Thread by @RUSI_org

We are live tweeting day two of the RUSI Land Warfare Conference #RUSILWC . Follow this thread for coverage of Session 6, 7 & 8.

“Perspectives of both the old and young are valuable and it is through the dialogue between the two that we learn. This dynamic is not confined to the military sphere, but to our whole society.”@MChalmers_RUSI @#RUSILWC

“If information warfare is political warfare, which I think it is, then having political nouse should serve @MarkLancasterMK very well in his upcoming post as deputy commander of 77 Brigade”@MChalmers_RUSI @#RUSILWC

“Resource scarcity, fragile states, trade disputes - I believe these threats are as acute now as they were in 1963 when @RUSI_org warned the public of escalating dangers during the cold war.” @MarkLancasterMK #RUSILWC

“Russia is preparing for major combat operations, and its use of proxies to avoid ‘getting their hands dirty’ should not obscure their efforts to modernise and improve their armed forces.” @MarkLancasterMK #RUSILWC

“The threat of non-state actors and insurgencies is increased by the proliferation of weapons systems which were once the sole preserve of tier one military powers.” @MarkLancasterMK #RUSILWC

“The division must remain the cornerstone of our military power. It is the division which can bring together decisive force from all domains and ensure interoperability at the international level required to dislocate and overwhelm an opponent.” @MarkLancasterMK #RUSILWC

“Ex Autonomous Warrior 2018 will see a battlegroup from 1st Armoured Infantry Brigade spend a month on Salisbury Plain testing some of the newest robotic technologies in collaboration with the @RoyalAirForce and @RoyalMarines, and US Military observers” @MarkLancasterMK #RUSILWC

“Our adversaries believe truth is malleable, we need to counter that and make sure the truth is heard. @BritishArmy knows that we cannot afford to look back in years to come to wonder what our cyber defence could have been” @MarkLancasterMK #RUSILWC

“We have to look to strengthen alliances and bilateral relationships, not only with our closest allies, the US, France & Germany, but also with countries such as Ukraine, Georgia and Lithuania which are suffering from Russia's attention.” @MarkLancasterMK #RUSILWC

The Q&A is off the record, but we can show that microphone is being delivered by 'Dragon Runner' an EOD Bomb Disposal Robot being operated by @Official_REME. #RUSILWC

“It is not weapons that kill people, it is people who kill people, warfare is a distinctly human endeavour. It is humans who deliver that competitive edge. Modern combat conditions are feral, different from the traditional Western way.” Professor Peter Roberts #RUSILWC

“We need to redesign our forces not for connectivity but to be unplugged. Soldiers need to learn to be miserable again. We are in an age of un-war.” Professor Peter Roberts #RUSILWC

“Command is an inherently human capacity, we are never going to let a machine take charge for killing other human beings.” @antbruceking #RUSILWC

“The paradox is that you absolutely need command in a 21st century environment to draw all the strands together coherently but the [increased complexity] makes understanding everything coherently much more difficult for commanders.” @antbruceking #RUSILWC

“Mission Command in the 21st Century is not the Von Moltke/Wehrmacht style individualist system. It has evolved into a different, collaborative professional skillset.” @antbruceking #RUSILWC

“The commander is essential, there needs to be a single point of reference in the quantum, multi dimensional battle space, but that commander needs a tight team within the network to manage the mission and it’s proliferating decisions.” @antbruceking #RUSILWC

“The essence of warfare is about to change - to demonstrate that point I am going to zoom in to the human mind and zoom out to grand strategy. I hope it becomes clear the two are intimately related.” @ThreshedThought #RUSILWC

“Strategy is the product of two human minds fighting each other. The human mind evolved over millions of years through social selection so individuals have characteristic to beat other individuals in their primitive group of 50.” @ThreshedThought #RUSILWC

“#AI will enter at the lower levels and progressively work its way up to applications at higher levels of command. This will change the hitherto fundamentally unchanged nature of strategy - human minds trying to outwit each other.” @ThreshedThought #RUSILWC

“AI training on human ‘Go’ strategies or datasets can beat human grandmasters, but AI training on itself with just the rules can conclusively beat the ‘Go’ world champion. It can create new strategies, that humans could not have worked out.” @ThreshedThought #RUSILWC

“If I were a general today, I would be looking very carefully at how the nature of warfare itself changes as we start to insert AI at the lowest levels of decision making support.” @ThreshedThought #RUSILWC

“At P.A. we take both a Utopian and Dystopian look at the future. We have to consider the future, and what it means depends on your sector. In 9 out of 10 cases we see that AI replaces passive humans in our projections.” Ms Johanna Hooper #RUSILWC

“There is still a role for humans in the future. Creativity, care, problem solving are all qualities humans are better at. Computer algorithms are not good at making sense of large unstructured datasets.” Ms Johanna Hooper #RUSILWC

“Because machines are trained on existing or hypothesised datasets, encountering a new problem or wildly divergent situation tends to cause failure.” Ms Johanna Hooper #RUSILWC

“The rise of the portfolio career means that the military needs to make remaining in the service as attractive as it was upon joining.” Ms Johanna Hooper #RUSILWC

“What makes soldiers volunteer to do what others are not prepared to do? Courage, discipline, respect for others, integrity, loyalty and selfless commitment.” @ArmySgtMajor #RUSILWC

“When it comes to crossing the start line in combat, soldiers will always fight for one thing and one thing only, and that is each other.” @ArmySgtMajor #RUSILWC

We now go into the Q&A for Session 7, which is off the record. We will be back live tweeting Session 8 'How Land Forces Should Train for 21st Century Manoeuvre' at 1145.

