Defence strategy for small nations - force design, friends, and deterrence on a budget

When defence strategy makes it into the media, it's often with a focus on the largest powers.

What new systems are the United States or China showing off,

or what new Russian or NATO wonder weapon is being deployed to Ukraine that month?

And to an extent you can understand the temptation.

Major powers are the ones who can afford all the expensive platforms in large numbers,

they're the ones who can show off runways filled with 5th generation fighters,

or fields and fields of battle tanks and armoured vehicles.

For these powers diverse capability is almost a given.

And if a given capability is falling behind the curve, well then it might be time to spin up

a multi-billion dollar development procurement process to make sure that gap is filled.

When during the Cold War for example, the United States became convinced

that the Soviet Union was about to field some form of super fighter in the form of the MiG-25,

it almost inevitably spurred the US to pour resources into developing and then fielding the F-15.

Because Uncle Sam gets nervous at the mere suspicion that someone somewhere might have better kit.

But here's the thing, most countries around the world cannot afford to have the best of everything.

Whereas countries like China or the United States might look at a list of capabilities,

be asked what they want and say "yes", other countries are not so fortunate.

And for those countries that's a key challenge, because war isn't exactly fair.

Military strategy is built strategy, and war is to an extent pay to win.

And that pay to win nature of military investment puts smaller nations in a difficult position.

But at the same time they also have a pretty strong incentive against losing.

Because if you find yourself invaded and your country taken over,

well then it doesn't much matter how well your social services sector was running before the end.

And so the challenge these countries face is one of the most interesting

in the field of defence economics, how do you protect your national security without breaking the bank?

And so today that's the question we're going to dig into.

To start with we're going to go back to some defence 101,

from the development of a national strategic concept,

through to force design where you actually design a military,

and then the procurement process that buys it for you.

Then I'm going to introduce you all to the completely hypothetical country of Kiwiland,

and all the myriad different security threats that it faces.

Then using both Kiwiland and some real world examples,

we're going to walk through some macro-strategies that countries can employ.

We'll look at the concept of total defence, of domain dominance, area denial,

deterrence based on weapons of mass destruction,

and also the idea of integration with allied powers.

We'll then round it out with a quick study of industrial planning and integration with these strategies.

And also the role of soft power, as well as hard-power based deterrence.

And we can end with a little bit more of an understanding of how

smaller or poorer countries survive the way they do.

So before we jump into some specific examples, let's just cover a quick bit of background

on how defence spending and planning works. Or at least one idea on how it should work.

The first thing to say is that in most countries high military spending isn't an end in and of itself.

The state does not exist solely for the purpose of feeding more money into the military budget.

Given the choice, most nations would generally prefer to pursue peace and prosperity.

And given the choice between building schools and hospitals and tanks,

they only really want to build as many tanks as are necessary in order to accomplish their objectives.

If you are a large wealthy nation that can afford a large military,

then those objectives probably include projecting power around the world.

Helping to shape global affairs or find allies

can be a great thing for a nation's economy and international position.

But if you can't access those economies of scale and have no international ambition,

well then your goal might just be simple survival.

Those are two very different defence concepts.

And defence concepts help inform just about everything else that follows.

So given that nations can have very different goals for their militaries,

most countries will start by doing a strategic scan and some thinking,

rather than ... rocking up to an arms show and just buying everything on the floor.

They'll investigate the threat environment they are operating in,

what are the major threats to the country?

If you're South Korea, the threats to you are very different to the threats facing for example, Belgium.

Then based on that threat environment, a country needs to decide

what it needs a national military to be able to do.

Do you want to be able to do international operations? Do you have obligations to your allies?

Or is your primary goal something like homeland defence?

And there's also the question over what sort of assumptions can be made during planning.

Historically for example, some countries have assumed that they would get at least

5 or 10 years warning before a major war broke out in their region,

because you'd see warning signs in countries building up their forces.

After World War One British defence investments were made on the basis

that a major war was always at least 10 years away. A policy that persisted until 1932.

Unfortunately for Britain, reality doesn't always follow the strictures of Treasury modelling

and World War Two in Europe would break out in 1939,

with Britain still very much in the midst of its rearmament program.

Another assumption might be the participation of allies.

If I'm Luxembourg and I can assume that my allies will give me access to space-based reconnaissance,

then I don't need to spend 300% of GDP launching my own constellation of spy satellites.

Once I've decided what the military's mission is and what it needs to be able to do,

well, then I need to design a military that is able to do that mission.

That means designing a force and bringing together the capabilities

necessary to do what needs to be done.

If my primary mission is peacekeeping, well then I can probably skip

the 5th generation fighters and stealth bombers.

Instead I want a well-trained professional infantry force,

some vehicles with some protective armour but relatively light armament,

combat engineers, medical personnel, and maybe some airlift.

And if I want to invade Ukraine then I probably don't want to pour my money into aircraft carriers,

naval assets that I'll never use, and a massively oversize strategic nuclear deterrent.

Instead I want a very large, very well-trained ground combat force,

probably coupled with an air force that is capable of suppressing air defences

even as formidable as those to be found in Ukraine.

Fortunately for the world, countries don't always get the force design component right.

But by now you probably get the picture, the focus is on designing a military

that is sufficient to do the job that the military has been assigned.

There is a near infinite supply of expensive blingy platforms out there that nations could buy.

These might look great during military parades or in media releases.

But for most nations these are a luxury resource that simply isn't required to do the core mission.

Your strategy and your strategic concept tell you what capabilities that you need.

You can then look at your existing force and ask,

"Are there any gaps? Are there any of those capabilities that I've said I need that I am missing?"

If that happens, you can spin up a requirement for something that would solve that capability gap.

For example, I could draw up a requirement for a short-range interceptor aircraft.

And then having done so it becomes someone else's problem

to go out and procure those aircraft, field and sustain them.

For those of you more familiar with business or consulting,

another way to think about this is as a series of cascading choices.

On the left there I've got a typical cascading choice model,

and on the right a slightly adapted one that probably better mirrors the defence process.

A nation will ask what its threats are, how it should respond to those threats.

Once it's decided how to respond, well, how will it make sure that response is successful?

What capabilities does it need to make sure that response is successful?

And then how does it go and acquire and maintain those capabilities?

And while every nation will respond in a slightly different way,

for smaller and poorer countries there are some general themes.

For one, they can't afford everything so they are going to focus

on what's important, on a narrower range of capabilities.

They are often going to spend a lot of money on systems to counter

the expensive capabilities of an opponent.

If I suspect I'm going to be fighting a country with an extremely powerful air force for example,

rather than invest in building a second best air force that will just be destroyed

I'm going to pour more of my money into air defences.

