We Spoke to One of Britain's Top Generals about Drones. This is What He Had to Say.

EM: I'm here with Brigadier General Ed Cartwright of the British Armed Forces; Brigadier General, if you could please introduce yourself and kind of tell the audience a bit about who you are and what you do.

Brig. Cartwright: Of course, Evan. So first of all, good evening from the UK. So my name's Brigadier Ed Cartwright and I command 16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team. So I'm Brigade Commander, which is, in the British Army, a unit of between sort of 6 and 7000 soldiers, and we are the UK sort of high readiness land brigade, and we constitute the basis of our global response force.

EM: Thank you very much. And, a bit of background for the audience. We first met at a British military exercise up in Canada called RHINO BIZZ. So during that exercise, you were in command of the two PARA group kind of learning to integrate drone technology with their current role, serving as a paratrooper force for the UK. So could you speak a little bit to what that exercise hoped to achieve and then what your role day-to-day was, overseeing those exercises for those forces?

Brig. Cartwright: Sure. So RHINO BIZZ was part of a process of learning and adapting to how we're going to think and fight differently in an era of uncrewed systems. You know, clearly the advent of drones, and not just drones, but uncrewed systems more broadly, and the proliferation of sensors on the battlefield are changing the sort of the character of land combat.

The nature of land combat doesn't change very much. It's kind of visceral, it's violent, it's full of friction, but the character changes. And drones, uncrewed systems, software, particularly artificial intelligence, they are driving those changes. So RHINO BIZZ was an exercise where we took what we call a vertical slice, so a bit of brigade headquarters,

a bit of battle group headquarters, and then a load of battle group assets, including standoff weapons, support weapons like machine guns, and obviously uncrewed systems to go and learn how to fight those systems more effectively. So a form of experimentation and trialling, but those words have quite specific meanings in military terms.

But it's really in plain English, it's about learning to adapt to and adopt uncrewed systems in our way of war.

EM: And obviously, a lot of those lessons and adaptation are drawn directly from the observations that the UK and many other nations have had looking at the war in Ukraine. So our listeners are probably familiar with the basics there, right? This is a drone saturated battlefield in a way that really hadn't been seen anywhere on Earth prior to that time, and has now been proliferated to other battlefields. We could talk about Sahel, Myanmar, so on and so forth. Looking at your involvement specifically in RHINO BIZZ, as you say, the nature of land warfare really hasn't changed too much, but the systems through which it's been fought, are obviously maturing rapidly and kind of evolving in different directions. So can you speak to the specific sorts of technology and drone technology or otherwise that it's really, really important that your soldiers are able to adapt to?

Brig. Cartwright: Okay, yeah, so I think there are two big buckets driving change, or two big buckets of change being driven by two things. The first is artificial intelligence and the way that that software is changing how we fight. And the second is the advent of uncrewed systems. And clearly the two are connected, but they are sort of two distinct things.

And I think there are sort of, you can draw from Ukraine 3 broad areas of change. The first is this idea of persistent sensing or persistent observation around the battlefield. Obviously, it's more than just observation. It is broader senses. But the persistence is what, persistence of those senses is what's changing.

I was recently talking to a very well-placed source who reckons there's about a million different sensors on the battlefield in Ukraine all the time. I have no idea if that number is accurate, but if you add the satellites, the drones, the ground sensors, the radars, you can see how it might add up to an incredible number like that. And that means that so much more of the battlefield is kind of visible more of the time in whichever spectrum you're analysing the battlefield, whether it's on the electromagnetic spectrum or visually through the eye of a drone, for example. So a much more, a much more, people use the word transparent. It's probably the wrong word because you can't see underground. You can't see into people's minds. But no doubt, there is far greater sensing across the whole battlefield. So a much more visible battlefield. That's kind of change number one.

Change #2 is this huge increase in cheap precision. So particularly in drones, and that's driving lethality up. And you know the numbers as well as I do, but I gather that Ukraine is aiming to build something between 8 and 9 million FPV drones this year. Russia probably 7, seven and a half million. Ukraine in the region of 50,000 UGVs, uncrewed ground vehicles. And we think that's probably in the ballpark of around 20,000 FPVs being flown every day.

by the Russians. So incredible numbers of cheap systems that can now be massed and they've got a long range and they're pretty accurate. So that kind of increasing ever cheaper precision is big change #2.

