King, country, and a sword called Arondite

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Anglofuturism – “King, Country, and a Sword Called Arondite”

Date: July 14, 2026
Hosts: Callum Drysdale, Clemeau
Guest: Will Blythe (Founder, Arondite)
Notable contributors: Seb Fenton (Arondite)
Theme: The transformation and future of British defense, with a focus on technological innovation, sovereign capability, and the challenges of modern warfare.

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the current and future state of Britain's defense capabilities, as seen through the lens of technological modernization and the challenges posed by shifting global alliances. The discussion centers on "Cobalt," Arondite’s new command-and-control (C2) platform designed to integrate both traditional and emerging battlefield technologies (like drones, sensors, and AI). Will Blythe shares insights from his military experience and recent work with UK defense, unpacking how software, industrial capacity, and strategic autonomy will shape the UK's ability to defend itself and its allies in an increasingly uncertain world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Arondite and the Challenge of Modern Warfare

• Tech Demo: The hosts and Seb Fenton run through a live demonstration of “Cobalt,” a digital battlefield management tool, observing mock “Danovian” (NATO-standard adversary) forces in the Brecon Beacons (01:44–04:03).
• Modern C2 Needs: Traditional British Army C2 is described as a "civil server shit show," reliant on spreadsheets and manual data entry; Cobalt seeks to revolutionize by integrating real-time feeds and automating data triage (01:53–05:26).
• Quote:

  “The key challenge here is one of scale and one of speed. There’s far more going on the modern battle space than there was in the past and things are moving far more quickly.”
  — Will Blythe (04:48)

2. The Battlefield: Humans, Drones, and Data

• Integration Challenges: The future battlefield is heterogeneous: humans, autonomous drones, sensors, and legacy systems—all moving at “machine speed.” Cobalt aims to orchestrate all these assets for optimal decision-making (04:48–11:10).
• Communications on the Ground: For front-line troops, information delivery balances smartphone-based apps (like Atak) with low-data radio comms; getting the right data to the right people, given contested (jammed) environments, is key (07:15–09:09; 30:47–32:23).
• Real-World Testing & Building with Users: Co-building with the military—iterative development and feedback-loop with demanding units like the 16 Air Assault Brigade—proves essential for relevance and success (33:15–35:49).
• Quote:

  “You can expect something like 40% of your assumptions to be wrong and you’ve got to go there and interview them and work alongside them.”
  — Will Blythe (33:20)

3. Lessons from Afghanistan & Historical Lag in Procurement

• Fragmented Tech in the Field: During Blythe’s Afghanistan deployment (2009), lack of communication between patrol bases and tech limitations led to dangerous “fog of war” situations; contemporary defense is only now catching up with available technology (11:10–14:30).
• Quote:

  “The idea that you would have some kind of like common data fabric and be pushing sensor data around would be literally laughable, I think, in 2009.”
  — Will Blythe (12:59)

4. Strategic Autonomy & the US-UK Relationship

• Changing Alliances: The UK’s reliance on the US as a fallback is under strain; rapid recalibration is needed on what should be sourced from allies and what requires sovereign capability (16:21–18:13).
• Resilience Amid Change: Blythe is optimistic about continued US-UK partnership, but acknowledges “things can never be the same again” in terms of unquestioned trust and support (16:28).
• Quote:

  “...It is now forever possible for behavior like this to manifest. And I think that does mean you’ve got to take a good Sober look at what should be...built domestically.”
  — Will Blythe (18:13)

5. Why Command & Control Software Matters

• Modern Warfare Trends: As the US pivots to the Pacific and reduces its European footprint, European nations must "step up" and integrate their own battlefield tech; decision-making "at machine speed" with distributed, diverse assets becomes paramount (18:44–23:46).
• Plug-and-Play Architecture: Modular C2 software allows rapid integration of the “best in market” equipment—key against fast-evolving drone and sensor technologies (24:22–25:38).
• Quote:

  “The challenge is, how do you have an infrastructure in place—a software infrastructure—that enables you to really quickly take whatever’s the best thing in the market...and plug it in?”
  — Will Blythe (24:22)

6. Procurement Realities & Interoperability

• British Defence Procurement: While notorious for inefficiencies (Ajax, Eurofighter), software acquisition is improving with greater focus on interoperability—“recce-strike complex” and integrated decision-making platforms (26:02–28:35).
• Interoperability Over Perfection: Emphasis on technical standards, flexible procurement, and empowering front-line buyers with some central guardrails—not legislative reform, but cultural and architectural (39:14–43:09).
• Notable Moment:

  “I think the critical change is...from a mechanistic war machine...to nurturing an ecosystem...”
  — Will Blythe (44:07–45:27)

7. Industrial Capacity & the Drone Revolution

• Drones as Ammunition: UK is ill-prepared for the demands of mass drone production (seen as “expendable” munitions, not high-cost persistent assets). The “artillery crisis” analogy signals looming risk if Britain fails to address the new industrial reality (37:02–39:09).
• Quote:

  “Drone production is one of [the critical needs]. The problem is that we’ve moved from them being...counter terrorist tools...whereas now...they need to be seen really much closer ammunition than they are to anything else.”
  — Will Blythe (37:02)

8. Ukraine as a Laboratory for Battlefield Innovation

• Field Innovation: Ukraine’s “marketplace” model empowers units to buy and trial drones rapidly, with performance-based supply. Lessons for UK: balance agile local innovation with the need for large-scale maneuver and coordinated operations (46:50–48:38).

9. Britain’s Strategic Future & Values

• Adversaries & Defense Posture: Modern threats (Iran, Russia) have long-range power projection, undermining the old “distance equals safety” logic. UK must bolster both NATO ties and its sovereign capabilities, hedging against various long-term risks (48:54–53:17; 71:36–74:05).
• Multi-century Thinking: Defense must balance fast-cycle tech like AI with enduring needs for platforms and planning that may span decades (53:22–54:55).
• Quote:

  “You have this dual mindset of trying to move incredibly quickly but also trying to make sure you’re contributing to major programs that still are going to need to be in place for the long term.”
  — Will Blythe (54:55)

10. Values, Sacrifice, and Patriotism

• War and Sacrifice: The UK must be ready for high-casualty conflict; national conversation about sacrifice and resilience is overdue—casualty aversion from Afghanistan may not be sustainable in peer conflict (65:56–69:24).

• Quote:

  “It’s really important that we start a national conversation really right now about what we’re willing to sacrifice to protect our way of life.”
  — Will Blythe (68:24)

• Patriotic Inspiration: The company name “Arondite” draws on Arthurian legend—signaling higher ideals, shared purpose, and a distinctly British approach to defense innovation (62:52–63:02).

• Quote:

  “Camelot represents something...it embodies ideals...it’s really important that people remember that they’re striving for something that really matters and that there’s a higher purpose to it all.”
  — Will Blythe (63:02)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Imagine government software with dark mode.”
  — Clemeau, on the Cobalt interface (03:13)

• “You do need an upgrade on your system.”
  — Will Blythe, on the hosts' podcast space station defense (01:44)

• “If it was easy, everyone would get it right straight away.”
  — Will Blythe, on the complexity of defense procurement and innovation (45:30)

• “I’m long on plucky chaps as well.”
  — Will Blythe, on the continued human element in future war (21:37)

• “Of all the societies that have ever existed, [Britain is] up there, you know, it’s pretty good. And I think there’s a lot to be really proud of.”
  — Will Blythe, on constructive patriotism (59:47)

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• [01:44] – Arondite & Cobalt introduction, initial demonstration
• [04:48] – Rapid pace & scale on the digital battlefield
• [11:10] – Blythe's Afghanistan experience: the absence of tech and consequences
• [16:21–18:13] – Reassessment of US-UK defense relations
• [24:22] – Importance of plug-and-play architecture for drones & sensors
• [33:20] – Importance of co-building with front-line users
• [37:02] – Britain's mass drone production challenge
• [46:50] – Discussion of Ukrainian field innovation and its limits
• [53:22] – Long-term vs. short-term cycles in defense technology
• [63:02] – Arthurian inspiration and higher purpose
• [68:24] – National conversation on sacrifice and resilience
• [71:36] – Blythe’s vision for British defense in 50 years

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Conclusion: The Future of British Defense

Will Blythe envisions a defense posture that’s technologically agile, strategically autonomous, and underpinned by pragmatic patriotism. The conversation frames Britain not as nostalgic or isolationist, but as a nation engaging with the realities of new warfare: machine-speed decision-making, agile defense tech ecosystems, and the enduring necessity of sacrifice and ideals. As the world’s security order shifts and technologies race ahead, Britain’s challenge is to “muddle through in the very British way”—but with renewed confidence, industrial robustness, and digital innovation.