If I can't afford a navy, well then maybe I can afford anti-shipping mines and anti-ship missiles.

They are also often going to embrace a plan which isn't built on the idea of a decisive victory.

Often the plan isn't to go raise the flag in the enemy capital after you're invaded.

Finally, you are probably going to focus more on the ideas of defence and deterrence

than on more proactive overseas missions.

If you are Finland or Sweden, you are probably not preparing for a war of global conquest.

Instead you are focusing your resources on preparing

for a security mission that might be much closer to home.

But that's all just theory, let's pull together a hypothetical

and see how these ideas might operate in practice.

And so let me congratulate you on your new role as

the Defence Minister of the proud nation of Kiwiland.

This entirely hypothetical nation consists of two primary islands.

You can see a very rough randomly generated map there on the right.

The northern island is the more strategically significant of the two,

the population is somewhere between 4 and 6 million.

It's got relatively advanced technology, a good education base,

and a GDP of somewhere between 200 and 300 billion US dollars.

But by far Kiwiland's most interesting national trait is that it tends to teleport

around the world at random intervals and find itself in strange strategic situations.

As the Defence Minister of Kiwiland, it is your job to keep the nation safe.

Now in doing this you're operating from essentially a blank slate,

because Kiwiland has no existing armed forces.

The nation does have a small police force to maintain order after rugby games.

And you can see Officer Sam there on the right with the nation's only Taser.

But if you want a defence force that goes beyond farmers, shotguns, and rugby front rowers,

you're going to need to start from scratch with a fresh defence concept

and a procurement plan to go with it.

We're going to assume that given Kiwiland's unique situation,

the politicians will vote you some money to build a defence force,

but the nation is a liberal democracy, so don't go asking for 20% of GDP.

And of course the primary threat to Kiwiland is the nearby regional power of Emutopia.

In both land mass and population, Emutopia is many, many times larger than Kiwiland.

It's a nation that has grown wealthy off the back of its immense resource wealth,

and now it covets regional dominance.

After all, the country chose the Emu, one of nature's most vicious creatures, to be its avatar.

So it is obvious that they will inevitably seek to prey

on the weak and peaceful Kiwis of the neighbourhood.

The exact nature of Emutopia's military changes from scenario to scenario,

but generally speaking you're looking at a professional

all-arms force with a high technology base.

Submarines, tanks, amphibious warfare capability, Emutopia has it all.

Maybe not in massive quantities, but it is an all-arms force.

The question for you as Defence Minister is how do you deter

Emutopia from attacking the peaceful nation of Kiwiland?

Which leads us into a discussion of the first sort of macro strategy

I wanted to talk about today, the idea of "total defence".

And to examine this strategy let's put Kiwiland in its first unfortunate situation of the day.

Kiwiland has been teleported really close to Emutopia,

and is now drifting forward pretty quickly.

Soon it's going to have a land connection across a lot of its border with Emutopia's shoreline.

Please don't think too hard about the tectonic plate physics on that one, just go with it please.

Now some politicians in Emutopia believe that Kiwiland should have been,

or was at some point in the past, part of Emutopia and should be again now.

As such, there's a very real risk at some point in the future

that once the nations make contact with each other there's every possibility

that if nothing is done, Emutopia will invade and incorporate our nation.

So let's start by defining our overall strategic environment and our main objectives.

The environment is we're soon going to have a land border with a

potentially aggressive neighbour that genuinely wishes to invade, occupy and annex us.

Being peaceful Kiwis our primary objective is to deter an invasion.

To encouraging Emutopia to basically stick to their own territory.

In the event that deterrence is impossible or ultimately fails,

well our secondary objective is to survive any invasion that follows.

In terms of assumptions, there's a number that we're making,

but there's one critical one that we're going to highlight here.

And that is even though the enemy might be aggressive and desire to take our territory,

they have a finite will to fight and a relatively low casualty tolerance.

They'll be willing to pick on us if we're weak and vulnerable,

but they're not exactly willing to fight us until the last flightless bird.

And so we come up with our strategic concept, and in doing so

we're going to draw inspiration from nations like Finland, Switzerland, Sweden or Vietnam.

We are going to acknowledge that it is impossible to match our potential opponents

dollar for dollar or man for man.

If we try and just build a direct copy of Emutopia's military,

our version is going to be smaller, less well funded, and ultimately lose.

What we can try and do however is convince them

that an invasion either wouldn't work, or would be incredibly costly.

And we can do it by eclipsing them in one respect: ground combat power and endurance during wartime.

And the way that we're going to do that is not by having more

overall economic resources than our opponent,

instead what we're going to do is put in place a system that allows us during wartime

to quickly and efficiently convert a much greater percentage of our overall resources

into exactly the kinds of military combat power that we need to win this sort of fight.

Then using a combination of bad terrain, social preparation, and man-made fortifications,

we are going to put in place a system of defences

so extensive that it just isn't worth invading us.

And perhaps most importantly to ensure that no war

breaks out in the first place, we're going to make sure they know it.

So right from the start we know the sort of things we are going to need

which is conventional military capability to resist a land invasion.

We don't need high readiness levels during peace time

because we're not planning on invading anyone else, or going overseas,

or participating in any large operations in foreign territories.

All that matters is how well we fight during wartime.

And so we come to the question of force design.

And I hope you have a good PR person, Minister, because we are about to introduce conscription.

You see, Kiwiland isn't going to be able to match Emutopia

manpower for manpower if we go with a large active-duty force.

That's expensive, and there's only so many members of the population

that will be willing to volunteer to spend their life in the army.

Instead we're going to adopt a system that is overwhelmingly reserves based.

All men and women in Kiwiland will spend at least one year in the armed forces.

There they will learn critical military skills and then pass into the reserves.

From there they'll periodically be called back to do refresher training

to make sure they don't forget their core skills, until they eventually age out of the reserve pool.

The full-time military personnel aren't really expected to go off and fight any wars by themselves.

What they have are three core missions.

One: to constantly train the conscripts that are coming through the military system.

Two: to maintain all of the equipment that's held in reserve just in case we need to mobilise.

And three: to form a so-called cadre of officers and NCOs that form the basis of units during mobilisation.

So what does all this mean? It means that during peacetime the army is basically useless.

You have a bunch of officers and NCOs that are operating in units

that have barely any enlisted personnel. And they're basically doing nothing

other than preparing for an eventual conflict and maintaining the equipment.

For their part, whatever the latest intake of conscripts is,

it's going to be spending most of its time in the service training,

and isn't particularly useful for anything like foreign deployments or peacekeeping.