And big change #3 is the speed at which adaptation is occurring. I think the first commercially mass produced FPV was produced in about March of 2023. And yet here we are talking about maybe 7 to 10 million being produced by each side over the next 12 months. So that incredible speed of adaptation. Just last week, I was listening to the CEO of Brave One, Ukraine's drone producing sort of conglomerate. And he was saying that he thinks that next year most strikes will be autonomous. And that is an incredible change even from where we are now. So those, I think, are the kind of three big things that are changing, persistent sensing, increasing precision ever cheaper, and then increasingly rapid adaptation. And that's what's driving change in the land force.

and how we fight. And that's what we were trying to get after on RHINO BIZZ. How do we as a tactical formation, how do we adapt to that situation?

EM: And let's dive in on persistent sensing, because prior to the Admin of all this technology, and you can please correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding of course is that units in the field, right, units kind of operating in frontline areas, really don't have a ton of access to broader awareness of the environment around them. They might have the information relayed to them from a command center, but they really don't have the ability to either gather information themselves or to receive high volumes of information that, I have to imagine can be overwhelming, can be overly noisy. So what are you doing? What is the British military doing to equip its frontline soldiers to be able to manage that noise and see their way through a battlefield?

Brig. Cartwright: So Evan, there's lots in that question. I mean, in the last, let's say, ever since the end of the Second World War, we have been gradually able to absorb more information, more data, and share that data. So, you know, soldiers today does have a great deal more of data than there used to be, unsurprisingly. But there has been a sudden increase in the amount of data that we now have available.

And to digress on a very quick story, I was in Normandy for the 82nd anniversary of D-Day only a few months ago. And I went to Braycourt Manor, which as you may recall, is where **** Vinters, you know, the character in 101st Airborne, played by Damien Lewis. It's where they identified the German guns that were firing onto, I think it was onto Omaha Beach. And he basically sent a recce patrol, which he led, that crawled through the bushes, identified the guns and then assaulted those guns. So they identified a threat, found it with their own eyes and assaulted it with their own hands effectively.

And we were still fighting like that. You know, I've run recce patrols on exercises and operations, still using your eyes and assaulting your position if you see it. We wouldn't do that anymore. We would if we had to, but we would try not to. We would try and do most of that with uncrewed sensors. Whereas from the Second World War right through to about three or four years ago, we were still doing human reconnaissance as one of our principal means of finding the enemy systems. Now it is largely, not automated, but it's largely conducted through our crew systems. So that is a huge change quite quickly. But what that means is you've got now a tonne of data you've got to manage. So to sort of to come back onto your question, what we need is really good mission management software that enables us to sort that data, identify what's important, and where decisions need to be made. So that is all about, you've got all these sensors, you then need good software that integrates all that information and helps you make decisions.

You know, that's the essence of command and control is making decisions. And with a tonne of data, you need good software to help you filter that data and make those decisions. And we are developing that software and we're developing how you then employ that software. Plenty of companies make that software. We're developing how you refine it to suit us and how you then actually fight it.

EM: And then how AI dependent is that software? How much of a space is there for humans and loop still?

Brig. Cartwright: Oh, so huge. I mean, there's a space, both practically in the sense that we don't yet have AI of that quality to make all those decisions for us. And there's a space ethically in that we still believe that we need a human, if not in the loop, probably on the loop. You know, I think there may well come a time in the future where that's no longer felt to be, well, I think it may be felt to be necessary. It's no longer possible because of the way our enemy fights, but that's, you know, that's for others to debate. But right now, we firmly still have a human, at the very least, on the loop if we're using force, you know, particularly lethal force, obviously. So there's huge space for AI. We are using some AI, not enough. And we are developing the ability to employ more and more.

EM: And you're saying not enough. Where would you like to see better AI integration in the near term? So kind of taking into account where technological capabilities are right now.

Brig. Cartwright: Okay, so I think the obvious, and I'm talking from a very tactical level, the obvious example for me is as we grow more and more sensors, what we need to do is filter that data and prioritise it. So I think that's where AI can play almost the most important role for me. So to give you an example of that, if we are surveilling a, let's say,

100 square kilometres of battlefield, and I use that number completely arbitrarily. And there will be a significant number of enemy items, people, formations in that area. I need AI to be able to identify all of those, process what they are, categorise them, prioritise them, and help me decide how to apportion munitions to get the right weapon target match. That's the sort of thing which we have traditionally done through pencils and spreadsheets, and we want to be done by AI, but we still need, at the moment, we still want humans to be the ones that are taking the decision to then cause some kind of effect, particularly a kinetic effect.

