Description
TLC ZOOM
Wednesday 4th June 2025 @ 18:00 BST
Are we ready for war in the 21st Century?
General Sir Richard Barrons KCB CBE
Michael Gove writing in The Spectator at the end of March 2025 was talking about a trip he had just made to Klosters to join a panel to discuss geopolitics for an audience of veterans, mentors and corporate sponsors of the charity SWV (Supporting Wounded Veterans) run by Gilliy Norton.
He writes ‘I was the weakest link, speaking alongside the former FT editor Lionel Barber, the Times Radio broadcaster Manveen Rana and General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command and the military brains behind the government’s current Strategic Defence Review. Given the tendency of defence reviews to be policy sugar-rushes – exercises in fudge manufacture and cakeism – it was reassuring that Sir Richard was bitingly dry and witheringly honest about our collective failure to take security sufficiently seriously since 1990. It was not just military weakness which worried him. Domestic resilience concerned him even more. The Heathrow substation fire might have been an accident, he mused, but the Russians do have a revealed preference for taking out critical national infrastructure, are known to hire local bad actors to start fires for them, and might have enjoyed seeing our major international airport crippled on the day our allies were in town to discuss joining the ‘coalition of the willing’. Whatever the cause, though, our vulnerabilities were vividly advertised to a world audience’
Having read this piece I am delighted to advise you that General Sir Richard has agreed to open our eyes to the challenges we face – hence the stark title of tonights presentation.
Of course Sir Richard is very well known to us as one of the key panelists for our Ukraine series but also an honorary member of TLC
Biography
General Sir Richard Barrons served as Commander Joint Forces Command, one of the six ‘Chiefs of Staff’ leading the UK Armed Forces, 2013-2016.
He was responsible for 23,000 people worldwide and a budget of £4.3 billion. His military career included the last decade of the Cold War and leadership from Captain to General on military operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He has a global role with CAE working on government relations and strategy, primarily around the evolution of national and alliance-scale synthetic environments, and is Co-Chairman of Universal Defence & Security Solutions. He advises and comments widely on senior leadership, defence and security.
In addition Sir Richard was an integral part of the Strategic Defence Review led by Lord Robertson and together with Dr Fiona Hill.