But what can happen during wartime is we can slam the big old mobilisation button.

And because of our system, we have hundreds of thousands of ready trained reservists

who have pre-assigned units that already have officers, NCOs and equipment reserves present.

Within 72 hours of a crisis we can have hundreds of thousands of men and women

back at their units, we can crack open the warehouses of all the stored equipment.

The officers and NCOs are there to smack them into combat readiness as fast as possible.

Everyone knows what they're doing, and the army increases in size

10, 15, 20 times over in a matter of days.

And those numbers aren't pulled out of thin air.

The Finnish Army has a peacetime uniform strength of fewer than 4,000 men and women.

And their job in any given year is mostly to,

A) make sure the buildings don't catch fire. B) to train 18,000 new conscripts.

And C) to put on refresher training for another 18,000 reservists.

And the result of those efforts is that during wartime the army can very quickly

call itself up to a wartime strength of 180,000 personnel.

Which means at that point a nation of 5.5 million people

is fielding roughly as many troops as the British and German armies combined.

That sort of military force lends itself to relatively simple,

affordable equipment with a long storage shelf life.

You want things that conscripts are going to be able to learn to use

and then cover in their refresher training.

There are a lot of very expensive, complicated systems out there that benefit

from having personnel who can build up familiarity with their use over several years.

We don't want that, those are nerd weapons, what we want are comparatively simple systems.

We want anti-tank guided missiles, we want artillery, we want landmines, we want small arms.

That's not to say militaries like this can't have fancy equipment.

Finland operates a significant tank fleet for example,

but you're likely to put greater overall emphasis on the cheap and the simple.

We're probably going to have a small, permanent, full-time air force,

but in terms of reservists, we're going to want ground-based air defences instead.

Given our primarily defensive mission, we might also adapt our hardware

very carefully for our own terrain and environment.

If our nation is covered in rivers, well then we're going to make our vehicles amphibious.

If our terrain is incredibly mountainous then we're going to design it with that in mind.

And if our tactics are primarily defensive, well then you can design

armoured vehicles for example, with that defensive role in mind.

There's a lot you can do to optimise a tank design if you think the primary engagement method

is going to be engaging hull down from behind a hill rather than going onto the attack.

The terrain itself can also become a key part of our total defensive strategy.

And here the most clichéd, but probably also a very valuable example, is to look straight at Switzerland.

Now for those of you who perhaps aren't particularly familiar

with Switzerland, it's not the flattest place on earth.

Much of the country's critical transportation infrastructure

runs through a dizzying series of mountain heights.

And so for centuries, a greater or lesser extent of Swiss defence strategy

has been built around the idea of a massive militia army and control of those mountain passes.

Bunkers and heavy artillery were dug in and concealed to control the mountain passes.

Bridges and tunnels were configured so that they could be rapidly detonated

during wartime to cut logistic routes.

And until 2007 not only was military service mandatory,

but troops who had finished their mandatory military service

would take both their rifles and their ammunition to store at home.

The idea was to combine terrain with a ready to resist population in order to deter invasion.

In fact there's an old joke that conveys that quite well.

It's 1912, and the German Kaiser asked the Swiss Ambassador

what on earth Switzerland would do with its army of only 250,000 militia

if he were to invade Switzerland with an army of 500,000 professional German troops?

"Simple," the Swiss Ambassador replied, "our troops would shoot twice and then go home."

Now that may be a joke, but it touches on something important for the total defence concept.

It's not just about the means to resist, it's about projecting the will to.

Because you're relying on an army of conscripts and for wider society

to come together and fight on during hard defensive battles.

And that means preparing society as well as preparing the military.

Everything needs to be in place so that in the event of war

peacetime society and the peacetime economy can be converted

as quickly and totally as possible towards the cause of national defence.

Go looking through Swedish government websites,

and as well as information about how to respond during natural disasters,

you'll also find information on total defence service

and your obligation to help defend the country if it's invaded.

Countries with this sort of system might plan not just for how

to get reservists to their units and mobilise the military,

but how to convert peacetime production facilities into wartime ones.

How to protect the civilian population from things like air attack.

Which in the case of Finland means having an enormous number of bunkers,

up to and including the point where they have underground swimming pools.

And perhaps most importantly, it means convincing your opponent

that your population will indeed resist until the very end.

If an opponent believes the people might just roll over and surrender,

or greet incoming troops as liberators, or that the government will fold and collapse

as soon as some military pressure is applied,

well then it's more likely to invade in the first place.

But if it believes that there will be a rifle behind every blade of grass,

and that sabotage will continue even after years of potential occupation,

well, that might give it pause.

And so you can find happy notes like this one in Swedish defence brochures,

"If Sweden is ever attacked by another country we will never give up.

All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false."

We build a system that is designed to produce the maximum possible mobilisation

of resources during wartime, and convince our opponent and our people that we're willing to do so.

Adopting these ideas helps us create fortress Kiwiland.

Under this new defence concept and force plan,

Kiwiland is vastly outnumbered by Emutopia during peacetime.

The Kiwi Army might only have 4-5,000 permanent personnel,

which means, they might easily be outnumbered 10, 11, 12, 15 to 1 by their opponent.

But during wartime something strange happens.

The peaceful people of Kiwiland leave their peacetime jobs,

collect their arms, travel to their units and join the colours.

Within 72 hours of war breaking out, Kiwiland actually has manpower superiority over Emutopia.

And with its deep reserves of relatively simple munitions,

well it might even have the capacity to launch an offensive and catch Emutopia off guard.

And even if that's not possible, the Emus now face the challenge

of digging us out of defensive positions we may have spent years preparing,

while society is mobilised behind us.

If the recent fighting in Ukraine has shown us anything very clearly,

it's that it is kind of hard to dig entrenched infantry out of urban or fortified areas

when they're adequately supported by ground-based air defences and adequate artillery.

Now that's not to say that given enough time and dedication the Emus couldn't do it.

Leveraging their much larger population, they could choose to mobilise an entirely new army,

train it up from scratch, purchase new equipment from abroad or build it at home.

And perhaps over the course of literal years, grind us down.

After all, a small country with a limited economy

can't survive this level of total mobilisation forever,

but the costs involved for Emutopia would be massive.

They'd be signing up for a many years long campaign

that would greatly disrupt their economy and their society.

They'd be signing up for tens of thousands, or potentially hundreds of thousands, of casualties.

And even in the event they won, they may well be signing up for a protracted period of insurgency,

because we have told our population in advance that resistance should never cease.

