Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's a question.
Chapter 2: What challenges does Ireland face regarding neutrality and defense?
Should Ireland spend more on weapons or build an arms industry? Or do we have the skills, the technology and the expertise needed to protect our own critical infrastructure and respond to the current global situation?
As a prelude to our next guest, I want you to listen to this contribution from Rory Stewart, former diplomat, former Tory minister and, of course, co-host with Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics.
Last week, the President of the United States did something that no technology company would ever have done. He took the most capable artificial intelligence that America's leading lab had ever built and he stopped it at the border on national security grounds, which means the latest frontier model from Anthropic is now, in effect, a weapon.
Americans get it, but the rest of us, allies included, get whatever version they're willing to let out. So what if the central technology of the next century, in other words, the technology on which everything will depend, our government, our defence, our economy, turns out to be something we can only rent, something which America can withdraw whenever it wants.
Is Britain, is Europe still a power that governs itself? Or are we just quietly discovering that we've become a vassal? And if it's the second, then what do we do about it? And the answer, I've come to believe, is something very radical.
Now, that is Rory Stewart, former diplomat, former Tory minister and co-host with Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics. But he's asking a very pertinent question about whether Britain or Europe become vassal states of the United States.
It's often argued that we are already in defense terms, vassal states, depending on the good offices of the RAF to police our skies and the good offices of other EU countries to help us police our undersea cables.
I'm joined now by Paul Davis, Associate Professor of Management at DCU, who's been writing about how we should proceed with our defence procurement, what precisely we need and what we don't need to spend money on and how best any money we have should be spent. Paul, good morning and welcome. Good morning, Pat. Thank you for having me.
Now, the traditional way of budgeting for these things is here's a budget. So many millions or indeed billions of euro. See the cheapest tanks you can get, the cheapest planes you can get, the cheapest ships you can get for that cash.
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Chapter 3: How does the U.S. influence global technology and defense?
When we're buying, maybe staplers. But the significant difference is that when we're buying something like infrastructure, which is defense capability, we want to buy something that we have an ability to be able to manage into the next generation. Probably a decade, decade after. Here's the problem. We tend to think in the life of a contract, three years, five years.
We don't think of the use of equipment or use of infrastructure for 20, 25 years and 30 years. And will we still have the capability to be able to run that when the contract finishes?
Okay, let's take a very practical example. We decide we need something of a jet fighter squad. So we buy F-35s from the Americans, but that requires American expertise to keep them in the air if there's a software update and they don't give it to us.
It's more important than even a software update. Let's take the basic maintenance problem. We buy F-35s and now suddenly we're dependent on parts and components that are sourced externally and that we have no control over. But if you take it even at a more simple level, rather than just the F-35s, let's think of the simple radar system that we're now sourcing.
And the radar system we know is built around intelligence and interpretation. We have a defense force of about 7,500 people. So the chances are we've got a very limited capability to be able to support that going forward. So we'll have this fantastic system, but we won't necessarily have the capability to be able to support it over the life of that system.
It'd be like getting a very sophisticated scanning machine in a hospital and not having the doctor who can look at that and understand what it's telling him.
And what's even worse is that we won't even be able to maintain it ourselves. We'll rely on an external person. And that external person won't have the ability to support it from an Irish perspective should the geopolitical circumstances change.
But isn't that where allies come in? I mean, we're part of the European Union. We would imagine that if we buy a French machine, that there shouldn't be a problem going forward in getting that serviced.
Okay, so here's your catch. We live in a geopolitical world and France has a different outlook in terms of its ability to how it sees itself. It doesn't see itself as a neutral country. We see ourselves as neutral. So we probably wouldn't take a side if there was a conflict. France may take a side.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of relying on foreign defense technology?
So it isn't about inventing a new military arms industry. It's using the industries that we have and looking at how they support ourselves, first of all for ourselves from a defence perspective, but also about where they can actually be exported as well.
Now, the idea of deals, and we will watch what Trump has done. He tore up pretty much every agreement, international agreement, that the United States was party to. So agreements are not much use. They're useless. You know, whether they're verbal or written, the idea that the RAF will defend our skies when push comes to shove.
If they're defending their own skies, they just may not have the resources to help us.
Let's take it even a stage further, not just the RAF. Let's look at the fact that we rely, for instance, on our rescue, search and rescue. We actually have a third party providing that service. We don't even provide that service ourselves from a government perspective. When as an island nation, you would assume that the government would be providing that service. We outsource that service.
What is that? Is this a mindset in government that you employ third parties for everything so that the book doesn't really stop at the minister's desk, at the politician's desk? It stops somewhere else.
It's short-term thinking, thinking that value for money is about cost, not about what we're trying to develop as a social society, but also the fabric of that society that underpins it, the infrastructure that's required.
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Chapter 5: How should Ireland approach defense procurement and budgeting?
So what do we need to do? I mean, first of all, we have to have this conversation that we're having now in a larger forum.
One of the things – and I was at the Oireachtas Committee on Defence and I said that we need to have a basic sovereign capability question. If we are unable to support it ourselves after the end of the contract and unable to build the capability to get the most from it, then we probably should not be buying it. We should be thinking in that way.
So when we buy a contract, when we buy equipment, we have to be thinking how do we build the capability for ourselves to be able to support this ourselves. after and when it's finished in terms of a contract. That's long-term thinking. I sat at that committee and it was interesting because the two parties that they brought in was myself and they brought in the Office of Government Procurement.
And as I pointed out, the thinking was the Office of Government Procurement procures everything. They don't. They buy the staplers. They put in large contracts, but they don't procure everything.
So the mindset of people is that this office, which is about efficiency, and it is very efficient and effective, would be able to procure equipment that was going to actually suffice as defense equipment. It is not.
Now, the other parallel, I suppose, is that if you're buying the stuff that you need right now, because we don't have proper undersea surveillance, we don't have surveillance of our skies, and we're buying this equipment, you really need to think in terms of insurance. Why do we buy insurance in case the house goes on fire? We hope it never will, but we do insure against that possibility.
And defence spending needs to be along those lines. Correct. The thing that may never happen, and we may seem to be wasting money, but you don't think your fire insurance is wasted money.
No, and we need to build to do that. To build to do that, though, requires building. And I keep going back to this word that I came up with, intelligent client. We need to be thinking of ourselves as more than just a contract, but actually why we're buying it and what we're going to do with it.
And the point of the article was to raise the debate, to try to get us into this frame of mind, rather than getting trapped into the neutrality debate, but actually talk about what it is we need to be a resilient society.
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