks Bengali, English, and French fluently with a little German, Hindu and Urdu thrown in for good measure. Join us for a delightful and really interesting chat with Jay Sarkar - we'll talk India's nuclear policy, Glasgow v. Edinburgh, Scottish Straight Cats, Diego Maradona, and Pink Martini, among many other topics! Rec.: 04/21/2023

In part two of a discussion by Mark Grove and Dr Gary Blackburn with host Iain Ballantyne, the tasty and varied menu includes naval aspects of the Ukraine War and whether or not a new Battle of the Atlantic is shaping up as Russia seeks to win its so-called ‘special military operation' in Ukraine it has sought to establish stronger links with China, so this begs the question, which Iain puts out there: what does Moscow have to offer Beijing? Does the answer possibly lie in naval technology? After also touching on Russia reinforcing its submarine forces in the Pacific, the chat turns to the Ukraine War itself. Among the topics touched on are Moscow effort's to impose a distant blockade in the Black Sea and the use of drones, plus implications for the Royal Navy as it struggles to achieve critical mass in aerial capabilities. The discussion turns to the new contest in the Atlantic between Russia and the West. Bearing in mind this is the 80 th anniversary year of the Allies gaining a decisive upper hand in the WW2 struggle for that vast and strategically vital ocean, does naval history offer anything relevant to where we are now? Would convoys of merchant vessels need to make a comeback if the 21 st Century Atlantic contest turns hot? And, as a worthwhile digression, what about the importance of safeguarding seabed infrastructure - especially in the wake of the Nord Stream sabotage attack - and how to avoid dangerous escalation? The expert analysis and commentary of Mark and Gary on all the above subjects is well worth a listen. Also touched on in this episode is China seeking to exert sea control in oceans off its shores, via land-based ballistic missiles, but why? The conundrum of prioritising UK army or naval expenditure is mentioned, along with the folly of the UK's notorious 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. Mark Grove is a Senior Lecturer in Strategic Studies specialising in Maritime Strategy, Warfare, and Security at the University of Lincoln's Maritime Studies Centre at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where he has taught for 24 years, originally working directly for the Ministry of Defence. Mark has written on amphibious warfare, the naval history of the Second World War, and the Falklands. Over the last decade or more has spent most of his research time examining the threats posed by the Russian and Chinese navies, on which he has provided briefings for several UK and NATO Headquarters and Government Departments. Follow him on Twitter @MarkJGrove Dr Gary Blackburn is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, which seeks to enhance understanding on the nature of war and strategy while also providing guidance on best practice in war and strategy to professional stakeholders. Gary has taught Security Studies and Military History at the Universities of Leeds and Hull, respectively - and has written for Defence Studies and The Critic, and for the latter about aspects of the UK's 2021 Integrated Review of Defence and Security. Follow him on Twitter @gjb70 • For more on Warships IFR magazine http://bit.ly/wifrmag Follow it on Twitter @WarshipsIFR and on Facebook @WarshipsIFR • Iain Ballantyne is the founding and current Editor of Warships IFR. He is also author of the books ‘Hunter Killers' (Orion) and ‘The Deadly Trade' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), both about submarine warfare, with his most recent books being ‘Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom' and ‘Arnhem: Ten Days in The Cauldron' (new editions for Canelo History). For more details on Iain and his books visit the websites http://iainballantyne.com and https://www.bismarckbattle.com/ Follow him on Twitter @IBallantyn

'The Macron-Von der Leyen visit to China has sparked a blitzkrieg of a debate over an alleged unity/disunity paradox in Europe. For India, there is an unmissable silver lining amid all noise of a “free thinking” France. True to middle power congruence, New Delhi must embark upon exploring the potential of unwavering French support to India at the UNSC. The pursuit of freedom and a truly “French mark” in world affairs by Paris could turn in New Delhi's favour', says Swasti Rao, Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. Watch #ThePrintVideo ----more----Read full article here: https://theprint.in/opinion/macrons-gaffes-in-china-open-a-door-for-india-unwavering-french-support-at-the-unsc/1531827/