Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE

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780 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TRIGGERnometry · Britain Isn't Ready For A Real War - Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

And after I left the army, I sort of got into a whole host of things, sort of journaling as well and writing books.

So, yeah, I've had a very fortunate life, I think, from a military perspective and quite a lucky one.

You know, I've survived a few scrapes.

And the irony, having somebody who did so badly at school, I'm also now a don at Magdalen College, Cambridge, which when they asked me if I would do it, I said, hang on, you've got the wrong man here.

You know, I've got one A-level, you know, hardly any academics.

and a third-class degree in agriculture.

They said, Hamish, you've got a lot of very clever people here at Cambridge.

We just need a few with a bit of experience.

That's where you come in.

So that's sort of my story in a nutshell.

Well, I think it's a very easy one to decry and put down.

I think like a lot of NATO countries, European NATO countries, our government so overspent the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War that actually a lot of capability was denuded.

A lot of people thought at the end of the Cold War, that was it.

And then we got into all the counterinsurgency with al-Qaeda in Iraq and then the Taliban in Afghanistan that we focused very much on there.

And we sort of lost the ability to do war fighting, as it were.

As part of that, what it meant is we diminished our skills.

So where we find ourselves at the moment is a very small military.

I mean, when I joined the army, there were 150,000 people and 1,000 tanks.

At the moment, it's about 70,000.

and 148 tanks.

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