EM: Have you seen in your own exercises, as that latency time kind of shrinks down between gathering this information, processing it, being able to put it into effect, have you seen soldiers be substantially more effective kind of in a moment-to-moment sense?

Brig. Cartwright: So yes, but we are still in the foothills of this process. You know, we're learning fast. You were with us out in Canada. You know, we were able to identify a target and engage it within about 12 minutes. Now, that is not very fast, but it was quite far away. And we were deliberately, it's the first time we'd done it, and we think we could do it much faster. I've heard several, particularly some Israelis who say, you know, target time could now be 7 seconds. And that is possible if you've got loitering munitions and you've got ISR, possibly on the same platform in position. But from actually finding a target and then engaging it with the systems we have because we have to launch a drone to do it, that took a bit longer. So I have seen an acceleration, but we have, you know, we've got some way to go, I would say.

EM: And thinking about the point of view of soldiers in the field. There's obviously the proactive side of this, where you'd like to be able to synthesise data and launch attacks and do what you need to do in a much quicker timeline. At the same time, these are soldiers in a constantly monitored battlefield, in battlefields that are observed at such greater penetration, as you were saying, than really any battlefield has been able to be surveilled prior to this point in history. What impact does that have on soldiers that are learning to deal with the battlefield, where they're kind of always being watched? Does that result in really significant training changes, or how does a soldier kind of?

Process that environment.

Brig. Cartwright: So I think it has a huge impact sort of professionally in terms of how we conduct ourselves. And it puts a massive emphasis on camouflage, concealment, deception and dispersal, what we call C2D2. So it means that wherever you are on the battlefield, you are now vulnerable, you are at risk, and therefore your standard of your soldiering, particularly in terms of camouflage, concealment, dispersal and perception, needs to be significantly higher because it puts a premium on survivability. So we have got to be more survivable everywhere on the battlefield. And there's a danger that our conversation is always about people in what we used to call the kind of the combat zone. The combat units who are driving tanks, assaulting positions, flying helicopters. You know, this obviously applies throughout the depth of the battle space, because drones have such greater reach, both in terms of surveillance and strike. And so now you have whether you are a what we used to, what we still do classify as a combat soldier in a combat arm, like a, in my case, I was in the parachute regiment, or you might be a tank commander, or whether you're a logistician, a medic, an engineer, everybody now needs to be as survival as is humanly possible, which means a fundamentally different approach to camouflage, concealment, deception and dispersal.

And it means we've got to have counter-UAS systems in depth to deal with both sort of quadcopters and FPVs at the front, but also to deal with the fixed wing observation UAS deeper in the rear. So there is a premium now on surviving. I think that's quite a big shift because the way that goes, not just at the front line, well, that's always been the case, not just in the range of indirect weapon systems like artillery, again, it's been the case since the First World War. This now goes deep into the rear, hundreds of kilometers, as we're learning in Ukraine. So I think that's a really big shift in terms of our professional conduct. And then I think there's also a big shift sort of psychologically where people now feel at risk everywhere. Now, you know, clearly I've not fought in Ukraine, as you'd expect. And the British Army doesn't have experience soldiering in Ukraine. So I don't know yet what that feels like.

But I can imagine what it feels like. I know what it feels like at the front being in jeopardy. And so having that feeling throughout your death has a significant psychological and moral impact on your people. So we need to prepare and train our soldiers, not only to survive longer, literally to stop yourself getting killed, but also to be able to endure that persistent threat in depth. So that's about moral and psychological resilience. And those are two different elements of our training that we are attending to, you know, in the Brigade High Command and in the Army.

EM: That must be an incredibly difficult thing to simulate in training, is that correct?

Brig. Cartwright: So yes and no. It's not actually that hard to simulate having drones in the sky because we've got some drones. So you can stick drones up in the air and then soldiers know that wherever they are on the battlefield, they're being observed and you can hear and see drones. So you can achieve that effect. I think it is therefore much harder to then simulate this idea of, you know, your life is constantly at risk.

particularly when you're clearly on exercise. And that's something about using the experience of our Ukrainian comrades and using the experience of what we're seeing on, you know, even on social media, you know, you are getting a sense of the battlefield there in a way you never used to. And we need to inoculate our soldiers to a more lethal battlefield. And that is something, you know, we are putting some thought into how we do that.

