Chief of Defence Staff speech RUSI Annual lecture
General Sir Nick Carter GCB CBE DSO ADC Gen, Chief of Defence Staff's speech the Annual RUSI Conference.
From:
17 December 2020 (Transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered)
It’s a great pleasure once again to be giving the annual CDS Christmas Lecture at RUSI, even if this year it feels somewhat weird doing so in an empty room and in a temporary building.
But, it has been quite a year – particularly with the announcement last month by the Prime Minister of a £24.1-billion uplift in defence spending. This is the most significant increase since the end of the Cold War, and it reverses, I think, a long period of decline. The rationale for it has been firmly established in the development of the Government’s Integrated Review of Foreign, Defence, Security and International Development Policy which will be published early next year, and we have already seen a new foreign policy posture emerging that indicates the direction of travel, Magnitsky and Hong Kong being obvious examples.