...But today’s Army needs more Qs
FOR all his genius inventions and life-saving gadgets, James Bond’s Q has always been second best.
When the world needs saving, 007 is always your man... but not any more. For General Sir Patrick Sanders yesterday said warfare in the future will require ‘access to fundamentally different skills and talent’.
He warned if the military fails to adapt to the digital age, it will ‘at best become exquisite but irrelevant, and at worst we will die’.
He added the traditional image of defence as involving aircraft carriers and jet fighters was now ‘dated’. General Sanders, who heads the UK’s Strategic Command, called for the Armed Forces to invest in artificial intelligence technology to meet the challenge posed by adversaries such as Russia and China.
Speaking at the Defence Security Equipment International arms fair yesterday, he said: ‘We are going to need access to fundamentally different skills and talent and to place equal value and afford equal status to computer scientists, data engineers and cyber operators as we do on the traditional warrior elite. I have more need of Q than I do 007.’
Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn between 1963 and 1999 and currently portrayed by Ben Whishaw, issues Bond with his gadgets.
In March, the Government’s integrated review of security, defence, and foreign policy set out plans to modernise the UK’s military, with a new focus on cyber and space warfare that is likely to see the Army shrinking by 10,000 troops. It called for the UK to establish itself as a ‘science and tech superpower’ by the end of the decade.