We are back live tweeting Session 8 'How Land Forces Should Train for 21st Century Manoeuvre'.

“We are in a period when a single fatality is a national event. In Berlin in 1945 a single casualty was the currency for a single room, and in the Falklands we often lost a warship or multiple fatalities in a single day.” Lt Gen Patrick Sanders #RUSILWC

“In the @BritishArmy we are focused on training for high end warfighting. Our training is no longer fail safe but a place where we can fail safely to learn. Mission success should be rare and hard won in training and defeat a useful tool” Lt Gen Patrick Sanders #RUSILWC

“In a @BritishArmy of only 82,000 we cannot afford to only train those held at high readiness. All our soldiers must be ready to fight high end war, not least because we might be called upon to quickly grow in a crisis.” Lt Gen Patrick Sanders #RUSILWC

“Cognitive effects, well delivered, can have concrete and decisive effects on the battlefield. Having experience of being on the receiving end of shock on the battlefield has taught me the value of inflicting it on the enemy.” Lt Gen Patrick Sanders #RUSILWC

“Simulation will only teach us so much. Learning by doing by training in the field with appropriate delegations and permissions in place must be the right way to move forwards.” Lt Gen Patrick Sanders #RUSILWC

“Multi-domain operations is really just an extension of Air-Land Battle. We see the future battlespace as extended in depth and complexity, with converging capabilities across domains and compressed levels of war.” Lt Gen Joseph Anderson #RUSILWC

“The Multi-Domain Task Force construct will play critical role in neutralising enemy anti-access and area denial (A2AD) capabilities by opening windows of advantage for Joint Force exploitation while defending critical assets” Lt Gen Joseph Anderson #RUSILWC

“The chaotic nature of war, its basic principles, battle fatalities and the essence of joint arms combat and manoeuvre have not changed despite the rapid pace of threat evolution in the modern world.” Brig. Gen. Ori Gordin #RUSILWC

“We have a citizen conscript army, but when I commanded them in battle I found that less than 10% were unable to handle the fatalities and uncertainty of warfare. These are difficult challenges but most people can handle them quite well.” Brig. Gen. Ori Gordin #RUSILWC

“In order to keep our Brigade Combat Teams ready to fight a 360 degree threat, we train at full scale and with all the different force elements integrated. Every year we conduct around 3 divisional level exercises in Israel.” Brig. Gen. Ori Gordin #RUSILWC

“My teenage son sits at home and plays games on the Xbox with people from all over the world. @FortniteGame is a fantastic simulation of a global command and operational system” Brig. Gen. Ori Gordin #RUSILWC

“Resilience is one of the most important assets on the battlefield. You cannot get that from AI. You have to put your soldiers out in the field, through intense training so that they can suffer, adapt and learn to handle uncertainty.” Brig. Gen. Ori Gordin #RUSILWC

“Urban warfare is manpower intensive, even with technological advantage which itself cannot today be guaranteed. Massed ground forces simply cannot be offset.” Cap Ali Smith and WO1 (RSM) Wendy Eagle #RUSILWC

“Copehill Down is not adequate for training for a modern urban environment. Urban combat is casualty and collateral damage intensive, and we do not currently have sufficient technology or precision munitions capabilities.” Cap Ali Smith and WO1 (RSM) Wendy Eagle #RUSILWC

“Training facilities are crucial. Germany’s cutting edge Schnoggersburg training area offers 500 buildings in 5 different types of urban areas. Some of this could be reproduced in the synthetic environment.” Cap Ali Smith and WO1 (RSM) Wendy Eagle #RUSILWC

“We in the @BritishArmy want to be trained hard, made and allowed to fail, and fail often in order to learn. We want to train hard so we can fight more easily.” Cap Ali Smith and WO1 (RSM) Wendy Eagle #RUSILWC

“If anything characterises the urban fight it is dispersion and chaos - exactly what makes logistical support a nightmare. We need to train and innovate to improve logistics for the urban fight.” Cap Ali Smith and WO1 (RSM) Wendy Eagle #RUSILWC

“Innovation is not the same thing as technology. It is 1% ideas, 99% execution. At @QinetiQ we have lots of people coming up with great ideas but the execution is often quite tricky.” @mike_sewart #RUSILWC