And in that scenario there's a very good chance that the political leadership of Emutopia

take one look at us and decide that we're just not worth it.

We may have beautiful beaches, wonderful natural landscapes and a thriving film sector,

but seizing it just isn't worth the effort.

That's the essence of the total defence concept.

Not that you will ever necessarily have the ability to go conquer the enemy capital and win the war,

but rather that you can make the task of beating you

so expensive that it just isn't worth thinking about.

Now one sort of extension on that concept, or a mutation if you will,

that we won't deal with separately here, is the idea of waging a protracted people's war of resistance.

So rather than establishing a network of bunkers

and intending to hold the enemy at our defensive lines,

we accept that we just aren't powerful enough to stop the opponent

coming in and occupying our country.

And so we'll largely allow our opponent to do exactly that,

we will allow our country to be occupied.

And then we will wage such a vicious insurgency that eventually they will go mad and go home.

In the final days before the Ukraine War broke out there was some effort

to put this sort of strategy in play for the Ukrainians.

Giving Ukrainians training in insurgency tactics, establishing weapon caches.

So that in the event that Russia came through and occupied certain territories,

stay-behind forces could recover those weapons and then launch attacks.

Now there are extensive drawbacks to adopting a system like this one.

For one, you are allowing your country to be occupied.

That places your civilian population at the mercy of the invader.

It's also likely that your civilian infrastructure is going to suffer

incredibly extensive damage as a result.

And historically insurgent forces take very, very high casualties.

You're using a lot of irregular troops, and you can't have much in the way of heavy equipment

because how on earth do you conceal a tank battalion?

So you fight with personal weapons against an enemy force that might have much heavier systems.

But the idea is that you will be able to outlast them.

In Kiwiland's case such a strategy isn't required.

But if instead of fighting merely Emutopia, we were fighting a coalition of 50 or 60 nations,

we might have to consider a strategy like this one.

But what if we don't share a land border with our opponent?

What if instead we're separated by a considerable breadth of ocean?

Well in that case you might want to talk about domain dominance, or anti-access/area denial.

So Kiwiland is now once again separated from Emutopia by a vast stretch of ocean.

This is both an advantage and an issue.

It's an advantage in the sense that there's now a barrier against landing,

we have a moat, there's a lot of water in the way, they can't just walk into our country.

If we try and define the threat we face now, well, there's two key ones that come to mind.

The first is that Emutopia might still attempt an invasion,

although now it's going to be a sea-borne invasion of our territory rather than a land-based one.

From a logistical perspective that's obviously going to be harder for them,

but they might really want our natural resources and territory, so we'd be dumb to rule it out.

Another potential threat would be Emutopia imposing a close blockade of our ports

wherein they have ships stationed off our coast to prevent

vessels docking in our territory and initiating trade.

Given the length of our coastline, unless Emutopia has a truly huge navy

this is probably less of a threat. But it is still one that we should keep in mind.

So if we're looking for a concept, for a way to win in this scenario,

well we need to either dominate a domain sufficiently,

so we either need to control the ocean, or we need to make landing

and sustaining an invasion force either impossible or just overly costly.

That could mean for example, stopping landing ships from actually reaching our shores,

or it could mean interdicting transport ships that are moving supplies to support the invasion.

Now we could still build a plan around resisting the ground component of the invasion.

We could go with the total defence concept again.

But let's assume the Prime Minister isn't keen on conscripting

every man woman and child into the Kiwi Defence Forces.

Not at least if there's a better way, and in this situation with the moat as our friend, there might be.

And so if our goal is to exploit the ocean component of this campaign,

well then there are two big force design approaches.

We could go with both, we could intermix them, or we could go with one or the other.

And really I think it depends on how powerful Emutopia's navy is.

If the Emutopian navy is strong, but not too strong,

well we might just commit to trying to win the naval war entirely.

We could pour everything we have into the naval warfare game.

And even if we don't have much in the way of an air force or in the way of an army,

at least we have enough to win the naval war and defend our territory.

If that's impossible, well then instead of winning naval dominance entirely,

we instead want to make it difficult, expensive and inconvenient

for them to access our territorial waters and carry out their missions.

This is where the anti-access/area denial component comes in.

And there you're looking more at things like sea mines, anti-ship missiles,

maybe some submerged threats, drones, or light surface-attack vehicles.

But to start with, let's assume for a moment there might be some possibility

of us winning the naval war if we put absolutely everything into it.

There are many times throughout history that Britain has found itself facing opponents

on the European continent with far more powerful armies than it had.

Whether it's the Spaniards, the French or the Germans,

there's a point on the story arc of just about every European hegemon

where you get to the point where it's really only Britain holding on for dear life.

And where if you could just march a massive army through Trafalgar Square,

well, then the show would have a happy ending as far as you're concerned.

The problem historically for many European hegemons is that just about every time

that situation happens, the British retreat to their island,

put the Royal Navy in the English Channel

and then tell their opponent to come at them if they think they're tough enough.

And it was a situation that did inspire a certain sense of cockiness

in the British even when they were surrounded.

I've got a comment there from Admiral John Jervis in 1801

on the prospect of a French invasion of Britain, to which he said,

"I do not say my Lords, that the French will not come. I only say that they will not come by sea."

Seeing as the French military in 1801 was pretty short on air mobility,

sea transport was the only option, and that was that.

Now Britain obviously wasn't a small country, it was a rich major power.

But compared to the combined might of all of a continental empire,

well then often it was in an asymmetric position.

And Kiwiland might want to take some inspiration from that historical legacy.

And so Kiwiland would commit to ruling the waves,

or at the very least, the waves close to the Kiwi homeland.

For a small nation a fleet of diesel-electric coastal defence submarines

or anti-naval aviation assets would be extremely expensive.

Industry would need to be adapted to support the force, likely over the course of decades.

And if somehow Emutopia managed to get a significant army onto Kiwi territory

well then Kiwiland might be in serious trouble.

But without the ability to move troops or supply by ship,

how would they get there and sustain the force?

Air transportation is possible, but has severe weaknesses.

And if Kiwi submarines started attacking traffic on shipping lanes supplying Emutopia itself,

well, that would be a pretty strong encouragement on the leadership in Emutopia to seek peace terms.

If the fight was more asymmetric then you're probably not buying expensive submarines,

but instead something a little bit cheaper that's designed to be an asymmetric threat.

A historical and contemporary example would be

the anti-ship missile equipped patrolling coastal combatant.

Which is a really fancy way of saying you take what is essentially a scaled up speed boat

and you strap some large anti-ship missile launchers to the back of it.

Examples might be something like the Iranian Peykaap class or the old Soviet Osa.