EM: Using Ukraine as an analogy, we've seen the nation kind of disperse its drone control into these backline bunkers where people can operate either FPV drones or longer range drones from afar and keep themselves safe, versus these frontline positions where soldiers are expected to operate drones, conduct surveillance,

conduct short range strikes while also managing the moment to moment needs of any soldier in the frontline area. At RHINO BIZZ, we saw really elite British soldiers kind of put this to practise in the field. Can you speak a bit to the way that specifically these very talented frontline operators need to incorporate drones into their moment-to-moment understanding of how they move through a battlefield.

Brig. Cartwright: Yeah, so I think, you know, drones are now the most ubiquitous weapon system on the battlefield. So if you take the conflict in Ukraine, I don't know the exact numbers, but I there's probably in the region of 6, 7, 800,000 Ukrainians fighting in what we call the combat zone. And there's probably in the region of up to 1.6 million Russians, potentially. Those are all public, you know, publicly available figures.

So let's say for the sake of argument, you've got a couple of million people in the combat zone. So that's not just the front line. That's the whole, you know, those areas that are in range of their weapon systems and they are combatants. So not civilians in range, combatants. And I just told you earlier that I think the Ukrainians are going to build something like 7 million drones a year. So there are now more drones than there are people. Therefore, there are more drones than there are, you know, AK-47 Kalashnikovs. And there are more drones even than there are artillery shells. As I understand from open source, the Russians expecting to make about three and a half million artillery shells next year and about seven and a half million drones, just FPV drones. So that is a significant shift. So we have to change how we fight.

So to your question about how are our soldiers adapting to this, we are having to rethink the tactics we employ. And if I was to offer you a characterization of how, and this is a personal opinion, but how I think that is changing, we have traditionally educated and trained our people with the sort of organising principle that we will seize terrain through mass and maneuver. We'll concentrate force, we'll bring together

men and women, armoured vehicles, combining fire maneuver, and we will kind of break through, break out and exploit. And we'll do that with some heavily protected systems that are as mobile as possible and, you know, highly lethal systems. That was our traditional model of how we fight.

And that is not wrong anymore, but there is a shifting emphasis towards using, you know, uncrewed systems to do much more of our killing through targeting. So this idea of find and fire is becoming like the organising principles around what we're doing. So using the kind of sense, integrate, decide, execute, the recce strike, we call it,

that cycle, that is how we are identifying targets and striking them, and we're trying to rapidly accelerate the speed of execution. So you're seeing this idea of shifting from massive manoeuvre towards kind of targeting as our organising principle, and we might shift again towards autonomy, and we should talk about autonomy later.

But what you're seeing then is rather than privileging these things of lethality, mobility, and protection in our systems, what we need to privilege now is affordability, scale, and speed. So you need to have stuff that's cheap, there's a lot of it, and it can be produced or replaced, so this replacement speed, really quickly, because it's going to break or get used.

And there's a balance because you still need armor, you still need indirect fire, but you now need a tonne of uncrewed systems and sensors. So I would say we're shifting away from being, organising ourselves around these ideas of mass and maneuver, lethality, protection, mobility, towards finding fires, targeting, killing at range,

And you do that with systems that are affordable, scalable, and that they can be procured at great speed. So that's, I think, the shift that's happening.

EM: And we've seen NATO member militaries kind of struggle with this shift over to more expendable, more attritional systems. How much of a paradigm shift has it been for the units that are under your command to now shift to, as you say, armour is still important, indirect fire is still important?

Ultimately, the primary munition, if you will, on the battlefield is this expendable high volume of drone systems, whether it's for strike or also for reconnaissance drones that are going to be lost constantly. Has that really been a big shift to get people's heads around: No, we're dealing with systems that are going to be used and thrown away, and we're not sure when they'll be thrown away, but we can assume that they're going to be thrown away and replaced constantly.

Brig. Cartwright: Yeah, it's a really big shift. And, you know, as I said at the start, I know I won't speak on behalf of the British Army, but as a British Army officer, our Chief of the General Staff, you know, his kind of vision, the way he articulates, I think is very clear, is in terms of how the Army generates its combat power, this idea of the total means of its destructive or destructive power, that can be concentrated at any given time. That's what combat power is. We think in the future, about 20% of that will come from what we call our survivable systems, things like tanks, artillery pieces, helicopters. These are generally crewed systems, generally armoured, generally lethal. And those are survivable systems that we want to use and reuse and we want to protect them.

