Now we get the pitch from the second man angling for the top job (post #762)…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/m...guns-92qq9cx7d
Military ‘needs to focus more on gadgets and coding than guns’
The military needs more “Qs”, the gadget specialist portrayed in the James Bond films, than “007s”, according to the general in charge of cyber and special forces.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of strategic command, said that the future of warfare needed to focus much less on conventional capabilities and more on the digital age. Speaking at the opening of the DSEI arms fair, he said: “I have more need of Q than I do 007 or M.”
M is the fictional head of the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, as played by Dame Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes in the recent films.
Sanders, who is in the running to replace General Sir Nick Carter as
head of the armed forces, said that “equal value and equal status” should be afforded to computer scientists, data engineers and cyberoperators as it is to the “traditional warrior elite”.
He wanted coding and data literacy to be seen as a core skill in the same way as weapon handling. He said the security outlook was “more perilous” than it was two years ago, with the UK facing a twin spectre of “emboldened jihadi terrorists” and a “growing authoritarian zeitgeist” not seen since the 1930s.
China’s military operations have shifted from the concentration of forces to information systems, including the creation of autonomous swarms, Sanders said. If the UK military does not adapt to compete with such technological innovations, then “we will at best become exquisite but irrelevant, and at worst we will die”.
He acknowledged that in order to adapt, soldiers would need to be educated and trained to have the skills required to compete with adversaries such as Russia and China.
“We will have to address the skills gap through attracting far more diverse talent, by inward investment so that coding and data literacy are seen as being as much a core skill as weapon handling.”……