Rory Stewart

Modern warfare is about new software every six weeks, new hardware every six months.

There's no point pretending.

that we know what's going to happen in 2040.

What we have to do is build the engineers, the systems, the industrial manufacturing capacity that is able to do new software every six weeks, new hardware every six months.

And that's basically leaning into software engineers, industrial production capacity, ability to build munitions, rather than betting on exquisite platforms.

And which is why I think pretentious things like kind of the ecosystem or the environment of British innovation, technology, talent.

infrastructure is probably much more important than trying to guess what the weapon or what the war will be in 15 years' time.

Just a quick plug for a brilliant final six-page Economist article by my friend Shashank Joshi, who tries to lay out what he calls transparency.

He thinks war is all about

transparency, that these devices can see things they were never able to see before.

I think the future war, I'd add to that, is sovereignty.

It's all about sovereignty.

And our real problem is we're having to build all this stuff without being able to rely on US defense equipment anymore.

Yeah.

Well, so answer to Andrew, there has been a lot of research on this and what academics have been trying to look at is pound for pound, what kind of return do you get investing in a nuclear submarine and barrow for your economy compared to investing in education, infrastructure skills?

Generally, the conclusion is if what you're trying to do is generate economic growth, pound for pound, you'd be better going for education, infrastructure, skills.

Defense is not a very productive investment.

We don't really do that either.

No.

I think the reason to go to defense is not that it's the cheapest way of getting economic growth.