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And it's occurring to me as you're speaking that that level of asymmetry between the producer and owner of this technology and an end user who may be an export client is going to be large, probably larger than fifth gen. Am I right?
I think yes and no. And why is it an ambiguous answer? So if you look at any air force around the world, they constantly need to adapt their solution. Yeah. And in the current mechanisms for a country which is not part of the core nation, like the core nations let's say,
they are relying on the core nations to do that for them. But this solution that we're currently developing is because it needs to be highly agile. The notion of it takes two years before there is a new piece of kit on the aircraft that doesn't work anymore, we're working with open system architectures.
It's a little bit like your phone. Take two iPhones, they're not the same, but the same hardware and the same operating system, open architecture, but you each choose your applications. So bringing it back to your example of an export nations, they could write their own applications. They could do their own sensor models, their own control models, 
and place it in an open architecture environment to create their own version of the equivalent Apple iPhone, if that makes sense.

We talked earlier about the differentiation between what we're doing and maybe other programs. It's really important for customer nations or partner nations these days to have a sense of sovereignty. They want to be able to modify capabilities to meet the threat and sometimes the technologies that they have. And I think GCAP, 
with that open system architecture Herman describes, gives us, and them, the opportunity. No, they don't have to have all of the fundamental skills that we have provided, but they can achieve a degree of sovereignty that's much greater than if they were just a customer.
Now, this program, of course, is incredibly significant and also incredibly complex. Now, the timeline set for the program, I believe, is 2035. Am I correct?

Yeah, we're using 2035 as a target date. We're still in the middle, of course, of defining the programme, but we aim to shoot as close to 2035 as we possibly can. There's still a lot of work to be done to understand in intimate detail on how the schedule will pan out as we go forward.
So what is the recipe when it comes to succeeding and delivering on time and within the budget that you've got planned for this programme?
Well, I think it comes back to what I said in the past before. So we've done a lot of analysis and having the right construct typically accounts for about 60% of the success. So Richard, as he described, the JIGO of the Government International Organisation, us, the joint venture in Edgewing, are a critical part of making that happen.
And I have the fortunate and unfortunate experience from Typhoon. I was the CEO of Eurofighter. I sat in Munich, the top of the tree by figure of speech, managing the program. And it was challenging to find all the levers to control the program. Eurofighter had an incredibly successful program, but I clearly observed 
that for a next generation and exactly as you described, how do we keep time and cost? There's an opportunity for an evolution in that construct and that's exactly what we're implementing. We learned a lot from others, from the London Olympics, from the nuclear environment, from other big joint ventures and collaborations we've set up to create this one.

So that's a very, very important part of achieving time and cost. I mentioned earlier the digitization. This has phenomenal opportunity. We're running demonstrations at the moment whereby we can do from requirements to certification potentially in hours instead of months. and there's other examples like that that allows us to really shorten the time.
It is challenging to implement in this highly secure environment but we're making some good strides and we have a really strong plan and a very big ambition to achieve that. And of course there's technologies and we've been very privileged I would say in the UK compared to other nations thanks to the UK government also thanks to 
industry investments to really get the core technologies for a sixth generation program in place. I mentioned earlier the Taranis program, a low observable unmanned combat aircraft that flew more than 10 years ago, but the technologies are absolutely still relevant today. And the engineers who design GCAP today learned their traits on that program 10 years ago.

And that's just one example of the investments we're making. There are many others in the engine domain, in the sensor domains, as well with our partners in Leonardo and Rolls-Royce that allows us to control the risk of the program going forward. But it remains an incredibly challenging program. But I think we've made some fantastic first steps.
If you look at where we are today on the program on GCAP and compare it to the equivalent point of Typhoon, is about half the time. And we, of course, will endeavour to continue to keep that half a time mantra alive as we go forward.
Your description of the recipe required to achieve pace in the programme is a good one. And there are so many ingredients required to make the recipe work. how we define our requirements and when we try to achieve them, ensuring an incremental approach to capability delivery rather than trying to do everything in the first iterations of a program.

The technology allows us to have a block strategy that can genuinely apply different capabilities over time. The sort of government and industry structures empowered structures that can actually allow decision making to be done by the programme and not have to rely, as Herman and his experience in other programmes, always having to go back to partner governments, 
always having to go back to partner companies for even quite simple decisions. We've put the GCAP agency and Edgewing's headquarters together so that they are literally working day in, day out in each other's company, solving problems together. It's just a collection of some really profound ingredients like digital engineering, model-based system engineering and certifications are really critical.

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