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For more on Anglofuturism and updates on British defense, visit anglofuturism.substack.com.

Transcript

[Will Blythe]

Who now has anything to say about the deindustrialization of this country?

[Clemeau]

Townhouses on the moon, the highest GDP

[Callum Drysdale]

per capita in the Milky Way.

[Clemeau]

Small modular reactors under every village green.

[Callum Drysdale]

This is Anglo Futurism. Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the King Charles III Space Station. I'm Callum Drysdale.

[Clemeau]

I'm Clemeau.

[Callum Drysdale]

And we are here in the King Charles III station. And suddenly, earlier this morning, we heard a knock on our door and our radar systems totally failed to detect anyone incoming. So we were surprised and we went to the door. And who should arrive but Will Blythe, founder of Aarondite, the defense company based in London that is revolutionizing C2, which is command and control for those listeners not in the know. And he walked in and he's got. He's. He's here both to update our. Our defense systems, which he describes as woeful, and also tell us some more about British sovereign defence capabilities and what the future is. So, Will, welcome to the show.

[Will Blythe]

A pleasure to be here. Thanks for letting me drop in. Sorry to surprise you like that earlier on. You do need an upgrade on your system.

[Clemeau]

Well, should we give some background on Will? Will, you were a major in the army. You served in Afghanistan, you worked for Palantir, for Helsing, and now you founded this company. So the connective tissue between the drones that the British army is using between the other bits of kit, and as I understand it, it's currently organized via Excel spreadsheets and people are having to swivel their chairs between these screens and. And it's a kind of total civil server shit show. Until now. Until now. And we've just had a play with the software which the listeners are about to hear, and we're going to hear a bit more about how it works. Well, what are we looking at? We're looking at this satellite map of the Brecon beacons with blue icons for, I suppose, the good guys and red icons for. What's the code name for the Russians? Well.

[Will Blythe]

Well, NATO training doctrine has a standard enemy called the Danovians, who are.

[Callum Drysdale]

Nothing.

[Clemeau]

Sorry, nothing.

[Will Blythe]

Similarities one might observe with the Russians.

[Clemeau]

And just since the listeners can't see it, this looks like a very kind of slick digital version of those classic maps where a general will sort of shunt units around, but it's much more reactive. It looks almost like a computer game. Seb, can you add a unit to the battlefield on our behalf?

[Seb Fenton]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Clemeau]

So he's zooming in this really, really pretty podcast and it's in dark mode. As well. Imagine government software with dark mode.

[Seb Fenton]

It's the most important feature. So yeah, I've just added in the company there onto the map for you.

[Clemeau]

Can we add a bit more weaponry like a Javelin or something?

[Seb Fenton]

Absolutely. So I can add a view shed that shows you can have multiple viewsheds, but I can add one in showing kind of the range of a Javelin. That's the Javelin anti tank system, not a throne one.

[Clemeau]

And what are the nearest towns that we're looking at?

[Seb Fenton]

Well, this is in the Bracken Beacons. So the Danovians have invaded Wales and we're putting a mock defense up to stop them pushing further into the Bracken beacons.

[Clemeau]

Can we add some Denovian units as well to make this a bit more spicy?

[Seb Fenton]

Absolutely.

[Clemeau]

This is really spicing up this, this battlefield. And so the idea of Cobalt, as I understand it, is that we can be aware of every bit of kit we have. The battlefield, where all the units are.

[Seb Fenton]

Yeah, I mean, it really depends on the system being used by the customer. But I think the point to emphasize here is I'm putting them down manually on the map. But what you're going to be dealing with in reality is some blend of manual updates alongside pulling in sensor feeds and triaging them, alongside having your own trusted data sources where you're going to automatically be populating this. But it's never going to be the case that someone's just solely putting all the pins on the map like I am now. And it's also never going to be the case that everything magically automatically flows in because it's a common denied environment.

[Will Blythe]

And the key challenge here is one of scale and one of speed. So there's far more going on the modern battle space than there was in the past and things are moving far more quickly. And you need to have some innovative approaches to kind of make sense of that in, in real time so you can take action before your enemy takes whatever action they were planning on taking next. And so in reality, you probably have hundreds or thousands of units and locations and sensor feeds and things going on, robotic systems alongside your humans. And the question is, how do you orchestrate all that in one place at machine speed so you can keep pace and ideally keep ahead of the adversary.

[Clemeau]

It would be quite thrilling to take that big rocket out. Do you get a notification if you kind of get rid of the Muller or whatever it is?

[Will Blythe]

Well, we have a simulator that we actually have built in the background to help us test out exercise scenarios. So when we run those little simulated war games Internally, it's basically like a kind of force on force simulated game. But yeah, it's pretty good fun.

[Seb Fenton]

Yeah, we run, basically. We did something last week actually, where we had a few software engineers in the room next door, a few upstairs. They're running like a drone joint fire cell with someone who's got a military background, sort of queuing in all of the sighting reports. And then that's how we kind of test internally before we put stuff in front of customers, because it is quite a good way to get used to the system.

[Clemeau]

And who on the battlefield is going to be kind of in the seb seat using this software?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, I mean, it's like everyone, basically, from large major strategic headquarters. That could be the kind of thing that for the uk, they have a lot of them in, like Northwood, North London, where you have the permanent joint headquarters, maritime operations center, you have those sorts of places. So this is software that's designed for those users all the way down to what the defence would call like sort of sub unit and even lower, like platoon and squad level. But anywhere where they can be sort of momentarily static is the current place where we're kind of. We're currently aiming for. So we're not aiming for plate for users who are, you know, mid firefight in a trench, you know, with just a smartphone. There's something else called Atak, which is around, which kind of serves those users quite really well. So we integrate with that, but everything kind of in between and all the different types of people you've got doing all the different jobs in those headquarters,

[Clemeau]

and if I'm some squaddie in a ditch, like, how is this information being communicated to me?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, so increasingly you may actually have Atak, which is. So think about, Think Android ruggedized Android phone with another, more simple version of a map. And we can push to that the information that that particular squad or platoon needs to be able to operate. And typically it's, hey, where are my friendly forces around me? Where's the enemy? And what alerts do I need to be pushed about? Things that have just been sighted that might be able to affect me. So we can push to those sorts of forces. But then for forces that don't have those, often a lot of these updates come over, come over radio systems. So the question is, how do we push out using the minimum necessary data over these radio systems, just the information they need to be able to operate and survive and win their local flight.

[Clemeau]

And obviously it's not just about the squadrons in the hulls. You guys are kind of helping drones interface with the decision makers. I wonder what else we can add. What other equipment can we add to this map that we're looking at? I even saw a sort of space drop down menu.

[Seb Fenton]

Yeah. Actually, as a complete aside, the mapping software we use does very good 3D visualizations. And so you can actually visualize how satellite orbits in interact with all of this and where the moon is at any point in time. It's a quite cool feature. No, I mean.

[Clemeau]

I mean, you can perhaps see our podcast studio on your map.

[Seb Fenton]

Exactly. King Charles III space station.

[Will Blythe]

We've been monitoring you all.

[Clemeau]

Are we within range exactly?

[Seb Fenton]

Well, I mean, fundamentally, you can model Cobalt's design, so you can model any particular piece of equipment and add it to the map and build richer tooling on top of it over time. Because depending on the equipment you add, you care about different things. If you want to add a logistics truck, you care about how quickly it can move over a certain distance.

[Clemeau]

Is it within range of.

[Seb Fenton]

Exactly, yeah. And do terrain analysis and see what paths it can move over.

[Clemeau]

And something's going to be moving quite quickly. If it's some drone or I suppose like a missile wouldn't show up, but a drone would. Like a missile, it just kind of appears on the map and your thing is exploded.

[Seb Fenton]

Well, it all depends about what data you are able to pull into the system. So if we're plugged into a radar that can detect missiles. Absolutely.

