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The digital enablers that underpin that, allowing us to work at paces that we could never have done in programs before. That combination of ingredients, all of them are required and we're working on them to plug them all together at the same time. It's incredibly challenging to do that, but exciting.
We sometimes use an analogy here, maybe not an entirely appropriate one, but to give you an idea, the amount of data that flows over the World Wide Web in Edinburgh in any day is about the same amount of data that the aircraft will compute at many points in time.
This is really fascinating. Well, I mean, the pace of innovation is really astonishing and it feels like everything is just speeding up each day. How do you future-proof something like GCAP when you think about not even years but decades ahead? Yes. What is the strategy?

So we're in a very critical phase of the program on the point you mentioned there. So the first thing we're doing today is making sure that all the physical attributes of the system are future proof. Will it be able to carry enough sensors in the future? Will it be able to carry enough payload in the future?
So the concepting work we're doing today in very close collaboration with the government requirements managers aims to address that. But the most powerful part of the answer to your question is the open systems architecture. So it is, again, I made a comparison with your phone. It constantly evolves. It segregates the application software from the operating software.
So it makes it easier when there will be new computing chips available to simply take the hardware out. and stick the other hardware in and the system will continue to operate in the same configuration that you saw before. You know, when you buy your next version of an Apple iPhone. Oh, I keep mine for years. 
Within minutes, you download your profile again, don't you? And all your applications and the world continues. It's the same kind of thinking. And I think that will be the most... powerful aspect to consider the future, prove the solution going forward. But we can't avoid it. We have to embrace it as industry. If we look, and we are very privileged from an industry point of view, where we're able to understand the threats from our customers very well, where the information is being shared, making that connectivity very early in the program. We have no choice but to create these kind of solutions within open architecture to make sure we can create the necessary agility and adaptability for the operators in the future.

And then building on that, we have to make some decisions about physics, as Herman said. Ultimately, you do need to design a vehicle. We are designing that for our understanding of how the threat's likely to evolve. And we think we've got a pretty good understanding of that. But we still have to make some decisions.
But only make the decisions you have to make now that you have to make now. Sorry, only make the decisions now that you have to make now. where you can maintain design choice, maintain the flexibility for as long as possible, where you can have an underpinning architecture that allows you to insert 
technology to do exactly that and make sure you've got a supply chain that is continuing to develop the apps of the future to look at how to use technology in the future to put it into the program as soon as it's mature enough and ready. And we think we've got that architecture, we've got the underpinnings of that.

We're working hard with our existing industrial supply chain. There will be a lot of others out there that we need to bring into the supply chain to help us bring that imaginative thinking of technological opportunity into the program as quickly as possible. And we think that an open architecture solution allows you to respond really rapidly. But both, 
I mean actually all the way from when you're on the ground being able to insert a chip to when you're actually up in the air in operations to be able to provide a data feed or a software upgrade even when you're flying into an operation. That's something we've never been able to do before.

I think what's also important and the benefit of the FCAS programme, so the UK programme of record, is that we are doing a huge amount of operational analysis and we have a really good high power computing capability. We run thousands of scenarios overnight and they just don't focus on what the aircraft needs to be, 
but they focus on what the system needs to be. So we're flying a manned asset with two or three unmanned collaborative combat aircraft or one, and we're exploring what capability that needs to have. So that gives us more flexibility, again, to deal with the future proofing, because it might be easier in the future to adapt and change an autonomous collaborative combat aircraft, particularly when we're looking at low cost manufacturing for them, then continue to worry about the quarterback, as I referred to it earlier. So the future proofing extends itself beyond the man-aircraft into the total system solution as well.

The other aspect of the future combat air system that's been really important in the last few years, it's not just an aircraft programme, it's a recapitalisation of the UK's combat air industry. Over the last seven years or so, we have rebuilt the skills, demonstration of technology, the infrastructure,
as well as designing and starting to operate in a programme to build an aircraft. And I think that's a characteristic of the future combat air system. that fits very neatly with our defence industrial strategy. It's clear we want resilience, sovereignty, adaptability, and we've got to create an industrial base that allows us to have that national sovereign capability, 
yes, in partnership with others, into the future. And we've invested very hard and need to keep investing in that. and keep people interested, keep developing those skills, keep the infrastructure, particularly on the digital side, evolving over time so that we have essentially the industrial base that can respond to the threat of the future.
To conclude our discussion today, when we think about the immediate future, 2026, we know that the Farnborough Air Show is coming up later this year. Maybe there will be some announcements on GCAP before, during the show?

But we have quite a good track record of every year making some big announcements. So no doubt we will make a good attempt next year again to make some announcement. But we've got more than 6,000 people, probably close to 10,000 people working across the three nations on this now. There's a huge amount of effort being dispensed.
We're hitting milestones every week, every month, in conjunction with our governments. Some of them we don't advertise, some of them we will. But the pace in the programme is there and will continue to be there. And when we have some really interesting news to tell, then no doubt we will shout from the rooftops.

Yeah, I think we're almost in the stage of the program now where we're doing the hard yards of delivery, the hard yards of engineering. And a lot of that isn't very amenable to announcements, but it's for Herman and myself, what we know is going on between the teams is just delivery, acceleration of pace, extraordinary technological evolution, 
buildings being built. This is a real going concern now, the FCAS and the Global Combat Air programme within that. In a way, we've made the announcements. We've established the programme. We're now driving hard to get on and deliver it. So there's a lot to look forward to.

Absolutely. And thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a truly fascinating conversation. And I'm afraid that's all we've got for you today. But hopefully we will have another episode coming up on an update when it comes to what's happening with GCAP later this year or in the upcoming years.
And that's all that we've got for you today. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Defence Talk Securing UK Advantage, brought to you by the Council on Geostrategy in partnership with ADS and BE Systems. Until next time.

Goodbye.

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