General Sir Patrick Sanders

speaker

1,311 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 2 Sep

General Sir Patrick Sanders’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.

Appearances

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The General & The Journalist · Is Pete Hegseth’s macho culture fit for the military? · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

So when I think about DEI, I think of it in those terms.

I think when Pete Heggsith thinks about DEI, he thinks that this is the woke mind virus.

It's such

Stop laughing, Sean.

So for people who aren't watching this, I am looking a little unshaven at the moment.

All

I mean this so this this was uh this was a debate that we were having in the army uh and in the end I took the decision alongside the army along with the army board that we would permit facial hair and beards to be grown in the army.

I mean, y you would have thought that I had I'd sort of taken a pair of scissors to the Mona Lisa with some of the reactions that I got.

Funnily enough, not from soldiers.

The so this was a

Hugely popular move.

All of the soldiers wanted it.

They couldn't understand why they weren't being treated as adults, why they couldn't be brought in line with what the Air Force and the Royal Navy were doing.

Whereas I was confronted by sort of swivel-eyed, frothing people of a certain age, generally all of whom had retired and I had completely undermined the army.

I mean, I I have to say, I think that this is one of the army's most successful modernization programs.

It was quick, it cost absolutely nothing.

It reached the front line immediately and we didn't need the Treasury to give us any money.

And it's a little bit alarming that we've been able to show more agility over facial hair than we have over developing, I don't know, drones, digital targeting or electronic warfare, or replacing our artillery uh in the last three years.

Um so I think that this is uh this is a weird obsession that some people have.

Does it get in the way of people's combat effectiveness?

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