That will probably generate about 20% of our combat power. And about 40% will come from our attritable systems, i.e. these are largely uncrewed systems, which might be an observation drone or could be a dropper drone, but you want to use it and you want it to come back and you want to reuse it. But it's probably not crude. It's not crude.

And if it gets shot down, it's replaceable at speed. My point earlier about affordability, scale and speed. And then the remaining 40% of that combat power comes from what we call consumable systems, which are effectively fire and forget. So like an FPV or a long range mid-strike zone drone. So something which you are going to expend and not get it back.

So we think that is quite a big shift, because if you think only five years ago, I would argue that about, I don't know, 90 something percent of our fighting power or combat power rather, came from those survival systems, you know, our armoured platforms, our helicopters. We still need those systems. They're all part of this mix of combined arms maneuver, the integrated force. But there is now a shifting emphasis in what is doing the killing. And it's now, we call it 20-40-40. And I think that's a really clear and neat way to explain the kind of the vision the British Army's got of how we think we're going to fight.

EM: So often when we're presenting our content, we discuss how, essentially, it's very different in the way that Russia and Ukraine have chosen to go about the idea of highly expendable war fighting, but there's really no way around high expendable war fighting if one side has chosen to fight a war in that way? It's very difficult to kind of greet an opposing force that has chosen to use, again, these mass attritable systems to come and attack you without falling back to the use of mass attritable systems yourself. Now, for NATO militaries and for Ukraine as well, we've seen such a prioritization, and for all the right reasons, of the lives and the safety of front-line troops.

We've seen a very different approach in Russia, where you have, you know, I believe the latest estimates from the UK just last week were 500,000 Russian soldiers killed over the course of this conflict so far, along with another million captured, missing, or wounded.

So the UK obviously has a fairly small force size, it also is a force that has a very long tradition of prioritising the well-being, the safety of its troops whenever possible. And obviously moving into an attritable warfighting method with human lives is not something that the UK is willing to consider.

That's not necessarily the case for the UK's adversaries. So how do you try and cope with that, that difference and make up the gap that a nation like Russia could achieve by throwing these young men into the meat grinder in a way that the UK, it certainly seems and hopefully would never even consider doing?

Brig. Cartwright: Yeah, and I don't think that's new. And I think it was the Second World War US Marine General, I can't remember who it was, who sort of, who used to say that we're going to fight with steel, not flesh. This idea of not using our humans as an expendable resource. Now, how the Russians choose to fight, clearly up to them. And if you're in a war with Russia and they are using humans as an expendable resource, well, then they will be expended because we have a pretty lethal military. What we've got to do is protect our people because people are not a finite resource. Even in Russia with 142 million people, you know, they are still not a finite resource.

And I would argue Western way of war from my Western perspective, that that's no way to fight a war because you know, you'll lose the support of your people, you use a moral component and you might ultimately expend all of your, you know, all of your fighting people. So I would like to argue our way of war is both more moral, but also more effective because we want to use the machines to do the killing and protect the people. And I think that's the way of war that we're designing now. Clearly, we're learning from Ukraine and they have done an incredible job with a population of something like 30 million now.

And as I said earlier, probably less than a million in the combat zone. They've done an incredible job of expending Russian life and protecting Ukrainian life. And they've done that through the employment of uncrewed systems and through the creation of this idea of a death zone or a grey zone and the drone wall they've built. I mean, if you do the maths now, and I haven't done it exactly, but it's a roughly a 7, 800 kilometre front. If you take out the water,

And they call it the death zone, the grey zone is probably up to 20 kilometres deep on each side. So that's an area that's something bigger than Wales and smaller than Scotland. And those are, sorry, those are UK reference points, but you'll know what I mean. But that is a big area that there is now very little movement in. And if you do move, you're probably going to get struck and killed.

That's an incredible thing Ukraine has done in order to protect their people. And we, I think there are elements of the Ukrainian way of war that we would want to adopt and learn from. And there are some elements we might do differently. But the idea of preserving your people and using machines to do the killing, that is the way of war that we need to get better at.

EM: And this might be a perfect moment to bring in the idea of autonomy, as you mentioned earlier. Ukraine, as you said, is looking to potentially shift to overwhelmingly autonomous drone systems as soon as next year. Where do you see the need for expanded autonomy and in which systems at the British military's disposal?