[Clemeau]

But it's faster than like a human can perceive. So I suppose it depends how far you've zoomed out, because it's, what, 20 minutes for something to get from. Sorry, not from Russia, from Danovia.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, it depends on the range. So it would depend on the range of the missile system, the time of flight, and then what decision you're trying to drive. So the idea isn't, with all these systems, there's a bit of a risk that you just try and throw everything you possibly can into the system. But the question is, what decisions are you actually trying to drive? So what decisions do it, does the defense user actually need to make? And then you hydrate that decision with data. You bring data to that decision maker and you give them the context and the data they need to make it. So for a missile defense system, for instance, hypersonic missile defense, the times of flight, they can actually be quite big, quite large, quite long, even though the system is moving so fast, because they might be traveling many hundreds of miles or thousands of miles. And so there will be an opportunity, although fleeting, for a human to decide exactly how they want to try and run that intercept. So the challenge we're solving here at Arondyte is exactly the one you describe. So defence has really uneven capabilities in this area and increasingly, though, they do have lots of things like drones and ground robots and sensors. And the challenge is that they can't really get very much done except by getting these different systems all built by different manufacturers to. No one sort of anticipated that they'd be being used together. And the challenge is, how do you get them to be used collaboratively in really tightly knitted workflows, when you've also got humans moving around the battle space doing what they've been doing for hundreds of years? So that's the challenge we're solving. And as you say, some of the current ways of doing it just don't keep pace with the modern battlefield.

[Clemeau]

I mean, I get the sense from your public comments about this that you could really have done with some of this software when you were in Afghanistan. So I wonder where you can kind of paint us a picture of what was going on there, what your experience was like and how the army was communicating this stuff.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, of course. So I, yeah, as you said, did 12 years in the military and I think one of the things that people perhaps don't understand if they haven't been around the military too much is that certainly as an officer you end up bouncing between lots of different jobs. And in that time I maybe did seven or eight different roles. But my first tour of Afghanistan in 2009 as an infantry platoon commander in the Rifles, was basically, we were in an isolated patrol base away from friendly forces, and if we walked out of the patrol base for more than a couple of hundred meters, generally we'd get into a bit of a scrap with the Taliban who were sitting and watching and waiting for us. And at that time, in the infinite wisdom of the military and the strategic lay down, they had is you had this network of patrol bases and they were maybe, you know, one or two or three kilometres in between the bases. And you often, despite having these incredibly short distances, I mean, you can imagine, like how close we're in Farringdon now in London, like, how close.

[Clemeau]

Sorry,

[Will Blythe]

what I mean is, this morning before I came up to the space station, I trust you with the official secret site. I was in our office in Farrington in London. And, you know, a kilometre is not very far away, obviously, but it's difficult, it's difficult. I think if you haven't been in these situations, to conceive of not knowing or not being able to know what someone is doing over there and just not having absolutely no way of talking to them whatsoever.

[Clemeau]

Even if they're on your side.

[Will Blythe]

Even if they're on your side. And at the time all you had was some VHF radios, very high frequency radios, and you'd be talking over a company network of these radios. And if the next patrol base was on a different radio net, you really never spoke to them ever. And you really had. No, certainly I had no idea what was going on about a mile away from me at all. And the idea that you would have some kind of like common data fabric and be pushing sensor data around would be literally laughable, I think, in 2009.

[Callum Drysdale]

And that wasn't because of the Taliban's excellent electronic warfare capabilities, was it? That was just like decisions in procurement that meant that these things were just not possible.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, I mean, I think part of it, it's 2026 as we record. Clearly a lot has changed right, since 2009 in terms of what's available and technologically. But yeah, even at the time there were far better technologies that would have been available. And one of the big things that my co founder and I wanted to sort of attack as we set up the company was that, you know, we both had experience of the military and had experience of things being out there, available in the commercial world that are definitely things that could be made available to soldiers. And for some reason there's just this five or ten year lag where defence takes ages trying to get things brought in. So, you know, it's a critical thing that we experienced firsthand. And yet in 2009, absolutely, there was nothing like this at all.

[Clemeau]

Presumably the Americans have some. Do they have some kind of software like this that we could use today?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, well, I think one of the really like, one of the great things I think about UK defence over the last five or ten years is they've become much better at buying and thinking about software. And there's a lot of complaining about procurement in defence. My sort of optimistic view on this actually, is that it's got a lot better, particularly around these sorts of technologies. So there have been advances. The US tends to be a little bit ahead of us, certainly. And I think one of the challenges we have in the UK is as we build our stack of technology in this area, as this whole world becomes more important of how do you achieve human machine teaming on the battlefield and do that at scale and at speed, is being really mindful of what we can go and should be going and getting from trusted allies who we think are definitely going to be there for us when the moment comes. And what you need to make sure you've got assured sovereign access to. And so one of the reasons that we wanted to found the company was with an eye on where things might go over the next few decades.

[Clemeau]

Well, I mean, that begs the question, doesn't it? You kind of got an impish grin on your face, perhaps because the strategic situation looks a bit precarious. Perhaps. We had Ben Judah on the podcast saying that the main problem for Britain's foreign policy is that the US Is no longer reliable. It won't necessarily always back as it has its own interests. And crucially, those interests seem to change with every administration. So one minute they're telling us to do this deal with the Mauritians over Chagos, the next is telling us to pull it, which is disastrous.

[Will Blythe]

Well, I mean, Chagos is a particularly thorny and sort of infinitely complicated issue,

[Callum Drysdale]

but it's a good case study.

[Will Blythe]

But yeah, it is an interesting case study. The character of the relationship you describe and is one I recognize. I think the UK has built so much of its national security apparatus around one grand assumption post war, which is that when it comes to the day of the race, whenever that might be, the United States would be there for us and will have our back and that we can build incredibly important capabilities on that assumption that they're going to be there. And I think one of the difficulties that we're wrestling with in the UK at the moment is a fairly rapid recalibration of just how deep and extensive that trust can be and understanding. And we've got this window now with this current administration, onto the ways in which the US can become a less reliable partner. Now, I'm really, I'm still really long on the United States. You know, I think people, people who bet against the United States over the, over the decades, you know, tend to, tend to regret some of these bets. And I think the uk, the US Is going to be there for us and for Europe for a long time to come. But, but clearly there's a different character to it right now. And I think the fact that that new character which, which is, which you can see at the moment as having emerged, you know, the fact that that has been brought, that has happened, means that we are, you know, things can never be the same again, in my view. And I think it is now forever possible for behavior like this to manifest. And I think that does mean you've got to take a good Sober look at what should be, you know, what you should draw from the US and what should be. What should be built domestically.

[Callum Drysdale]

