Speeches by Martin.

“Permanent secretary, will you answer the same question?”

“To give you an example, I may be slightly out of date, but at one point last year, my understanding was that the brigade pencilled against Estonia was 4 Brigade. You will remember that pre the accession of Finland and Sweden, we offered security guarantees to those two countries. In the interim between them saying they…”

“Provided that those promises are not all called in at the same time.”

“Air Marshal, as you would expect we have a number of commitments all over the world. Some of those will be physical commitments, such as in Estonia where we have troops, and some of them will be promises for further troops. To use Estonia as an example, we promised a follow-up of the rest of 4 Brigade to reinforce that…”

“The accountability would go from you to the director of Defence Digital to the project lead—one, two, three—and then the portfolio approach, which might bring together a whole bunch of stuff, sits at your level, which is the interface.”

“So that portfolio approach is held at your level?”

“I have a final point on organisational design. Incentives are important. Organisational design basically aligns personnel and teams’ incentives towards outputs. With the portfolio approach you are talking about, we could have a digital bucket and so on—perhaps in your answer you could give us some examples. Are you the…”

“Many of these programmes were started a long time ago. To what degree are we locked into stuff that means that we cannot open up the architecture, for instance, and get these different elements to work together better, inhibiting that systemic thinking you are extolling?”

“That is very MoD, because you only get four cups of coffee in those carriers, rather than five.”

“To pick up an earlier theme around simplicity—I like the phrase system of systems, as that is exactly what it is—many of these projects started out at different times. In the old way of working, the specification would be set, there would be something bolted on, and so on and so forth, so we ended up with a bit of a me…”

“My hon. Friend is making a powerful case for his constituents. Does he agree that this is a problem not just for the Isles of Scilly, but for the Isle of Wight and the Western Isles? We are an archipelago. Those who live on the outer islands suffer from this inequity; they are as British as us, but they do not enjoy th…”

“One of the significant linchpins of the SDR was this idea of a digital backbone. That integrates our whole force from reconnaissance surveillance and all the other sensors to effectors, shooters and all the rest of it. It is fair to say that, without that backbone, the individual elements of the force do not work. Ther…”

“Thank you. That is actually very clear.”

“A heavy battlegroup?”

“I will take that as a no. How about a heavy brigade?”

“I just want to pick up on Derek Twigg’s point about NATO capability targets. Air Marshal, could we deploy a heavy division to Europe if the need arose?”

“Yes, it is about co-ordination.”

“Yes or no?”

“Contrary to what some less well-informed voices from the Conservative Benches have been saying, short of putting ground troops into Iran, there is no military solution that enables us to open the strait of Hormuz. The Iranians are effectively placing civilian shipping at risk with missiles, drones, subs and fast boats;…”

“TEK Military Seating in Tunbridge Wells designs and exports military seating. It risks losing a £400,000 order to a customer in the United Arab Emirates because it lacks the permissions in the export licence, and my understanding is that the Department for Business and Trade is waiting for an answer from the MOD. Will …”