Brig. Cartwright: Yeah, look, so I think this is coming. I mean, there was a media theorist, I can't remember when he was writing, a guy called Marshall McLuhan, who wrote that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. He was talking about, I'm not even sure what he's talking about, but that's certainly true of smartphones, isn't it? And I think the same is true of, you know, uncrewed systems and autonomy.

We've invented these things called drones, but they are now going to shape how we fight. And I'm sure that autonomy is going to be the next bound. And as I mentioned, you know, Brave One, Andri Hekluk, I think he's called, the CEO of Brave One, saying that next year, as many as half the strikes could be autonomous. And I think that is, you know, that's a way of what we have to adopt. And I think you can, I heard David Petraeus characterise it really well recently, where he sort of said there's a world in which it is human intent, which has been absorbed by LLMs and then processed and put into the machines. It is agentic orchestration. This idea of agentic AI will make decisions for itself. And it's agentic AI that's going to orchestrate the employment of uncrewed systems.

And it's machine execution. So they're going to, machines are going to go forward and do the killing, but there'll be a human on the loop. You know, we think and we want to keep a human on the loop for moral reasons. We can debate whether or not that's going to last. But this idea of human intent, agentic orchestration and machine execution, I think is a really good way to describe and understand how we would like to employ autonomy and the move, as I talked about earlier, that shifting emphasis, these organising principles going from massive maneuver, fine and fast and into autonomy. I think that's what something like what it will look like.

EM: And obviously this technology won't all become available at once. So as you see these concepts coming down the pipeline, where would you like to see autonomous capability integrated first in the role that you're soldier serving?

Brig. Cartwright: Interesting. Well, hey, look, I mean, I'm a tactical Commander. So of course, I'd say I can see, you know, the most obvious instance of the use of autonomy is in the use of lethal force against the enemy, because that minimises the risk to humans. But I also look at the problem of sustaining the fight, and I can see a significant role for uncrewed autonomy in logistics, because then you take a whole slice of the battlefield

out of harm's way, which I think is really important. So I think those are the two kind of obvious areas for me. So it's the employment of lethal force. So it's putting drones and munitions forward into the enemy. And then it's how you then achieve resupply. So therefore removing humans from some of those logistic roles and removing the risk that is inherent in extended resupply lines.

Evan, off the top of my head, those are two areas where I think you could easily see autonomy making a huge difference. And then you could probably add a third area, which is around the decision and the plan of making, sorry, the planning and the decision making, because that way, if you can accelerate all of that, then actually you can get ahead of your enemy, the old OODA loop, as people used to say.

I'm sure there's a role for autonomy there. So there you go, there's three areas off the top of my head where I think we could see in the future.

EM: How do you feel the response of soldiers at this point as autonomy is beginning to be discussed? Is this something that soldiers are looking forward to incorporating or kind of reserved about?

Brig. Cartwright: Yes, I'm not, you know, I haven't had lots of deep, meaningful conversations with the soldiers about autonomy, but I think there is a, there's a realisation that, you know, as I said, the character of land warfare is changing, and you know, we're professional soldiers, we want to stay ahead of that change, we want to adapt as fast as possible. So, I'm sat here tonight in the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in the midst of what we call the Army Drone Wars. Today is our first sort of full day, or no, not sure actually, today is our second full day of the Army Drone Wars, but this year is our first full Army Drone Wars competition. We've got teams from across the Army competing in competitions with uncrewed systems, you know, find and strike competitions. And you know, absolutely, we can see in the future that some of these missions that are currently being flown by drone pilots, you know, hiding in bushes or hiding underground on joysticks could well be flown by software defined autonomous machines, where you're simply plugging in a grid and laptop or simply drawing a box on a map and telling the machine to go and kill in that zone.

So we talk about that and we know that's coming. And we want to make sure that we're as adaptable as possible. I think as I, to go back to my point at the start of the three things that have changed, the speed of adaptation, the only way to prepare the force to deal with a battlefield that changes so fast is to be an inherently adaptable force. So we recognise that we can't afford to become wedded to particular weapon systems or particular software systems. We've got to be able to change all the time, which

requires real kind of agility in your people. So breeding a force that is agile and adaptable is just as important as training a force that is really good at flying drones, because we may not need to fly as many drones in the future because they will be autonomous. So I think it's all about inculcating this sense of adaptability. And yeah, the abilities change fast, rather than becoming wedded to a single system or way of war.