Now as systems these have significant drawbacks, they usually don't have particularly good range,

they are not very survivable, they are not very versatile.

But in large numbers, launching swarm attacks, these can provide an out-sized threat

to an opposing naval force far beyond their cost would suggest.

With the right tactics and a little bit of luck, a squadron of 200 ton missile boats

might be able to bring down a top-of-the-line frigate displacing 6,000 or 7,000 tons.

And for this approach to work there's no requirement that the entire Kiwi Navy

sail out to meet Emutopia head-on in some grand decisive battle.

Ships might be concealed, carefully reserved, husbanded and defended,

and only sent out when an opportunity is seen to make a quick strike.

It doesn't need to be impossible for an opponent to enter a sea area,

it just needs to be sufficiently and constantly risky.

When the opposing admiral goes to sleep every night you want his greatest fear to be that

some angry speed boat is going to sail out from its port and sink his flagship overnight.

Now there are some systems out there that are specialised for this role

that are nonetheless a bit too expensive to be within Kiwiland's budget.

Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles for example, are designed to make it risky

to enter sea areas hundreds, or even thousands of kilometres out to sea.

They are not guaranteed to hit a carrier or a ship under way,

but they do impose a constant risk and a constant threat.

But for most nations such technologies are going to be out of reach,

and so we have to turn to simpler weapon systems.

And so sea-fortress Kiwiland would probably end up

looking a little bit like Ukraine and its coastal defence strategy.

The country would stockpile vast numbers of anti-ship guided missiles,

which it would station in concealed locations either along the coast or even a little bit further inland.

In order to avoid the opponent simply destroying those with cruise missiles,

the massive employment of decoys would probably be utilised.

Conceal a launcher inside a shipping container for example,

and you could easily create 20 decoy launching sites

in various forested or mountain areas for every one legitimate launcher.

Depending on the anti-ship missile system being used,

the range could extend out potentially several hundred kilometres from the coast.

Different systems could be intermixed together. So you could buy a number

of the cheaper, shorter-ranged anti-shipping missiles to make an invasion particularly difficult.

While at the same time purchasing something longer ranged, more deadly,

something like the Russian Bastion coastal defence system, as ironic as that sounds.

So that ships several hundred kilometres off your coast always felt at threat too.

In the event that an enemy force does land, well, the objective becomes

to make it difficult for them to supply that force.

So sink the supply transports that are coming in

to bring in food, ammunition and other critical supplies.

But in an ideal world it doesn't come to that.

Because once again invading Kiwiland has become a massively risky venture.

Maybe the army is able to land, maybe the army is able to supply itself

take over the missile launching sites and neutralise the country.

Or maybe the invasion force gets unlucky, destroyed by missiles swarms,

and the entire invasion is over on D+2.

Unless Emutopia has a very, very large risk appetite, they may not want to take those odds.

And so once again, with a relatively limited investment, Kiwiland has achieved deterrence.

But maybe some politician out there asks whether it's really enough deterrence.

"Why," they might ask, "are we spending all of this money

on conventional weapons that may or may not work?

Why not just build up a small stockpile of the ultimate deterrent

and do what some countries have done in response to a perceived security threat?

Why doesn't Kiwiland just go nuclear?"

And to be fair, it is a legitimate question.

And one that is sometimes dealt with in a strange way when you're looking at popular defence media.

In the popular conception either nukes don't exist in a particular scenario.

Say for example, the internet fanboys are trying to argue who would win,

the United States or Russia, if they had to invade each other

and were magically bolted together and had a land connection or something.

And sometimes the person asking the question will include a little line, "Let's assume nukes don't exist."

Well that's fine, but nukes do in fact exist.

And if you look at the war planning that we now have available from the Cold War

that came out of both the NATO and Warsaw Pact sides,

nuclear weapons were usually written into operational planning.

At the other end of the spectrum are those that sometimes fall into the trap of arguing

that no military confrontation between superpowers is possible

because nuclear weapons make it impossible.

That's a pretty absolute stance that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny either.

And so for Kiwiland we're going to operate in a universe where nuclear weapons do exist,

and we have to take into account realistic scenarios for their potential use.

And those potential uses are split generally into two categories.

Tactical weapons that we use on the battlefield against military targets,

or strategic deterrence, where we have weapons that are primarily intended

to strike the enemy homeland to convince them not to attack us,

otherwise we will remove some of their cities from existence.

The polite euphemism for that is a "counter-value strike".

But no amount of rebranding can take away the horror of what exactly that concept implies.

And given just how frightening the ability to cause a second sunrise is,

some Kiwi politicians might ask the question of whether or not we should have

these weapons for ourselves, and would they provide a security solution?

The answer of course is maybe, but with a giant asterisk.

The first thing to say is that a nuclear program is expensive.

Both in terms of resources and also in terms of diplomatic consequences.

Most global powers are pretty strongly behind the idea of the non-proliferation regime.

Those who already have nukes, well they can keep them,

but no one else is allowed to get them.

The basic justification being that nuclear weapons do pose a bit of a risk

to, you know, the survival of the human species. And as a result the fewer of them there are,

and the fewer actors that have them, the better off everyone is.

I'll leave it to someone from Ukraine to pipe up as to whether they think the world

was made a better place when they gave up their nuclear weapons in the 1990s.

But the basic gist is as soon as it becomes known that you are pursuing nuclear weapons

as a non-existing nuclear weapon state, you should expect international blowback.

South Africa was eventually forced to dismantle its nuclear program by international pressure.

And North Korea and Iran, well, they have both faced

significant international sanctions given their nuclear ambitions.

No matter how good Kiwiland's diplomats are, it would be naive

not to expect at least some pushback from allies once they announce a program.

And then the program is likely to be expensive, very expensive,

to the point where it's going to monopolise military funding for many years.

You need to put in place the infrastructure necessary to generate both the fissile material

and to construct the warhead, the thing that goes boom.

But also the associated delivery system, which is often technically

and in terms of monetary terms the more demanding and expensive component.

One public South Korean estimate suggested that North Korea's nuclear program

has cost it about 3 billion US dollars so far.

That may not sound like much, but it doesn't include the cost of sanctions,

international activities, opportunity costs,

or most importantly, the massive purchasing power parity advantages that North Korea has.

I have to imagine that if I look at the salaries and costs associated with hiring

a North Korean engineer and a Kiwilander, there's going to be a significant difference.

In 2021 the cost for the French nuclear deterrent

was about 5 billion euros, just to give some perspective.

But if the money and the will is there, an advanced economy like Kiwiland can probably do it.

