https://www.express.co.uk/news/polit...ichard-barrons
Only artificial intelligence can protect Britain, top general warns
BRITAIN'S Armed Forces are still fighting "yesterday's wars" and can neither protect this country nor meet increasing 21st Century challenges, General Sir Richard Barrons said last night.........
“In 1904 Lord Esher led a review of the British Army after its experiences in the Boer War. Politics forced a military transformation which set it up for the First World War. Who is today’s Lord Esher? We are fiddling around in the margins of a broken defence programme. It’s a political failure.”
Significantly, he pointed to expensive platforms such as Britain’s aircraft carriers and the F-35 Joint Strike fighter programme, warning they could never defeat China and Russia’s advanced missile systems.
“The current Armed Forces model is just too small to be effective. It consists of military hardpower which cannot deal with emerging Chinese and a Russian capability”. Just as air power “killed the battleship”, he said long-range missile developments by Russia and China have effectively made it impossible to invade their sea and airspace.
“Our carrier groups were conceived in the 1990s. When, in 1996, China threatened Taiwan, President Bill Clinton sent two carrier battle groups. China could then not cope with two. But it has learned its lessons well,” said Gen Barrons, who last week addressed the Cogx conference on the ethics of lethal autonomous weapons.
“We imagined our carriers and Joint Strike Fighters would allow us to penetrate Chinese or Russian airspace. This is now never going to happen. Russia and China have invested in anti-air and anti-ship missiles that keep the West away, and missiles that deliver harm to other homelands.”
These include the DF-21D , a precision carrier-killer with a range of 1,600km. Its successor wil have a range of 3,000km. “The equation is a 100,000-tonne carrier with 6,000 lives on board against missiles, fired from thousands of kilometres away in clips of 20,” he said.
Similarly, Russia’s development of the S-400 missile defence system means that “Nato air forces cannot now penetrate Russian airspace”...........