I mean, should. You know, obviously that is a sort of argument for increased sovereign capability, and we sort of touched on it, but I think it'd be good to expand more. Like you, you've. The thing you've chosen to focus on, you know, you could have. You could have gone and built missiles, you could have gone and built, you know, drones or tanks. But the thing you chose to do was this, what, like C2 command and control software, like, why is it so important? What does it allow? That previously was so difficult.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah. So the big trends here that we're responding to are there's two big, grand things, I think, going on. So one is the thing we've just described really, it's really linked to that. There's what's going on at the international sphere and what is the UK's place in the world. I know you both think about all this all the time, but I think the challenge here is for the UK is you've got the us, which is, you know, part of what's happening with the us UK relationship is happening because of the current administration, and part of it's just a continuation of what they've been signaling for a long time, which is that they're saying, look, we cannot dominate the Middle East, Europe, the European theater, and the Western Pacific theater in the Pacific with the same assuredness going forward. And. And we need Europe to step up very much more significantly to dominate your region, please. And that's been the message from multiple administrations, and they spoke openly, the Obama administration, about pivoting to the Pacific to try and ram the message home. And I think, to be fair on the Americans, I think the message didn't get rammed home until the Trump administration. And now there's absolutely no doubt that message has been. The message has been well and truly received. So part of it's that, like, UK place in the world, and. And then the other half of that is, okay. The context there in the wider international system is it's becoming less stable, so obviously over time. And the Iran war is going on, who knows how that will play out? But every sign is that things will continue to degrade, I think, in terms of global stability over the coming couple of decades, unfortunately. And so that's that landscape, and that's sort of colliding with what's going on in the technology world and how that's affecting the battlefield. And so on the battlefield, you have this kind of old paradigm of crude systems, of manned systems, things like tanks and fighter jets and ships with people in them. These things are going to be around for a long time. But it's obviously the case, as anyone who spends any time looking at videos from modern battlefields will see, is the kind of, as the military would say, that the con ops, the concept of operations basically just means sort of the tasks that these things can do. No matter which one you're looking at and playing out, these systems are being more vulnerable and they're capable of less because of that vulnerability. And so it's increasingly the case that you just can't get much done unless you're teaming those systems, which are still going to be around for a long time to come with uncrewed unmanned systems. And they tend to be disparate, they're scattered across the battle space and they're becoming increasingly specialized. So you'll have one that's able to do a particular type of sensing and that will collaborate with two other drones or two other robots that might be specialized in two other different types of sensing. So you might have one that's for electronic warfare or signals intelligence that might cross cue to something that goes and looks at something with a thermal camera. And then you might have another one altogether that has some kind of multispectral thing or some kind of electro optical camera. So that would have previously been done by an old fashioned reconnaissance patrol of six sort of plucky infantry soldiers with a pair of binoculars. That would have been how you would have done that task. And now you need to orchestrate three robots that were built by three different companies. And then you need to decide how you're going to go and strike something on the battle space. And previously that would have been done by that infantry patrol getting on the radio and saying, hey, I can see this enemy commander control node. I can see the enemy colonel sipping his morning coffee. It's the perfect time to strike. And they'd call in an artillery barrage or something like that. And now that's rarely the case. There's still artillery on the battlefield, of course, but increasingly you'll have big blow for plucky chaps. Well, no, I'm long on plucky chaps as well. But now the striking of these targets is often through one way effectors and loitering munitions and these sorts of things or which are themselves a form of robot and needs a targeting data sent to them. So that is the sort of character of where the battle space is going. And that's happening on Land, in the air and at sea. And you just have to have different systems to cope with that. And I think really what this is has been, it's really started in the 80s and the 90s where you had, in those days, in the first Gulf War, you had things like the Predator drone was doing its first. It became prominent as a thing that was flying around and you've had increasing numbers of sensors and drones proliferating. And what you then saw during the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan is you've got all this information about the battle space at the headquarter level, not for poor me, my patrol base, but at the headquarter level you've got lots of this information. But what you don't have is any kind of innovation in the ability to process, make sense of that information and quickly take the right decision. And so that's the way of innovation you're seeing now. And that's the wave of innovation we're leading at.

[Callum Drysdale]

Aaron Dyke and I mean, obviously you started this. The Ukraine war was kind of moving on, it was happening. And obviously that has been the big sort of red flag or the signal of how, what warfare is going to look like. I read something the other day about how Ukrainian drone companies were sort of struggling, sometimes selling their drones to Western armies because they get the drone and they can't, they don't have all that backend like coordination technology that the Ukrainians have built up. Which means you've got 10,000 drones but you don't know where to send them.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, exactly. No, I think the future we see, and you can see this playing out in the British military at the moment and the European militaries is that you have this increasingly complicated blend of robots and drones and systems. But then there's lots of churn in that blend because of the innovation that's going on. And so the drone that you, the specialized drone you bought to do some electronic warfare with, to go and do what's called RF sniffing and looking for enemy radio communication emissions, probably the one you bought six months ago for that job, in another six months when you find yourself deployed, that's not the right answer for that particular specialist role anymore. There'll be four other new options on the market for that particular task. And so the challenge is, how do you have an infrastructure in place, a software infrastructure in place that enables you to really quickly take whatever's the best thing in the market that is in that particular segment, that and quickly integrate it and plug it in so that it can then be used collaboratively with everything else. And so that drives the logic behind starting with the architecture, starting with the software and making sure that whatever systems are going to be available, you can go and plug in. Because as you say, if you just buy the systems and you haven't thought about the infrastructure and the architecture, you're unlikely to drive quicker decisions and you're still going to have bloated headquarters with lots of people in them.

[Callum Drysdale]

And what's your experience been working with the British government and the army. Right. Because surely, you know, examples like the Ajax, the Eurofighter, like these are sort of procurement hells that drag on for years and years and years that seem pretty opposite to that ability to within six months have a new capability online.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, I'm really sympathetic to the challenge that events have. So first of all, I think it's, I think this is true of, you know, when, you know, when examining any area of public policy or any performance of any government department is, you should. It's important to not analyze the UK in isolation. You've really got to compare us with our peers across the world. You've got to take a look at similar approaches throughout history. I think that most of the challenges the UK government has on military procurement are similar to, similar to peer nations. And the challenges like it's really difficult because you're basically, you've got these capital intensive projects, these massive projects. The only, I think probably the only similarly sized and similarly complicated programs you've got going on in government are probably very large scale transport infrastructure projects like HS2 or Crossrail.

[Callum Drysdale]

And you'll have an unfortunate comparison.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, but you'll have, but this is, but they're incredibly difficult obviously planning law in the UK nightmare and all the rest. But like, but. So that's hard enough. But imagine if you had an active adversary trying to screw your ability to deliver a.

[Callum Drysdale]

We do. They're called NIMBYs.

[Will Blythe]

Well, perhaps.

[Callum Drysdale]

Have you got a drone for them?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, but the NIMBYs aren't yet sort of bombing the construction sites or coming up with their own sort of competing infrastructure that renders the decision you made a month before now irrelevant because there's been a qualitative change in the competition. So there's this adversarial nature plus major capital program. And the adversarial nature is inherently unpredictable. You don't know that Russia is going to develop a new type of armor mid program which now means that your choice of turret on the tank you're going to buy and put on the Ajax. This hasn't actually happened for Ajax. It's one of the few things that hasn't gone wrong with Ajax, but that renders that decision now one you couldn't in good faith continue with. And so I'm really sympathetic. That said, there have been a lot of mistakes and that is obviously the case. And then on digital procurement software, they're getting actually a lot better. And I think over the last 10 years it's now much quicker to bring in new software. They're much smarter about what they want and they're much more careful about saying, hey, move fast, get this software into this organization over here. But just make sure you can pass data between the software platform and the software platform in the following ways. So you've got interoperability, which is the way to go. In the British military at the moment, they talk about this as the, as like the recce strike complex, the reconnaissance strike complex.

[Clemeau]

Let me guess, we'll pay loads for a drone, but then we'll try and like fix it via. We'll try and operate it via Excel or something.

[Will Blythe]

No, so it's this, this is their attempt to get this right now, which is to say it's less about any individual program or any individual hardware capability and it's more about the emergent ability of a military force to understand what's happening on the battle space, to out sense your enemy, which basically means like knowing more about the battlefield than they know about the battlefield, including about them, and then being able to quickly analyze, to understand points of vulnerability. So an example might be that you can really quickly identify that they've maybe started to set up a new logistics node at a certain point and then you can pre position assets so that when that gets to a critical mass of maybe ammunition storage, you can quickly strike that thing. That's much, much better than just sort of blindly or not blindly, but sensing the battle space, seeing things and just sort of opportunistically whacking them. And this leads to a kind of like whack a mole around the battlefield where you're just sort of seeing something and trying to strike it. And what you really need is the ability to have this coherent decision architecture, which is basically what fundamentally Cobalt's about delivering, which enables you to understand what's happening, not just see stuff, but really understand what the enemy is trying to do and then, and then basically screw their ability to do whatever it is they're trying to do.

[Callum Drysdale]

I think I'm quite interested by, because you say there about the whack a mole that you're actually seeing a lot more than what you historically could have been. But I think that the thing that Seb really outlined out, laid out there for us, was that actually often you don't have a lot of data, that there's a real, there's a real sort of contrast or difficulty that you might have a satellite image, but you can't actually get it to the person who needs that bit of information without. Well, I mean, previously it would have been even just on a mobile phone. Can you maybe go into how that is changing warfare, that you simultaneously have access to more sensing than ever, but the ability to block it or defeat it is also better than ever.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, exactly. So it's a really. Both these developments are happening in parallel as you described. So exactly as you say, more data because you've got more things moving around the battlefield, sensing the battlefield, but at the same time more jamming and electronic warfare and harder to move the data around. And this means that you need to take a really careful approach on what data you're choosing to move when. And the right way to think about this is what decisions do I need to drive? So there's a lot of data available which people just don't need to have, given the particular problems they're solving. But then there's also a lot of context that it actually would be great to serve them up because it's plausible that they might encounter a decision for which that context is useful. So this is not a simple problem to solve. Now you can do a lot at the software level and we're taking. There's a lot of engineering choices we've taken in building into Cobalt that are that help you to prioritize data that you're moving around the battle space, help you to deal with your radio network being jammed for 30 seconds, then coming up for five seconds and going away for 30 seconds. And what packets do you choose to squeeze through in that five second period? Well, you need to have a whole bunch of stuff on the technical side done so that you can, with confidence, make sure the right data goes out to the right people. But it's not a simple challenge and it requires a whole bunch of stuff at the technical level and a whole bunch of stuff at the human level of us working really closely with the military to understand what decisions they're trying to make. Just announced the work we've been doing with 16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team.

