Dr Marion Messmer

speaker

100 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Dr Marion Messmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Independent Thinking · NATO in Ankara: Is Europe ready for a Russian attack? · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

That's right.

I think this whole situation could have been handled better.

But at the same time I think we have to be fair and acknowledge that this government inherited a fiscal situation that wasn't fantastic and a lot of economic constraints and then decided to not raise taxes any further.

So essentially if you only have so much money, there's only so much you can do with that.

And um as Richard outlined earlier, uh the

The British military establishment is in a really unfortunate position of having been at the receiving end of cuts after cuts after cuts over the last 20 years or so, if not more.

And so that means that there were certain parts of the British military that were already depleted to a level that it just takes a lot of investment to catch up.

And then there are other aspects that are not as directly crucial to the fight of the future.

But that really connect with having a well-functioning military or being able to retain personnel, such as military housing, which for some reason has become a total funding black hole for the Ministry of Defense and continues to cause a lot of issues.

So you have some amount of perhaps contractor mismanagement is fair to say.

You have some amount of the military just needing to change quite a lot because of the range of different emerging technologies.

That need to be adopted.

And then you have, you know, all the other exquisite projects that we know are very difficult to manage.

You know, GCAP, for example, the joint uh fighter jet program with Italy and Japan, and the UK, of course, that the Treasury is incredibly concerned about because they are worried that this will turn into one of those projects that will be beset by overruns and delays.

So the Treasury has now put in place a project board.

that essentially helps oversee it to make sure that it actually runs on time and on budget.

That's a great question.

I mean, I think it depends a bit on the circumstances of the US leaving or disengagement.

Mette Frederickson, the Danish uh Prime Minister, has said famously earlier this year when when the US threats on Greenland were quite acute, that if the US really was to take action against Greenland, then that was going to be the end of NATO.

So I think that And do you think that's right?

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