Door Slider - thanks I forgot about the scheme. However suitability is based on outside supervisory experience - hard to think of direct equivalence but salary wise like starting as a junior squadron leader and higher than a WO. Starting as an officer is not dependent on similar experience. Now that would be radical thinking.
The Chiefs of Staff better be very well prepared and at their sharpest - he appears to have no respect for experience or rank especially if his interlocutors don't share his point of view.
I do wonder if Cummings would have got DV clearance if he had been in a normal government job, his public persona suggests he may have done something that makes him vulnerable but hasn't seen it as such himself. I would be suprised if the Russians didn't try to recruit him when he worked there (or at least think about it), I would assume this has been carefully investigated.. Even so, I think his Russophilia should be of concern, he is clearly someone who believes he is always right and thus may dismiss any threat analysis of Russia he disagrees with.
A protege of Prof. Norman Stone, he was compared to Robespierre by another of his Oxford tutors, quoted in the New Statesmen, in that he is "someone determined to bring down things that don’t work", however I fear like Robespierre his self belief and disdain for counterviews will lead to the throwing out of the baby with the bath water. The problem with Cummings is he has some good ideas, is highly intelligent and a forceful communicator but I suspect has little or no respect for other beliefs or ideas that contradict his own.
He is a fan of the IDF's Talpiot programme: "Graduates pursue double higher education while they serve in the army, and they use their expertise to further IDF research and development in technological leadership positions."
If you want some insight into how he thinks try this he wrote in 2013:
Dominic Cummings: Some Thoughts On Education
Early on he reveals his contempt for the education and abilities of our elected representatives. I don't think he has much respect for those who head large organizations be they business, government departments or armed services as he believes the systems ensure most of those selected are incompetent.
From my limited reading, he appears obsessed with benefits of education based on science, technology and maths (particularly statisitics) and overturning the comfortable metropolitan elite. I am not sure if he sees the irony of this being propounded by an arts graduate produced by private school and Oxford, who is a scientific autodidact. Mind you he's from Durham so he isn't metropolitan
.
This quote struck me:
"Given that intelligent adversaries aim to implement Sun Tzu’s dictum ‘to win without fighting is the highest form of war’, cyberwar and other advanced technologies offer obvious possibilities for ‘winning’ by destroying an adversary’s desire, or ability, to oppose - without conventional conflict and even without any obvious evidence"
(I fear the Chinese have to a great extent already done this.)
I also fear his obsession with technology blinds him to the continuing need for conventional armed forces.