[Clemeau]

The tip of the army spit.

[Will Blythe]

Exactly, exactly. They are, yeah. So they're a great example of this stuff. So they are the UK's Global Response Force and they will be, you know, straight into the action whenever, whenever that time comes. And yeah, we embed really, really closely with them. We have people on, you know, on their camps, on their military camps and on exercises and on deployments with them all the time. And you know, if and when the time comes for them to go on more serious major combat operations, then we sending Seb Fenton. Well, perhaps not Seb, but we have. Yeah. And we don't talk about like exactly how we would support them in that context, but we'll be, we'll, we'll be supporting Endeavor and them in that context in a way that I think previous defense technology companies wouldn't have done.

[Clemeau]

Well, I'd love to know the kind of specific things they ask for. Yeah, when they, when they're demoing your software.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, I mean you get, you get fantastic feedback. Like, you know, so I was in the military for quite, quite a while and my intuitions about what they need are all continually wrong. So I'm right maybe 60% of the time. First of all, it's really important to be there and to ask the question and to get the feedback from them and not to just to build the software in an ivory tower and deploy it out and expect them to be totally okay with it. You can expect something like 40% of your assumptions to be wrong and you've got to go there and interview them and work alongside them. And we definitely view building this company really as something that we're kind of, we're really co building the company alongside the Defence customers and that we're co building the product, we're co building everything. And it's a project that you've got to do with continual conversations and close embedding with them. Otherwise the product's just going to go in the wrong direction.

[Clemeau]

Was going to the most demanding customer first a deliberate strategy?

[Will Blythe]

Well, they're not the first customer actually. They're the first one we've been able to talk about quite so openly.

[Clemeau]

Who can't you talk about?

[Will Blythe]

Well, one of this is, one of the challenges of working with defense is that, you know, we're trying to, you know, we want to attract the best talent to the company. We want to make sure we've got the capital in the company to grow, to grow it into something the UK can be proud of. And of course Defence is rightfully concerned with controlling the communications around what you're talking about when you, when you're talking about which parts of the defence you're working with. But no, they are incredibly demanding. They take their role really seriously and they take it seriously because most of them have experience of having been crashed out on one thing or another. They've done some in the very recent past, some non combatant evacuation operations in Kabul, not that long ago in Sudan. And over the years it's, it's generally every few years, there's some, some important short notice crisis task coming their way and so that, you know, for them it's real and it's a thing that happens every, you know, every so often and when at the opening phases of the next major war, you know, they'll be, they'll be out there like for sure in the mangle, you know, helping to, to, to defend presumably against, against a major adversary trying to, trying to attack and trying to seize terrain. So they're the best possible partner for us and give us incredibly good signal and really strong opinions on what they need us to be and to build.

[Callum Drysdale]

I mean, maybe then the suppliers one, like if you're working with drone companies, to what extent do we have enough the capabilities and minerals and things. Well, I say this obviously, understanding that you are a software company, but I think it's still an interesting question as the most military man that we've had on our, on our, on our military

[Clemeau]

man in the room.

[Callum Drysdale]

Yeah, us to effete metrosexuals. Although I was in the CCF in the RAF for a year.

[Clemeau]

Great respect is swelling and.

[Callum Drysdale]

Exactly. Well, I then switched to doing poetry every single week. So, you know, warriors can be poets too. Anyway, but the question I suppose is, is one of sort of with these. If the future is drones and the future is like the multiple heterogeneous, but importantly like quantity being its own form of quality, how is Britain set up for that? Like, do we have the capabilities to provide drones and respond to be, as you said, like every month putting out a new device that could be like replacing or improving capabilities.

[Will Blythe]

No, we don't, we don't have those capabilities in the way we should. I think the salutary lesson from history, I think is the artillery crisis in the First World War, you know, and I think they had a similar moment where artillery was becoming increasingly important to the way the battlefield was running and you were going through vast quantities of shells and they really struggled to ramp up artillery production in a way to feed that war machine. And it was, you know, it was incredibly politically controversial at the time. All sorts of accusations flying around about incompetence and, you know, accusing the government of putting British security at risk because it hadn't anticipated the need for large scale production. This will happen again in the next major conflict if it happens in the next couple of years because of the UK's inability to take a strategic view of what the new kinds of major industrial capacity it needs to have in place are. And drone production is one of them. I mean, the problem with drones is we've moved from them being a lot of people who haven't been paying particularly close attention in the last few years to the battlefield, still kind of view them as these, you know, a counter terrorist tool that flies around at 20,000ft and looks down at some high value terrorist target in. And then someone in a dark room somewhere decides whether to fire a Hellfire at that individual to stop them doing an attack on the streets of London. Whatever it is, there's a counter terrorist kind of like framing to the thing, whereas now there are still drones that do that sort of thing, to be clear. But really what we're talking about when we're talking about mass production capacity is the expendable ones and they need to be seen really much closer ammunition than they are to anything else. So Alex Fitzgerald mentioned earlier doing great work trying to re industrialize the west in general, partly because he sees this as a critical problem that's coming down the tracks. But yeah, we're not there and it will be political dynamite, I think, in the next major conflict unless someone sorts it.

[Clemeau]

Well, how do we sort it? What's on your wish list of things that the MOD or the government should.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, well, I think so. I'm. So I've got two lenses, so one is my sort of general interest in US winning the next war and US building the right kind of country. And then there's, you know, from a software kind of lens, I think that, you know, the former first. It's clearly the case that Defence and Defense, the defence national security complex within the uk, needs to take a firm and opinionated strategic view on what production capacity does it need in these critical segments. So we have ammunition production capability and the challenge here is you need a production capability that works in peacetime when you're going through training, ammunition and this sort of stuff, but you're not firing that much, but you have to be able to ramp it up quickly in wartime. And so they thought about this and you can be reassured that the UK can produce good quantities of, for instance, 5.56mm ammunition and 7.62mm ammunition. You know, stuff you fire through rifles and machine guns. In the case of A major conflict, because they've put the thinking in and they've made sure we've got the capacity not to get us through the whole war, but to, like, you know, to ramp up in the opening few months and then to buy you time to think. So that thinking has not been done on any of these new capacities. I'm out of the. I'm not in the military anymore. I'm not in the loop on all the sort of secret conversations and things. But my strong hunch is it has not been done. I see no evidence of it having been done. And I think that's got to happen. So that's not a request from me. It doesn't affect Arundijk particularly, except that we want to be on the winning side next time. But they've got to take that incredibly seriously. And the window for action is now. And you would have thought a Labour government would be really interested in this in terms of building proper hard industrial capitol capacity. So I hope action is taken. If we wait to the next conflict and we wait for the crisis to trigger the sense of urgency, we'll regret it. And then in terms of software, I think what you need to do is you need to have a system of procurement that enables interoperability between software systems. So this is the nightmare for any CIO or CTO in any large organization is that you've got this really splintered, complicated landscape where you've got a team over here using this app, team over there using that app, that they can't pass data between them, doesn't sync, whatever. It happens all the time at large organizations. So you have CTOs, CIOs who are rightfully trying to organize and deal with this sort of cluttered software landscape. And then you have other people who are just trying to do stuff and they're just like, I have this local problem and I hear this app's going to help, so I'm going to go and buy this and speak to this company and get it. So defence is no different. It's exactly the same forces at play. And the challenge is making sure that those, I think, is making sure that the people at the lower levels can increasingly be empowered to buy software themselves because they are increasingly intelligent customers who know what they're looking for and know how to buy it, because they're just like grown up with software and are not. They're smart people. But make sure that you've got common technical interchange and common data exchange standards where to say, you can just understand, okay, no problem, buy this, but make sure. You ask the company that they can meet the following six data exchange standards, all protocols or whatever, messaging formats, whatever it is. So that's the kind of balance you want. It's not really about legislation, I don't think, and it's not really about changing any major procurement regulations at the policy level. Most of it's just like it's below that, actually. And it's well within the gift of defense. Defense to do quite quickly. And I think increasingly this is the direction they're going. So that means you can move really fast, get the right software in the right place, but then make sure it's not like you can't sink with the brigade next door, as it were.