EM: So let's go back to the idea of these crude armoured systems, because there's a big debate right now, and I'm sure you've consumed plenty of media on this topic, about whether or not tanks are survivable in modern warfare, whether infantry fighting vehicles are survivable, whether they've become obsolete. Now, that's been an ongoing debate that we've hosted a bit of on our own platform, and that we've

been avid consumers of. Just based on your experience as a commanding officer, where do you see the role for crewed systems, if at all, these large, heavy, slow-moving armour pieces in these battlefields of the future?

Brig. Cartwright: Okay, so I think we should start with the fact that humans will still be involved in combat and humans will still be at risk. And therefore, we will need armour to protect humans. That's the sort of start point. So there is still a role for armour to protect humans.

We will still need to manoeuvre and move people at some point, because we will want to seize and hold terrain. Now, some terrain could possibly be held by machines in the future, but particularly if terrain is occupied by civilians, and that is, you know, that is the case in war, then you need to put soldiers into those civilian communities that are being liberated to look those people in the eyes and to reassure them. So there is absolutely a role for humans on the battlefield. Because remember, the battlefield is not always highly contested and lethal. You know, war takes a long time over huge areas of ground.

So we still need protective mobility. So armour of some sort to move people into harm's way in order to achieve their mission, be their mission to seize and hold terrain, or be their mission to engage with and meet and reassure civilian populations that are being liberated. And we still need crude lethality, you know, tanks and those sorts of things, because when you are moving people, they need to be able to protect themselves.

and you protect yourself both with armour and with weapon systems.

So we still need crude lethality, but we probably need to employ it in a different way. Back to my earlier argument, we used, you know, our doctrine, in some degrees is still, but certainly used to be the idea of how do you mass armor, people and armor, in order to seize terrain, exploit breakthrough and breakout, and that's how you shatter the enemy's will and cohesion. That is going to be harder to do on today's battlefield. So our armour needs to be more dispersed and probably used in smaller quantities, possibly to penetrate rather than to hold.

And, you know, other friends of mine have done great work on this idea of penetration, and how you can then isolate an enemy formation, rather than having to simply seize it with armor. So I think there's still a role for armor. I think that's indisputable. There is still a role for crude lethality, so things like tanks, but I think they will be more dispersed and employed in smaller numbers, probably over shorter periods of time than we have traditionally used them for. But the balance of therefore what needs to be doing, most of the killing, if you like, but a lot of the conceptual manoeuvre, achieving a positional advantage, that is done by uncrewed systems, principally nowadays, I would argue.

EM: Zooming out a bit to the, not just the technologies, but the wars of the future for the British military, the UK obviously is reorienting toward the rest of the NATO alliance and kind of looking to fight future wars as I understand it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, in tandem with NATO allies, whether that is the United States, whether it's European allies, especially any future confrontation, should it ever appear, with Russia. So how much of your work with your troops and your training work with your troops is focused on the idea of the British military kind of operating on its own versus being part of a much larger multinational coalition in its operations?

Brig. Cartwright: Yeah, Evan, that's really easy. You know, NATO is the cornerstone of our national security because we're part of a defensive alliance in Europe. And we envisage ourselves, you know, always fighting with partners. You know, it's a truism in life that you never want to fight alone if you can avoid it. And, you know, we're part of a very sort of cohesive continent and we're part of a defensive military alliance that is NATO. And so we want to be part of a military coalition based around, if we are talking about Europe, then based around NATO members. And that might be part of the Joint Expeditionary Force, which is not strictly a part of NATO, but it's clearly mostly NATO nations, or whether it's actually fighting as part of NATO. We fight with our allies. And I think it was Winston Churchill who said, you know, the only thing worse than fighting with your allies is fighting on your own. And so we need to be always part of an alliance.

EM: So then, looking at the ways in which the British ground forces are looking to...

basically insert themselves into, again, whether it's frontline, whether it's rearline, whether it's these kind of larger grey zone frontline areas. Do you look at this in terms of, okay, so we'll be assigned territory, for example, that is hours we need to monitor, we need to operate on as a larger coalition dictates? Or is it, we need to cultivate specific capabilities that we can offer as part of a kind of dispersed presence across a wider front line to augment the larger coalition?