After all, the US did this with 1940s technology, how hard can it be to do in 2023?

The answer of course is it's still pretty hard, but we'll assume that Kiwiland can do it.

The strategic concept behind this idea of a strategic nuclear deterrent is pretty simple

until you start thinking about it just that bit too much.

If all is lost and the opponent is about to take your capital,

or hit some other tripwire point that you designate,

you can launch your nuclear weapons at value targets in their territory and as a result, they lose.

Now if they have nukes as well, they may deploy them

against your value targets and you also lose, so everyone loses.

It's the strategic equivalent of flipping the chessboard when you don't like the result.

The game is now over and there are no winners.

And because, the logic goes, your opponent now knows that they cannot win

without being made to lose, they'll never try to win in the first place.

They won't invade you and try and conquer your capital, because that would result

in the homeland being destroyed, and no foreign conquest

can ever be worth the destruction of the homeland.

Meanwhile, tactical weapons can make things more expensive on the battlefield,

but really only if they are used in large numbers.

Most battle plans from the Cold War era that involved the use of tactical nuclear weapons

involved the use of very large numbers of them.

Troops in the field tend to be much more dug in and also much more spread out than, for example, a city.

Most of the energy from a nuclear blast against troops in the field is going to be wasted,

and so you need to use far more of them.

And so for most nations the focus is on the strategic deterrent component.

And while I'm grossly oversimplifying the idea of nuclear deterrence,

let's have a look at two quick examples.

Now North Korea is perhaps the most famous example,

and proof of the fact that you don't need particularly many resources

in order to eventually put together a nuclear weapon,

if you're willing to pour absolutely everything that you have and years of your time into the effort.

North Korea is now believed to have a relatively small number of warheads

coupled with a number of viable delivery systems.

The cost of those weapons has, in terms of opportunity cost, been astronomical.

The development program itself may not have cost much,

but the sanctions, the foregone trade, and all of that

imposed massive costs on the national economy.

But they do have their nuclear weapons.

And that means every North Korean international tantrum has to be taken just that bit more seriously.

The North Koreans themselves might also feel that it gives them a deterrent

that has to be taken seriously, even by a massively over-matching opponent like the United States.

Pakistan is another country that went through tremendous

hardship in order to develop its nuclear deterrent.

Pakistan's strategic nuclear quandary was significant.

India developed the atomic weapon first.

And from that point Pakistan found itself facing not just a nuclear-armed rival,

but also a neighbour that over time was gaining an accelerating conventional advantage

because of India's superior population and economic growth.

And so in the 1970s the decision was made to pursue a nuclear weapon almost at all costs.

The Prime Minister at the time famously declared

that Pakistan would have its nuclear weapons even if it meant the people had "to eat grass".

Literal decades of development work would follow

until Pakistan fielded its first operational weapon in the late 1990s.

Pakistani nuclear doctrine appears to leave open the door to nuclear first use.

Its a doctrinal position you could argue makes a certain degree of sense

given the conventional military superiority of Pakistan's primary geopolitical rival.

So let's just say Kiwiland looks at that example and goes,

"Yes, a nuclear program is absolutely worth the cost."

Resources are poured into the development of warheads and delivery systems.

The cheapest delivery system would be a simple gravity bomb.

That obviously isn't going to work because we've got no money to pay for an air force.

And so missiles it is. We don't have a navy, we can't afford that,

so ground-launched ICBMs or intermediate range missiles it is.

It does mean we need a rocketry program, but it's still probably cheaper

than developing a nuclear submarine fleet from scratch.

If our opponent is close enough, we might be able to skip that

and just use something like nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

But I'm going to assume we need a rocketry program.

For the purpose of illustrating the point we're going to assume that Kiwiland

has fantastic engineers and scientists, we're going to hand wave our way through the international response,

and we're going to give Kiwiland 40 nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles to carry them.

For the sake of realism, we are going to assume some sort of response from Emutopia.

Either they will get nuclear weapons of their own,

or they will place themselves under some other country's nuclear umbrella.

Even in a universe where that doesn't happen, we have to assume the nuclear taboo is still a thing

in the international community, so we can't just go nuking people without consequence.

But we do now have our missiles, our warheads, and our strategic nuclear deterrent.

Does that mean that we have now solved the security issues of this small nation? Well, don't be so sure.

Because while a nuclear deterrent might be an answer to one specific threat that Kiwiland faces,

a massive total invasion that poses an existential threat to the country.

It's pretty much useless in the face of almost every other threat.

Because when your only two options are nothing or nukes,

you lose the ability to launch any sort of graduated response.

For example, let's just say an Emutopian diplomat says mean things about our country,

we want to do something in response,

do we do nothing, or do we launch the nukes and end our country?

Emutopia is now hacking our military networks. Going to launch our nukes?

Obviously not, we're not going to destroy the country just because our networks are being hacked.

But we had no money for a cyber security or hacking group of our own

so we can't exactly respond in kind.

Alright, now Emutopia is sending over spy balloons - or totally not spy balloons - nukes?

Again, still probably a pretty dumb idea.

Now you might think those examples are deliberately farcical,

because maybe you wouldn't use military force in those situations anyway.

But let's take the scenario up a notch, what if Emutopia occupies the South Island of Kiwiland?

It's not where most of the population or industry is, but it's still an integral part of our territory.

Are we going to launch our nuclear weapons? Well obviously not,

because then we're going to lose the North Island as well.

All of our people will cease to exist, our country will be glass.

So of course we're not going to launch our nukes just because some

of our territory has been taken, that's not an existential threat.

We might use tactical weapons if that would make a difference,

but we can't really fit that in our budget, now can we?

And there's a hundred other scenarios that you could generate that land you in the same problem.

Let's just say Emutopia, because we don't have a navy, imposes a blockade of our country

and people are slowly starving and the economy is breaking down.

Well, nuking them isn't going to solve anything now, is it?

Given the choice between being hungry and glass,

most people are still going to choose alive but hungry.

It's going to make more sense to make diplomatic concessions

than to end our existence just out of spite.

And so you encounter the major drawback of a counter-value only nuclear deterrent.

The first response and the last resort are at this point basically the same thing,

and there's a very narrow range in scenarios in which you'd ever consider hitting the button.

At least if you were rational. You could pretend to be irrational

in order to influence your opponent and cause them to hesitate. Maybe.

But because using these weapons against a nuclear-armed opponent means you lose everything,

then as long as you have anything left to lose, it's not logical to use them.

So the only thing you could argue they really protect us against

if your opponent really wants to call your bluff, and that's a big caveat, if they want to call your bluff,

is a total complete existential threat. And even then, the protection isn't total.