[Callum Drysdale]

I'm interested. You say it's not a procurement problem because I think that's what a lot of people would assume that, oh, people are being slow. Aaron, our producer, has told us that we've got a question that. So Adam Tooze has argued that the great conflicts of the 20th century were about what he calls industrial metabolism. That is, states needed continuous flows of energy and calories to keep the war machine running. And that actually the Lebensraum is sort of more of an ability, it's a source of those things to keep everything going. I think what you've described there with the sort of integrating crisis and the sort of need for common data standards is that that is the real question, right? It's do you have the data and the compute rather than necessarily oil, and do you have the intelligence that can keep this stuff flowing?

[Will Blythe]

I think the critical change is one from a mechanistic war machine. You know, Adam Tooze is a great thinker in this area about how that system all fits together. And I think most of that is right. And that is still the case when you're dealing with metal. So that's still very much the case. The same forces are at play now, digital procurement. And obviously the changes that many of these metal things are becoming, the things that they can do, are increasingly defined by the software that's on them and the AI capabilities that are on them. Now, they might be in some way limited by their form factor and their inherent physical design, but they're also increasingly defined by the software capabilities. So people talk about software defined defense become a bit of a cliche, but it's sort of true. So as that becomes more operative and more important, the big change is noticing that procurement is less about these big sort of having seeing a sort of mechanistic metabolism operation going on and more about nurturing an Ecosystem where you are less able to sort of precisely conduct exactly what's being procured in a very minute, in a very minute detail. And more, you're someone who is caring

[Clemeau]

for

[Will Blythe]

a broader sort of garden of capability. And you're trying to give people at much lower levels clear principles by which they should go out and buy stuff and make sure that the thing they're buying will sync up with the thing the other person is buying. But just acknowledging that people are going to increasingly going to want to solve their problems by going and getting digital capabilities. And they can do that really quickly. And you need to empower them to do that really quickly, but do it in a way which means you don't have a messy garden, you have an organized ecosystem. So that's a kind of a mindset shift, I think for people in procurement more than anything else. Most of it doesn't require any legislation, difference changes. It just means that they need to culturally conceive of their role as slightly different. And it's really hard because if you have CTO or CIO or Director of Information or Director of, you have these big titles, maybe you're a general level, it's really hard to accept that on some of your programs you have quite close control. But you also need to have hold the lanes, the reins a little lightly in some areas and give space for some of your subordinates to be able to go and innovate and that you should be facilitating that innovation in other areas. So, you know, I feel for them and they're all incredibly busy people and really smart people and it's. If it was easy, everyone would get it right straight away. So it's a complicated task. But there's some kind of mindset shift there between like mechanistic and ecosystem.

[Callum Drysdale]

I suppose this is what's happened in Ukraine, right, With their. Was it where you have the units are able to almost buy from a marketplace of drones and they sort of test them in the field, they're awarded points for successfully hitting targets, they can use that to secure supplies. Right. It's a very different model.

[Will Blythe]

Well, yeah, the Ukrainian system, there are some interesting lessons. We should also be a little bit careful. I think the Ukrainian system exists because they have accepted that they have this sort of blend of organized military and sort of citizen volunteer forces and they are just going to go and locally procure stuff. And so the question is, how do you try to give them guide rails to go and procure things that are sensible things to go and procure help that happen? Now they have Other challenges. I think, certainly I don't think it wouldn't be controversial to say that the Ukrainians have not conducted particularly effective large scale maneuver in that war. And we want to be able to do large scale maneuvers. So we mean by this we mean like multiple brigades or divisions working together to go and do big things on the battlespace and change the geometry of the battle space. Now that does require you thinking really carefully about making sure that your brigades and divisions can pass data between each other and communicate and mostly pass targets is really what it's about, and do logistical requests with each other. So I think Ukraine has done a great job at getting an innovation ecosystem going that is flourishing. I think it's done a less good job at putting things in place to ensure they can maneuver. But there's a whole bunch of reasons in their military history as to why that's the case. And obviously they're under enormous pressure and they're doing an incredible job day to day. And we would have our own challenges in the next conflict.

[Callum Drysdale]

Where do you see Britain playing a role in that? What do our listeners need to understand about kind of what our defence posture, what our readiness needs to be, what should we be preparing for?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, so the defence has a way of thinking about all these things. They come up with different scenarios and they play them all out and they figure out, okay, could we do this thing alongside this other scenario? So could we deploy a brigade on a so called discretionary expeditionary operation somewhere on the other side of the world at the same time as fulfilling our core NATO commitments to defending Europe? And they play all these things out and game out force structures and then they'll bring these decisions up to the ministers and to the Prime Minister at the point of these strategic defense reviews that happen every few years and say, this is what it would cost to have effectively zero risk. This is what it would cost to have 30% risk against our ability to defend the European ally in these circumstances. And then it's etc. Etc. Etc. And the government system comes to a view on what the appropriate budget is to give to defence. I think in my mind, in terms of the adversaries that we need to be most concerned about, I think there are those adversaries that threaten our interests internationally. Clearly Iran, what you can see happening now, it has spent almost every moment in terms of the regime since the revolution in Iran trying to actively hurt British interests, not just in the Middle east, but around the world, and has been through its proxies and sometimes directly responsible for the deaths of British service personnel. So there is no doubt that they're a significant adversary. But clearly there's a sort of regional nature to that threat. But anyone looking at inflation right now and oil prices in the uk, you know, that threatens, that has an impact on us in the UK, has impacted close the Straits of Hormuz. And then there's this other category of threat which is potentially more existential to the UK And I think I worry about this sort of analysis. I think people who have read a lot of history but haven't noticed that what has happened since the UK there was the last credible threat to the UK in terms of invasion, which is that the advent of the missile age, you know, and so it is now not the case that we are just like not threatened by an adversary so long as they're kept more than 1500 miles, you know, more than 1000 miles away. You know, you need to, you need to think we are so much more invested in the security and the ability of our allies in Eastern Europe to defend themselves than we were say you know, 100 years ago. You know, it's just the, because of our adversaries ability to project force. And I think you can see if you look at what Iran's being able to do and the damage it's able to inflict on the regional actors in the Middle east right now today, you know, that is something like the damage that Russia will be able to put into Europe at the point of the next major conflict. You know, it's now it might not be play out quite exactly like that. They might use their missile and air forces somewhat differently, but they have that power to do that and we have some power to do stuff back. But clearly that's a very different nature of something. It would be an odd analysis which would lead you to say, oh well, it's all good, I'll worry when they get to Calais. It's the Germans problem. I think it's a lot more complicated than that. And I think at the point at which you start having UK critical national infrastructure start being knocked out every single day, day after day, month after month, the politics shift very quickly. So I think you have to sort of be able to imagine what that would look and feel like and then think about, okay, what is it worth us doing to make sure that never happens? Now you're right. Do I think Russia is likely to mount an amphibious invasion in Kent like that? Almost certainly never or never's a long time, but it's fairly inconceivable now next five decades but you do need to think multi decade and multi century about what you're trying to defend here in the uk. And we don't want a future, any possible future that plays out in any direction that makes it remotely possible that an adversary could threaten our most important European allies for certain. So that's what you're fighting for.

[Clemeau]

In what way are you using a multi century lens in your work?

[Will Blythe]

Well, I think the technology industry changes really fast and so you have this weird thing going on, particularly with defence where you're looking at programs that have, you know, I can't remember the end of life on the, on some of the next submarine program, the ballistic missile replacement program, the Dreadnought class, but it's something, it's something like the 2000s or something like that. You know, it's a very, very long way out. Might have got that wrong. But it's certainly many different.