“There is no right or wrong way to integrate technology into the training process. But what is important is configuring and harnessing the feedback loop in order to improve interoperability between the virtual, augmented and real worlds.” @mike_sewart #RUSILWC

“Drawing techniques from the gaming world will become increasingly important not only to improve the immersive nature of synthetic training but also for harnessing the innate digital mindset of the current generation.” @mike_sewart #RUSILWC

“You can’t buy useful training software for armies off the shelf. You have to employ experimentation and development, which I am a big fan of. A good example of this is the Nexus programme.” @mike_sewart #RUSILWC

“We must move from being a @BritishArmy that trains often in complex human terrain, to one that trains always in complex human terrain, and often in complex urban terrain.” Maj. Gen. Timothy Hyams #RUSILWC

“Performance metrics are crucial to successfully leveraging the synthetic, augmented and live training environments. Not simply to ensure the right lessons are drawn but also to help iteratively improve our training in future.” Maj. Gen. Timothy Hyams #RUSILWC

“From this April we have for the first time brought all our collective and individual training together along with our war fighting development branch.” Maj. Gen. Timothy Hyams #RUSILWC

Session 8 now goes into Q&A, which is off the record. We will be back for Session 9, The Chief of the General Staff Keynote with General Mark Carleton Smith, at 1400.

We are back for Session 9, The Chief of the General Staff Keynote with General Mark Carleton Smith. He is taking the stage now.

“I think you’ll agree we’ve covered a lot of important ground – too much for me to do full justice to now and we’ve shared some well-judged insights…I hope you all leave with a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

“I think we almost certainly still under-estimate the change that is going to take place within the next decade” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

“We don’t live in the past and certain fundamental changes seem to be underway that have real meaning for our future; much of it linked
to rapid technological change which I think marks out the times we live in now from those that went before.” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

“For those of you have planes and trains to catch and want it in a nutshell, my focus as CGS is the future”@BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

“What can be afforded for Defence should be in direct proportion to the threat; just so long as we continue to demonstrate that our efficiency is at the very edge of arduous and exacting whilst consistent with our operational outputs” ” - CGS @Britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

“I think we all agree that the nature of warfare is broadening beyond the traditional physical domains, and that warfare today is characterised by a persistent full-spectrum competition”@BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

“Putin’s State of the Nation three months ago painted a darkening geo-political picture. Russia today is not a status quo power; it’s in revisionist mode and its intent is now matched by a growing arsenal of long-range precision capabilities.” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"The international rules-based system isn’t self-sustaining either. It’s underpinned by power, hard power, predominantly although not exclusively American hard power which we Europeans can’t take for granted"

“[It is a] misplaced perception that there is no imminent or existential threat to the UK and that even if there was it could only arise at long-notice is wrong” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"We are confronted by the consequences of a global order challenged by a number of rogue states; that want a world shaped along their own authoritarian lines; at a minimum they’re a reminder that democracy and Human Rights are not universal values."@Britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"To fall behind today is to cede an almost unquantifiable advantage from which it might be impossible to recover...Think Big, start Small and be prepared to scale rapidly is the message” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

Russia is deploying am "asymmetric approach is a deliberate and targeted strategy to expose Western vulnerability especially in the non-traditional domains." - @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"We need a more proactive, threat-based approach to our capability planning including placing some big bets on those technologies." - @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"We need to continue to argue the relevance and importance of Land Power in response to those who would challenge its utility in the cyber-age; an argument compounded by the potentially toxic legacy of intervention." - @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"Russia seems to have taken a different body of lessons from the historical evidence of intervention over the last 15-20 years including the utility of hard power in changing the facts on the ground"

“Russia took a rational risk, judging correctly, that The Crimea was ‘doable’. And the logic for Syria was similar and no amount of Information Advantage is going to change that calculus” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

“To go further and faster we need to expand our simulation capabilities, better understand how we might improve the human/digital interface and better visualize what task-organization in the Virtual domain looks like” @BritishArmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"The Army is starting to adapt to the security challenges ahead; considerable steps have been taken to escape the binary mindset of peace and war, operations or training." - @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

We need to "accelerate the pipeline between operational concepts to requirements through acquisition to fielding." - @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"It’s for Defence to overhaul the policy; that’s essentially an issue about mobility and flexibility; but we will need to provide the leadership, the inspiration and the motivation that goes beyond a common set of values; That produces a decent Army" @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"The Army consists of "intelligent, dynamic and adaptive warfighting professionals – recognising that we’re paid to fight and win." @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

"If I were to brand it – it would be as intelligent, dynamic and adaptive warfighting professionals – recognising that we’re paid to fight and win; that’s a unique responsibility on behalf of our Nation" @britisharmy #CGS #RUSILWC

That concludes the Keynote from the new Chief of the General Staff, General Mark Carleton Smith, Chief of the General Staff. This also concludes the live tweeting of the @RUSI_org Land Warfare Conference. Thank you for following along, we hope you enjoyed the coverage. #RUSILWC

To remind all, @RUSI_org Rules still apply and the Q & A is off the record.