Because if your opponent finds a way to destroy your nukes

before they can be launched to counter force attack you, then the deterrence falls away.

Is anyone likely to take that risk? Well it probably depends on their technology and their capabilities.

So as a strategy, a very small limited nuclear arsenal

might provide an effective deterrence against a narrow range of threats.

But in any particularly complex security environment, it might be too limited

and too narrow as a security concept to defend against all the threats that the nation faces.

I'd probably suggest, Minister, that you look for a different option.

And for most nations that's not building a military

that's capable of repelling all potential attackers and threats.

Instead many countries bind themselves together into alliances

so that collectively they have the capacity to resist whatever threats they face.

You could build nukes, or you could just make friends with people who have them.

Because in any realistic scenario Kiwiland and Emutopia

are not the only two nations in the world, and they're almost certainly not the most powerful.

There are many other more powerful nations out there with their own security interests.

And so a good scan of a strategic environment is going to acknowledge

all of the actors operating within it, their capabilities and their motivations.

It's then going to ask either, can we place ourselves under the protection of a hegemon or a superpower?

Or can we team up with many other small and medium-sized countries

in order to collectively solve our security problems?

The first example is probably the simpler one.

Let's assume that there is a regional hegemon called Freedomland,

which is a major military power to which we could outsource our security demands to.

They could easily crush Emutopia if Emutopia decided to invade us.

The question then becomes how would you convince Freedomland to do exactly that?

Now if they have particularly strong security interests in your regions,

well, then this is probably relatively simple.

If they and a rival are competing for influence in your area, well then siding with one or the other

is [potentially] a great way to be put under ... a defensive umbrella.

Maybe you offer them the opportunity to build some military bases in your territory

in order to forward position their forces, and Bob is your uncle.

Bob in this case being the Freedomland equivalent of America's Uncle Sam.

But in many cases this isn't going to be enough.

Countries are going to want to see you contribute to the overall

collective security architecture in order to welcome you into it.

And so what you will see, especially in many European cases, is countries design militaries,

embark on a force design process and acquire capabilities

not with the intention of building a force that's capable of independently defending their own territory,

but instead one that's capable of making the best possible contributions to a larger alliance.

And if you want a solid example of this, something that I'll walk through now,

I'd encourage you to read the 2022 Defence White Paper for the Kingdom of the Netherlands,

as well as their 2035 defence vision.

You're looking at the front page of their 2022 Defence White Paper right there and the tagline is literally,

"A Stronger Netherlands, A Safer Europe. Investing in a robust NATO and European Union."

The Dutch strategic concept is not based on the idea of the Netherlands

responding independently to new and emerging threats,

but rather on NATO and the European Union responding as a collective unit.

Start digging into the design principles that underpin the vision for what the Dutch military

is going to look like going forward, and you see evidence of that almost immediately.

Design principle 4 for example is pretty telling: "Escalation dominance with our partners.

So in all domains and dimensions, we and our partners

must be able to defeat potential adversaries, even in relatively new domains."

"The Netherlands contributes to this ability with high-tech equipment and high quality personnel."

So the principles envision a force which is capable of

"dominating" any potential threat, but only in cooperation with partners.

Now in order for that sort of strategy of mutual alliance to work,

others are going to want to keep you within the security architecture.

Which means there's often going to be an expectation that you pull your weight, so to speak.

And while that might take a variety of forms, it can mean

things like contributing to regional missions.

So being able to send your personnel abroad as part of an alliance unit

to do a peacekeeping operation overseas for example.

Or it might mean contributing units to a high readiness force within NATO

helping to bolster the alliances' eastern flank.

Or providing special selected capabilities that you are well optimised to provide.

So even though it might not be suited to the job of independent homeland defence,

you might want to build a force which is capable of regional deployment,

or expeditionary operation, or which has some high-tech capabilities.

The key is to have something to contribute to and integrate into the wider force.

In the case of the Netherlands, design principle 9 is particularly telling,

"Focus on further specialisation within NATO and the European Union.

Within NATO and the EU we will focus on further specialisation

with the aim of achieving greater shared effectiveness.

Our capabilities need to fit perfectly with the power and added value of the Kingdom,

and should contribute to the sharing of costs and risks."

If you want an example of that specialisation within NATO,

the Baltic countries tend to focus on developing ground combat forces

optimised to answer a potential Russian threat.

They don't have the resources to maintain combat aircraft.

And so those nations rely on rotating NATO contingents from other air forces

to provide for the so-called "Baltic Air Policing Mission".

And among those aircraft currently stationed on NATO's eastern flank

filling that air combat role are Dutch F-35s.

And so force design in this sort of scenario tends to preference high readiness,

high deployability and high technology capabilities that contribute to allied operations.

You want technology that's common and interoperable with your allies.

So if you're in NATO that means complying with as many of the standardisation agreements as possible

and a focus on whatever capability you specialise in best.

The Dutch don't maintain a massive fleet of tanks, they can leave that to the Poles.

But what they can bring is an expensive high-tech and specialised capabilities,

with the F-35 fleet being one of the most obvious and highly visible symbols of that approach.

Ideally you can end up with a bunch of interlocking specialist forces

that together are stronger than the sum of their parts individually.

These small contributing nations don't individually need their own blue-water navies,

their own AWACs or units like that.

They don't all need their own spy satellite constellations, they can share that information instead.

And what it means is that even countries with relatively limited resources

can make a valuable contribution by specialising extensively in what they're good at.

The flip side is that a highly specialised military

isn't going to be well designed for operating independently.

Many NATO armies arguably wouldn't do particularly well

if they weren't mutually supporting each other.

But if you assume you can trust your allies,

then it might provide you security solutions without breaking the bank.

Alright, so assuming that Kiwiland can find some potential allies

and wants to follow the Dutch model, what is the force design?

Well, we're basically going to take everything that was involved in the

total defence design and basically reverse it.

Conscription is out, and career professional soldiers that can be deployed overseas

for long periods, or internationally, or master high technology capabilities, they are in.

Our budget is still limited, but instead of using it to produce a large force

optimised for an expensive grinding home defence,

we're going to produce a highly trained, high technology,

highly ready and deployable force that can contribute to allied operations.

What our specialisation is, what our secret sauce is, probably depends on our

own natural capabilities and advantages, and what the wider alliance needs.

In the absence of a more detailed scenario, let's assume that something like

a very good Special Forces component, maybe a small expeditionary naval capability,

and at least 50% of the alliance's rugby line-up.

Critically, in order to make that work we're probably going to discard some capabilities entirely,

because we can entrust those to our allies.