[Clemeau]

I know the US is using jets that have been around since the 50s or the 60s.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, exactly. Yes, they're using airframe still. They've updated the avionics, but same airframes and the B52 and others and I think. So you have this customer who thinks very long term in sorts of the way the ways I sort of describe. They have a really interesting group that you guys would really like actually who look at, they try to map out possible futures looking 30 years ahead and create these scenarios and then they get fed into these planning, into military long term strategic planning. So they're doing that. And at the same time the tech industry is incredibly unpredictable right now and there are forces and currents moving. The eddies that swirl around AI at the moment are totally unpredictable. Even if you're in some of the companies that are pushing the boundaries of what's possible and we sort of count ourselves in that because it's very difficult to predict the discovery that's going to happen the next week and the implications of that discovery, discovering how that's going to play out. So yeah, you have this dual mindset of trying to move incredibly quickly but also trying to make sure you're contributing to major programs that still are going to need to be in place for the long term.

[Callum Drysdale]

Are these big platforms obsolete now and how do you see Britain taking advantage of these trends? Because are we being naive? Having the Challenger 3? Should we just have a million drones that can go off, hunt through a forest and find every single person?

[Clemeau]

The value add for your platform is actually, it seems much more relevant to how it seems that your platform is much more suitable for Militaries that have kind of thousands of expendable drones. That's the kind of thing that the value add works for.

[Will Blythe]

So the challenge with defense is at any point you have in your inventory some big metal thing that you probably designed 30 years ago and bought 20 years ago, and it's probably got another 10 years to go or something like that. So you'll have a bunch of metal stuff and some of those will have been life extended, you know, for good reasons. B52, actually, they've upgraded the avionics, some of the engines. It's like. It's a great platform. The only thing that kind of remains is sort of the shape, you know, it's sort of. There's a lot in there that's kind of different that aren't the original parts, but it kind of makes sense, you know, and they've been able to. To run on the support program for decades. So you have things like that and then you've got things that have been extended, probably for bad reasons, just for savings. And they'll run on an armored vehicle that everyone kind of knows they don't really want to take to war because it's not going to survive for very long. So you've got that sort of messy mess of kit in the inventory for sometimes good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons. Now the challenge is, and the biggest, there's a term revolution in military affairs, which sort of, for people who are like the military nerds, has a certain meaning. And there's a question now as to whether what we're seeing and the advent and the proliferation of autonomous systems and autonomy in general is a revolution, amounts to a revolution in military affairs. Is it a sort of horse and tank moment or is it something else? But if it's not, it's really close to one. And the challenge now is, well, how do you manage these inventories of kits which can still do some useful stuff, but are clearly, clearly not as don't have the primacy that they used to have. So it's a really big challenge for defence. So you can see this in Ukraine at the moment, there are main battle tanks moving around the Ukrainian battlefield, but they are being used with great care and they are kind of darting out from COVID to go and achieve some limited objective, which has been carefully prepared and is supported very fulsomely by drones and effectors of different types. So that's what you tend to see when that. When the platform you're talking about is becoming less relevant. So it never is. You don't get a Cliff edge. But you do get a kind of like, oh, well, it's occasionally useful, and then it's even less occasionally useful, and then it's kind of. Actually, we haven't used this in years now, why we've been keeping it around. You sort of saw this with the battleship, you know, so the battleship in,

[Callum Drysdale]

to our great, you know, dismay.

[Will Blythe]

Yes, well, I'm sure.

[Clemeau]

Is your platform glorified battleship.

[Will Blythe]

It is not, but it's. But like, I can imagine you two are keen on battleships, but, like, I think, you know, you had a battleship versus aircraft carrier or whatever it is. So the moves to carrier groups versus battleship. The battleship didn't become irrelevant overnight, but it clearly became far more vulnerable and you wanted to make sure that you were using it in a controlled setting where you could assure its safety. And so you see this with major platforms now on land. And the challenge for defence is how do you take this heterogeneous, complicated blend of systems? And it's not just what you said, which is about the. Like, that they'll be all autonomous and have AI on them that will help them to do things autonomously. That is increasingly the case. But you have this second challenge, which is they'll have different types of autonomy and they'll have different levels of autonomy and there'll be drones that were bought a couple of years ago with not very much autonomy, and then one that comes out next week with quite a bit more. And the ways in which they're autonomous won't particularly be conceptually compatible. So that's why it's. One of the reasons Cobalt exists, is to help people cope with this complexity in the variance in autonomy.

[Callum Drysdale]

It seems. I mean, you said that software procurement was getting a lot better, and this seems quite promising that they're willing to work with you maybe on this, like, I don't know, what is the right word? They. A regiment?

[Will Blythe]

Are they a brigade?

[Callum Drysdale]

A brigade. They're working at a brigade level that they're willing to do this. I suppose this is something that works for Britain. Is this something you see that you would work for other countries? Like, you know, there's the. Is this a sort of patriotic project for you to help Britain, or is this something that is sort of more useful for the west and NATO?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, I think. I mean, my personal. I guess my personal journey here has been had the time in the military that time, you know, clearly it would be weird to join the military if you weren't in some way patriotic. You know, I think. And like, I think in the uk, you know, we've had a, you know, post war, we've had a. An anxious sort of slightly sort of nationally neurotic relationship with the concept of patriotism. And there's certainly toxic formation for forms of patriotism. But this is my form is that, you know, I'm. I see the UK as, you know, it's a flawed country, it's not perfect. There are problems in the uk, which, you know, you dive into in your podcast all the time. But, but it's also, you know, we do a lot pretty well. You know, it's not that bad. It's, you know, it's. Of all the societies that have ever existed, it's up there, you know, it's pretty good. And I think there's a lot to be really proud of in the uk, in our political system, in the liberty that most people have in their lives and the opportunity that they have. And so I'm patriotic because I see the UK as a great example of a project worth furthering and fighting for. And so for me, my patriotism in that sense doesn't stop at the uk. It stops at the limits of where I see societies that share similar values and are driving in a similar direction. Clearly, I'm British and like, you know, there are concentric circles perhaps of fading, of fading patrons in that sense. But absolutely, I think the tools we're building can and should be used by allies who share our values across the world. So that's the way I'd put it. We're primarily focused on the uk and we have been the last couple of years, but we'll be expanding. And it's really important, I think, that we do to achieve the mission in terms of the patriotism and the reasons behind starting the company is, you know, one of my observations, leaving then the military and going to a couple of other tech companies. So worked an American company, worked at a German company, and you could see that the UK has this amazing concentration of talent to build stuff like cobol. And unfortunately, in my view, some of their, you know, some value that comes from their labor is, you know, is not ending up being accelerated around the British economy in the way it should be and ending up in perhaps some of the tax receipts that could be generated by it. And it's just obviously in my view, the case that in 30 or 40 years, when we look back on this period in time, we look at all these great global forces that are happening, you look at all the great technological trends that we spoke about earlier, that a global technology company that we can all be really proud of that can build things here in the uk, export globally, you know, can and should be built in the UK by the amazing talent we've got, particularly in London and across the uk.

[Clemeau]

We rather enjoy the name of your company, which is, of course, it was Lancelot's sword, isn't it?

[Callum Drysdale]

Yes.

[Clemeau]

Inspired the name of the company.

[Will Blythe]

Exactly.

[Clemeau]

We call this Arthurian Anglofuturism.

[Will Blythe]

What we wanted to convey was that we were partly doing this because of the sorts of pride that we've just spoken about. But there's also a sense, I think, from the Arthurian legend, which I really like about it. Camelot represents something, you know, it's like it's something. It's not just a place where they keep their mead, you know, and their armor, you know, and the spare chainmail and then go back out on their adventures, you know, it embodies ideals, you know, And I think when. When our engineers are out there sharing the hardships that they have to share with the defence customer. Seb was here earlier, was talking about arriving at some VC event with muddy boots and covered in mud from being out in the field. I think it's really important that people remember that they're striving for something that really matters and that there's a higher purpose to it all.

[Callum Drysdale]

It's interesting that, you know, this is a reference to Arthurian legends and a lot of companies in the U.S. tolkien has been the inspiration. Obviously, you were at Palantir. It's interesting, this sort of resurgence of confidence that is coming, that actually we've seen maybe a dark side of when we all think, oh, well, history's over. But now that history's starting, people are actually waking up and saying, no, there are things that matter and things that we need to. Need to care about. I wanted to ask you about. You said that you wanted to export and, you know, see this as something that might be used by other. By other allies. How for you this is, you know, this is obviously based on the British and British sort of doctrines. I don't know. Am I allowed to say that Seb was out in Ukraine and that you have done some work with the Ukrainians? Yeah, yeah. It was the sort of thing that he'd come into the pub and he'd

[Clemeau]

say, yeah, his coordinates are.