Brig. Cartwright: That's quite a complicated question. I think the answer is a bit of both, because, you know, the Army and the Navy and the Air Force, you know, we exist to offer our government choice. And so we want to be as useful as possible, and therefore, we need to have as much as greater utility as possible. So whether that is, as you describe, holding a piece of frontline or in defence, because bear in mind Europe was formed to defend the territory of the NATO nations in Europe, sorry, NATO was formed to defend the territory of European nations, then it may be that we are holding a piece of real estate forward.

Or it may be that we are used in a more dispersed fashion, as you describe. As the British Army, we have to be able to offer the government the choice of using us as forward land forces, which is what, you know, we've got elements of the British Army doing today, or using us in response to something, which is why we've got the Strategic Reserve Corps, potentially to restore the territorial integrity of a NATO nation. So we have to offer both options, Evan. We aren't, I don't think, designing ourselves as an army does one or the other. We want to offer maximum utility.

EM: This is obviously a very long list of adaptations that troops need to make. Can you speak to how the troops are rising to the occasion? Because we had spoken about this a bit at RHINO BIZZ, and you had expressed then that the troops on the front lines kind of learning and taking to these situations have done a very good job overall. Could you speak a little bit to kind of the points of either greater tension and or the need to take some more time to work out or the areas that they've done a really fantastic job adapting quickly to this new environment?

Brig. Cartwright: Yeah, and it's an opposite question because I sat here at the Army drone war. So I would say, I mean, I can only, well, I can talk about my brigade most easily, obviously, you know, I think our units have embraced the opportunity and the potential of uncrewed systems remarkably. You know, we have got, you know, drone subunits within our battle groups and our logisticians, our engineers, our medics, they're all doing incredible work in terms of how we can use uncrewed systems to make ourselves more survivable and more lethal. And ultimately, to simplify things, that's what we've got to be able to do. And so that's remarkable.

But look, there are challenges. And we have, the British Army has this regimental system. And that regimental system creates an identity around a role. And actually, as uncrewed systems come on, we are thinking about, well, do we need the same mix of infantry, engineers, artillery, logistics? Have we got that mix right in light of the changes in the character of war that's happening? And we have a regimental system that slightly locks in that myth, that mix. And so that's a really interesting and highly contentious subject that we need to have a really hard think about. So it's hard to re-role soldiers once they've got a, they're trained in a particular profession, they've joined a particular regiment or a particular corps. You can't just re-role. You can't say you were an infanteer, now you're an air defender. There's a training bill to that. There's an equipment bill to that.

So that's the bit that we're finding hard, is how do we restructure, re-equip and adapt our army fast enough for the changes that are happening on the battlefield in Ukraine, for example. But there is no lack of will, there's no lack of enthusiasm, and there's no lack of purpose in that it is crystal clear why we need to adapt, because we need an army that is increasingly lethal and increasingly survivable if we're to be sort of competitive on the contemporary battlefield. And you know, no army ever arrives in the perfect place. You should always be improving. You can always be better. And that's the journey we're on as the British Army and indeed as a 6th narrow assault brigade.

EM: Thank you very much. And one final question, because I know we're running up on time. This obviously is such a huge adaptation and shift to make in your role as a commanding officer. I have to imagine there must be a lot of divergence between the lessons that you were taught as you were coming up and kind of the lessons that you're adapting to now as we see warfare shift. So, across everything we've discussed today, across autonomy, across the use of uncrewed systems, across this transition to a persistently sensed battlefield, what do you wish you had either known sooner or been able to implement sooner, or technology you had had sooner? What do you wish you had had sooner, to make the right changes to be ready for a moment like this.

Brig. Cartwright: Yeah, it's a great question, Evan. And the answer is actually really obvious to me. You might expect me to say, oh, I need more drones. Actually, what I need is a really robust and resilient digital network, because the way we want to fight is all about shifting data really fast around the battlefield so you can identify a target.

prioritise it, and then affect it as fast as possible. That requires a really robust network. And by network, I mean, obviously, the sort of physical hardware, the radios, the server stacks, all that sort of stuff. But also, you know, the data layer, the transport layer, the application layer, all these other elements of a network that mean you can move information and make decisions and then create effects really, really fast. So if I could ask for one thing, I would ask for a, I say, resilient, robust, incredibly kind of data rich, huge capacity network that we can fight from. That's what I really need. And we're in the process of developing that, but it's not easy.

EM: Brigadier General Cartwright, thank you very, very much for your time and for being with us at Fronts.co. Thank you.

Brig. Cartwright: Evan, it's a pleasure. Good to talk.

Listen to the full Fronts interview with Brig. Cartwright, here.