Maybe another country is willing to take over air defence duties for Kiwiland's territory

and we can specialise on other things entirely.

And now because it's me, a quick note on defence industrial policy

and the way it relates to all these strategic decisions.

For most nations defence industry and industry strategy

is an integrated element of whatever the overall national defence plan is.

How well configured your industry is to support your armed forces

is an element of your national deterrence, it's an element

of your perceived combat power and your endurance.

And given a finite pool of resources, countries in their defence industrial strategies

often have to make a series of choices.

Say for example a country is focusing on being able to defend itself independently,

well then it may place a focus on self-reliance and strategic autonomy.

The ability to supply itself with as many things as possible during wartime.

Now that can be useful for guaranteeing wartime supply

and also reducing the strain on things like international shipping routes during a time of war.

Now if you are a small nation this is going to have its limits.

You are not going to be able to produce everything domestically,

but you might be able to cover a wide range of systems.

And if you want to see countries that have historically focused on self-reliance,

think about Switzerland, think about Sweden, think about Israel.

By contrast, if the focus is on allied integration,

well then maybe I'm going to buy a lot of my capabilities in

to make sure that I have equipment that's common with my allies.

If I buy F-16 for example, well I'm compatible with the rest of the F-16 fleet almost immediately.

I can exchange spares, components, in an emergency I might even be able to exchange pilots and aircraft.

Meanwhile in return, instead of trying to produce as many products as possible myself,

I might focus my industry on an area of specialisation

to try and become the alliance leader in that particular area

and sell that product out to everyone else.

I might buy my diesel engines from Germany,

my frigates from Italy or from France, and my firearms from Belgium.

And with everyone specialising and selling into the wider group,

we have more chances of generating cost-efficient world beaters in any given system category.

And so the way we specialise Kiwiland's industry is really going to depend

on the wider defence concept that we adopt.

In total defence land Kiwiland is probably going to be self-reliant

on the systems that it is using to ensure its survival.

Artillery ammunition and systems, mines, ATGMs, MANPADS.

Those sort of critical high-volume systems we will want to produce in-house.

By contrast, an allied-focused Kiwiland is probably going to buy in or licence most of its hardware,

but look for opportunities to become a real pack leader in one or two

particular systems categories, what those would be I'll leave to the audience's imagination.

And now before we close out, I want to end on one final point

which I think is often missed when we spend all of our time talking about

the defence industrial base and military equipment,

and that's the role of soft power and influence in national security.

Because if you spend too much time playing online video games,

or reading comment sections, or talking about deterrence,

you start to see the world in some cases through a very hard-power view.

It's a world in which the only reason countries don't get invaded

is because they have enough weapons to inflict great pain on the countries that would invade them.

It's a world where the strong rule, the weak get eaten, and that's just the way it is.

Kiwiland needs weapons desperately,

otherwise Emutopia is going to come over and take what's theirs.

The reality of course is that sometimes it's possible

to just convince your neighbours that they don't want to invade you.

Most governments don't come to power on a platform of invading their neighbours.

Most civilian populations aren't hankering for war every day of the week.

And with enough soft power, whether that be economic, political or cultural,

those sort of attacks, those sort of security altercations, can become even less likely.

Would you attack your primary trade partner?

Would you attack a country that the population views favourably

because they see actors and actresses from that country on their screens all the time?

I mean, to put a question which is not entirely unserious, how hard would it be

to convince Americans to invade a country they viewed positively like Australia?

I feel like even with a really concerted media effort, that would be a pretty hard sell.

I mean seriously, how would you convince anyone to invade this little guy's home?

And for anyone who's guessing, yes, that is a real animal,

those things actually exist, that is not a photoshop.

And it's one of the few animals in Australia that genuinely will not try to kill you.

It's called a quokka, and I use it as an example because its primary defence

against humans is not to be able to hide or deter us,

it's just to be so damn cute and exercise so much soft power that we decide we adore the things.

In a world where only hard power matters,

well, then most small European countries have no reason to exist.

Luxembourg is an extremely wealthy country with about 900 active duty military personnel.

According to certain models of strategic thinking, it's right there for the taking.

But you'd never be able to convince the French or the German public

in the 21st century to invade Luxembourg.

It's a friendly nation, part of their alliance, with significant soft power.

And so it might be that some hypothetical threats can be answered

with soft power rather than with military deterrence.

Although to be fair, given the cost of getting it wrong,

sometimes a little bit of kinetic deterrence probably doesn't hurt.

In conclusion, defence isn't just an objective for larger and more powerful nations.

In some ways it's more significant for some of the smaller and the poorer.

What strategy a nation chooses to adopt to defend itself is going to depend

on its strategic concept, and the defensive concept or idea that it chooses to adopt.

Looking around the world reveals many options for how nations

in this sort of lighter weight class choose to defend themselves.

And that diversity confirms the importance of really well-considered

decision making at the highest levels.

Kiwiland may face significant threats and challenges, but with a coherent strategy

and a well-designed force, I'm sure the proud people of that nation will make it through.

OK, channel update to close out. First of all, thanks to those patrons who voted for this topic.

I know I can't always follow exactly where the polls lead me,

sometimes the data isn't available or another topic pops up,

but I absolutely do take the input into account.

After a number of topics that have been deeper dives into specific systems,

or aspects of the Russia-Ukraine War, I wanted to zoom out

and do a topic that is a little bit more defence 101.

And given how much defence content out there tends to focus on the major powers,

I wanted to take a little bit of a different tack today.

Most people don't live in countries that can afford nuclear-powered aircraft carriers,

but nonetheless would like to remain safe and secure.

I do hope you enjoyed it and I will be back with the long anticipated

episode on Wagner Group and PMCs next week.

In other news, I was recently interviewed by the podcast, "The Red Line".

I'll leave a link in the description, but I was interviewed alongside Neil Melvin of RUSI,

Alex Clarkson of King's College, and James Black from RAND,

with the focus of my segment really being on Russian and European rearmament efforts.

Now obviously it's a podcast format so there were no entertaining slides,

and given the line-up, I also thought it was worth pulling back on the jokes a bit.

But if you are interested, I'll leave a link in the description.

Moving forward, I think I would like to do more of these interviews,

there are requests that I need to get to dating back months.

It's just a question of allocating the time to make sure that they happen.

So if you would like to see more of that material, please do let me know.

And perhaps we'll see more of these along the lines

of what I did with Jake Broe some months ago in the future.

I also have some reflections on the fact we've now passed a year since

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022,

but I think it's best to hold onto those for another week or two.

That's all from me, all the best, and I'll see you all again next week.