[Callum Drysdale]

Yeah, I've been in Eastern Europe, but I can't say anything more. But has. Does that. Does that lead. Does that sort of produce. Do you have to build things differently with those things in mind? Sort of how armies work differently and how they. What they're seeking to do differently. I mean, I think the thing that I think about a lot is Ukraine has suffered a lot more casualties than what a Western army would probably now be comfortable doing. You know, even the, like, small numbers of casualties that happened in Afghanistan. Each one it was, you know, what's the air base that they always flew into?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, they'd fly into, I think, Bryce Norton, then travel through Wootton Basset.

[Callum Drysdale]

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it was the coffins with the flag over it. And it was a. It was. I mean, people struggled with that. Even these lower levels of casualties.

[Seb Fenton]

Yeah.

[Callum Drysdale]

How does this. How does this integrate? Like, what are the tensions there?

[Will Blythe]

I think. I think there are.

[Clemeau]

There's.

[Will Blythe]

There are really important things to think through about all this, because I think at its core, the west and I. And I was clearly, you know, and the UK specifically, you know, has to have a backbone and has to be willing to sacrifice to defend itself and everything that the country embodies in terms of values and also just its people and its territory, these things actually matter. And the nature of that sacrifice, you see in the modern battlefield in Ukraine, as you say, and the casualties are astonishing. And I think for those Ukraine's not that far away. You can fly. Fly to Poland, be over the border very quickly, and then it's quite close, really. And Russia now has taken more casualties than the United States took in the Second World War in that conflict. That is not, I think, particularly. That doesn't seem to be particularly noticed. And Ukraine has taken very substantial casualties. But I think all the indications are, to me, and I say this without trying to be alarmist, but if and when major combat operations happen that the UK needs to be involved in, the UK can expect to take very significant casualties and that there isn't some. It's an incredibly capable military, very much more technically advanced in terms of how it would operate compared to the Ukrainian military. In some ways, particularly around air power, they do some things differently which might somewhat limit the casualties, but you can expect major casualties. And I think the campaigns I took part in as a soldier, I think it was not always helpful for the UK to deal with the individual casualties in the way that it did, because I think it limited our ability to be robust in the face of future major combat operations. Now, that's clearly every individual soldier, the loss of every individual soldiers, a huge tragedy. And I've been in these situations where we've lost soldiers and have people been seriously wounded. But it's really important that we start a national Conversation really right now about what we're willing to sacrifice to protect

[Callum Drysdale]

our way of life.

[Will Blythe]

Because as the current conflict in Ukraine, in Iran that's kicked off recently has shown, like we're not always going to be able to choose when the war starts in the 30s. I mean, the UK was finally forced into declaring war in 39, but it couldn't. I mean, in my view it was almost inconceivable it could have left it any longer. But the UK rearmament for rearmament purposes could have done with another year, basically maybe another two years in terms of their rearmament program. Well, now I see us, you know, potentially moving towards another major conflict and I don't see such a rearmament program and I think it's incredibly serious and you've got to take a really sober look at like the sacrifices that might be coming down, coming down the track. Obviously none of us want that to happen, of course, of course we want to live in peace and we hope war is deterred, which is the whole primary purpose of the military. But you've got to be honest about that.

[Clemeau]

I think it's also quite worrying. If you look at survey data of young people saying they wouldn't fight for the country, I'm sure that often young people would say that and then the emotional situation might change if we were actually at war. But it must worry people in the industry, I think.

[Will Blythe]

Well, I'm an optimist in general and I think I'm also an observer of human nature and I think when your tribe is attacked, when there's no external threats, the conversation is about internal division and intra tribe division and the distinctions between us all. And when there is an external threat, I think people change their perceptions of what they might be willing to sacrifice and what they might be willing to fight for. I think there were similar surveys in the 30s, I think about in some areas. Was it Oxford Union debate or was it. Yeah, so not fight for its country. Right, exactly.

[Callum Drysdale]

And I think it won the country.

[Will Blythe]

I think it won. So I'm less worried about this. Well, I mean that wasn't the age

[Clemeau]

of mass immigration, right, when I don't know what portion of London's foreign born, but it's very high.

[Callum Drysdale]

Well, I mean, I think it is the question, right. It slightly forces you to put up or chat.

[Clemeau]

We just don't know what would happen if the society undergoing mass immigration went into total war. I'm not sure this has ever been done. I think.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, I think it's like a reasonable, it's a reasonable Concern. I think I'm optimistic that most decent people living in this country who are not actively seeking to undermine the democratic way of life and want freedom and the freedom to live their life in the way they want to live it. I think in the context of that country being attacked and it being an obviously righteous cause to defend that country, I think a lot of them would step up. And I'm pretty optimistic.

[Clemeau]

And with all this in mind, Will, I know that you've touched on elements of this over this interview. What is the describe to us the British, you know, British defence in 50 years. Like what is the kind of blithe vision for the long term future, the defence of these islands?

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, I think, I think when trying to think about what the kind of country we want to have and the kind of defense aspect of that, it's really easy to be prone to kind of utopianism where you try to describe a kind of ordered future. So I think democracy, there's a huge amount of internal debate in this country. There's always a kind of the anxieties that exist within the country about its sense of identity, I think are unlikely, you know, to be. I don't see some great resolution. You know, I think, I think actually the thing we need to make peace with is like make peace with our anxiety disorder as a country, you know, and make peace with the fact that, you know, there are people who have competing views of what the UK should be now and what's going to be the next century. So like defence is going to, is going to. Has this manifests with defence in certain ways, One of which is, should we. People want really binary answers on like, okay, do we lean away from America and lean towards Europe? Do we lean away from both and conduct our own independent expeditionary operations around the world? Of course these, some of them might float you back more than others, but you cannot in the same way that you might manage your own long term life, you know, your own think about your own long term financial future or something like that. It's like, fine, maybe you've gone all in on crypto. Like maybe you did, maybe you were that guy. But probably you took a pretty balanced approach and you were hedging against all sorts of risks and you were trying to make sure that you could cope and react in a nimble way to any potential future that's playing out. So for the uk, what that means is we need to make sure that NATO remains strong and at the heart of everything we're doing for as long as possible. We need to continue to give the reassurance to the United States that we are playing our part in our region of the world, such that it justifies for many decades to come their continued support of Europe and not to, as they have done in the past, sort of infantilize Europe by doing our job for us. And it means that I think increasingly, though, we probably do need to move one notch towards a more of a French approach in making sure we've got more assured sovereign capability. Not all the way, but just a little notch in that direction. So I think you're going to do all those things at once

[Clemeau]

and we'll

[Will Blythe]

continue to muddle through in the very British way that we have.

[Clemeau]

And if you made it all the way to the end of this podcast and you're a general looking for some kind of platform to manage all your

[Callum Drysdale]

gear, are you a general who's got C2 problems? Have I got the product for you?

[Clemeau]

Unless you are Denovian General, then go

[Callum Drysdale]

to aarondite.com Will, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. We will send you back down to Earth on your stealth coated rocket and after, I should say after you upgrade our, our own radar arrays to be able to, you know, not replicate what

[Clemeau]

happens coming from it.

[Will Blythe]

Yeah, exactly.

[Callum Drysdale]

We want to be able to see the postman at 5000km.

[Will Blythe]

Walk around with my USB stick now and upgrade it.

[Callum Drysdale]

No, no, no, no, don't let it do that. I don't know much about military, military intelligence and counterintelligence, but you're not meant to let people stick their usbs into your stuff. Anyway, with that, listeners, thank you very much for listening. And Aaron Dite, the very excited cover, you have just raised recently, haven't you?

[Will Blythe]

Well, yeah, we, yeah, last raised was last year. Yeah, Codex Ventures. Yeah, exactly right.

[Callum Drysdale]

They're raising, you know, the country's gonna be safe. Don't worry, you know, put your feet up. We're all right with that. Thank you very much, listeners, and goodbye.