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Herman, let me turn now to you. So there's a lot of talk about the next generation capabilities and or the sixth generation capabilities. So what do these capabilities do and why are they critical for our national security? And also, what do they offer in terms of contributing to our deterrence?

Victoria, Paul, thank you for having me here as well and to be able to contribute to this very important and exciting topic indeed. So sixth generation capability, that's what we refer to, that's what the next generation combat air capability sometimes gets referred to. But what does that really mean? A little bit what Richard said earlier there.

So typically it means we need to go in denied environment, which means that the aircraft or the system needs to be able to be stealthy or have a low observable characteristics. it needs to be able to handle a huge amount of information, more data than we've ever seen before,
to help with that decision making and underpin the operator in achieving its operational goal. And that's the trend we've seen from third to fourth to fifth, from Tornado to Typhoon, to Typhoon to F-35 and now into the next world and GCAP, that trend of low observability data management continues to prevail.

So that's the operational capability and that is one cornerstone of the FCAS programme. Other cornerstones of the programme focus on the economic benefit to the nation and the importance to the nation beyond the operational capability. And that manifests itself in jobs, high value jobs.
Today more than three and a half thousand people in the UK are working on this programme. We know that the UK has a challenge with productivity. These jobs typically offer very high levels of productivity, about 87% higher than what we see of the national average, therefore contributing more towards the gross national product.

But we also have conducted various independent analysis on that economic benefit. And they consistently continue to demonstrate that a programme like Combat Air, just like Typhoon and Tornado, can generate lots of benefit to the economy. And recent studies have shown that we're talking about more than 36 billion contribution towards the gross annual GDP.
And that's not just BA systems, you know, we work very closely with the supply base, with partners in the UK, whether it's Rolls Royce through propulsion, whether it is with Leonardo on the sensing capability, but also in excess of 600 SMEs across the UK and academic institutions, which are a fundamental part of the FCAS ecosystem going forward.

It is also an inspiration to early careers, I sometimes keep saying because this programme will manifest itself for many decades to come, that the people who will be operating this system, the people who will have an engineering career on this programme or a leadership career just like I have, they haven't even been born yet.

And I think that's quite exciting and that gives the context of this programme and its longevity. So just not an operational capability, it offers significant economic benefit as well to the nation. And the final aspect to pick up within that context is around exports. And to date, Combatair has demonstrated through Typhoon, for example, 
that it is one of the only defence programmes that actually offers a return back to the nation. the export activities on combat air programs generates tax revenues and other benefits, which in effect pays back the investment to the taxpayer. And I think that's a very powerful business case to the nation in addition to the jobs, in addition to provide a highly capable operational capability. FCAS is covering quite a lot of critical areas for the nation.

Well, defence dividend in practice, I guess. 
I think so. And Richard, I think you wanted to come in on this. Well, can I go back to the issue of deterrence? Because I think it's such a fundamental reason that we're pursuing the system, the program that we are. Achieving conventional deterrence, massively important in the strategic political environment that we're in, being able to show that we have escalation pathways and de-escalation pathways, that we can manage our adversaries and we can deter them from aggressive behaviour. There are very few military capabilities that can genuinely prove to an adversary that we are able to impose threat, risk against things that they care about. realistically in the threat environment, the defensive environment that you described earlier, Paul. And having a combat air system that can, at range, in a responsive, agile, adaptable way, genuinely impose threat and risk to an adversary is something that is critically important to conventional deterrence in Europe for us.

And so we are absolutely designing a capability that has the ability to be able to strike targets against very heavily defended threat. And sixth generation is in part about being able to continue to hold the enemy at risk.

I suppose one, this is a question for both of you. One attribute of sixth stroke next generation air is that not every state that currently does fourth or fifth generation will be able to make it to that level. And how will that change the dynamics of alliances and indeed geopolitics?
There are only a few people who are going to be able to do this, aren't there?
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And perhaps this question of what is sixth generation? We can see with fifth generation, essentially the change was the addition of additional low observable characteristics and a degree of being able to sense and process huge amounts of information on board. What's sixth generation?

Well, it needs to be able to stay survivable against even more difficult threats. But perhaps the biggest thing that differentiates sixth generation from fifth is that it needs to be able to share that information, not just with itself and process itself, but also share it across a combat air environment and even more so in a multi-domain environment.

There are going to be very few countries that can genuinely do sixth generation. The UK is one of a really select handful that can do that. And I think we're seeing the US have clearly announced their FWQ7 programme, are moving at pace. That investment shows just how important,
but it's important that Europe has that sort of capability for itself. And that's why we built the partnership we did.

I think it's interesting to see at the moment if you look at the UN Security Council, every single nation on there currently is running a sixth generation combat air programme. So proving your point to some degree there. But what's also inherent in particular to the UK F-CAS strategy is that we never do this on our own.

We do this in partnership. That's how we've been doing combat air for many decades, again going to previous programmes. And when we move on to the global combat air programme, perhaps we'll talk about that later, it is again a partnership programme, in this case with Italy and Japan.

But if you look at a nation like Japan in this context, on their own they will not be able to develop a six-gen capability. but they have very good core strengths. They have a clear ambition industrially to create more sovereignty. They recognise the threats that are sitting on their doorstep and they see a
programme like GCAP together with the UK and Italy as a mechanism and methodology to achieve those strategic ambitions. And we've always said on the programme, on the GCAP programme, that it is a programme international by design. So we will always be looking for other partners, for other nations to, in some shape or form, 
depending on what level you enter, I guess, what entry ticket you buy, to be part of the journey and to develop, ultimately create the national sixth generation capability.
So I suppose that's a good cue to go to the next acronym, isn't it? We're slightly jumping the gun. Shall we go to GCAP?

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