The Ground Truth - April 2026
The defence community has stopped being polite
Even the Defence market cannot escape the Year of the Horse; the mood has shifted across government, industry and the Armed Forces where the gap between rhetoric and long-promised plans has become too wide to excuse with polite optimism. This month’s (April) Ground Truth with me and Dr. Hugo Rosemont covered six moments that defined that shift: from a pin-drop silence in Salisbury to a hand-raise in a lecture theatre at the Defence Academy, and a lot in between.
Every month Hugo and I dive into the monthly Rosemont Report, expanding on what has happened in the last 30 days. Hugo is the Whitehall barometer, and I am the industry translator. You can watch the full April episode of The Ground Truth here.
1. The Pin Drop
The moment of the month came on 14 April in Salisbury, when Lord Robertson, the government’s own lead reviewer for the Strategic Defence Review, delivered what amounted to a public indictment of the political class. Hugo was in the room and reported you could hear a pin drop as Lord Robertson argued what would have been almost unthinkable from a figure of his standing even a year ago, he called for defence to be funded by shifting money from the welfare budget.
The government had received a serious set of recommendations. It was not implementing them at the pace the threat environment demands. Incremental pressure will no longer work. It is not just Lord Robertson, the market increasingly and collectively feels the system needs a shock. There are many who have called out the Defence Investment Plan delay, but this was not a think-tank paper or an opposition attack, it was the government’s own man, in public saying that support for Defence is not good enough and not fast enough.
2. The London Defence Conference: A Tale of Two Days
The London Defence Conference the following week crystallised the same tension. The morning of the first day brought Defence Secretary John Healey to the stage for a fireside chat with LDC organiser Iain Martin. Asked directly whether the UK is ready for war, Healy responded “yes, we are ready.” The audience that spanned senior figures from across the defence and security sector, including the Heads of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), did not agree. Sitting in the audience, I observed people muttering “disgraceful” and “appalling” under their breath as they shook their heads at Healy’s statement. The dissonance was stark: there is no Defence Investment Plan, there is no funded programme, “Ready” was not a word that matched the room’s experience of reality. Especially when prominent members of the US Congressional delegation indicated that even the US is not ready, let alone the UK. They also shared a strong sentiment that the US is with Europe, and will remain so.
Day two felt like a different conference. The leader of the opposition, Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch delivered her first significant defence speech as leader of the opposition. It was energetic, substantive, and energised the audience. Armed Forces Minister Al Carns followed with enough conviction to claw back some credibility for the government. The event didn’t collapse. The contrast between the two days was sharp enough to become the talking point of the conference, and as Hugo noted may well have been part of what finally prompted Robertson’s intervention.
3. When Politics Stalls, Industry Leads
The most important observation from this month did not come from a speech, it came from watching where the real work is happening.
With political leadership under pressure, the Defence Investment Plan still unpublished, the operational momentum in UK defence is increasingly being driven by industry. Programme managers, contract officers, SME partnerships, bilateral commercial relationships: this is where decisions are being made and where relationships are being built. The diplomacy, as we put it at the LDC, is happening at the corporate and commercial level.
This was reinforced at the Red Queen event in California, hosted by the Common Mission Project, where senior budget-holders and authority-figures from the US, UK, and NATO sat alongside some of the best tech companies in the world, not to network, but to actually work through the gap between good intentions and operational reality, and the collaboration was genuine. The lesson was consistent with what we heard at the LDC: the people doing the work are not waiting for political permission and they are now actively influencing what we all feel to be a high-stakes geopolitical environment. With this level of diplomacy at the commercial level, it will be interesting to see if the political level can move fast enough to channel industry’s pace rather than simply observe it.
4. The King’s Visit: What It Actually Means
His Majesty’s state visit to Washington was, by any reasonable measure, a success. Two major addresses, to a joint session of Congress and at a state banquet, placed defence and national security at the heart of the UK-US relationship. Support for Ukraine, NATO, AUKUS: all front and centre, all well-received, including by sceptics in Congress. The King’s remark that without Britain, Americans would be speaking French landed with characteristic good humour. Hugo’s verdict: rumours of the demise of the special relationship are grossly exaggerated.
That said, we should be pragmatic. The relationship between the current Prime Minister and the current US administration has been choppy. The visit was a useful reset, and I think we all know it is not a permanent fix. The broader picture of the UK government simultaneously trying to deepen ties with European defence partners (while continuing to spend millions on US defence companies) reflects a more complex strategic geometry than the special relationship alone captures. For companies and organisations operating across both the US and European defence markets, the tectonic plates may be shifting slightly, but the opportunities are live on both sides and neither can be neglected.
5. Political Turbulence: What Stays Steady
Against the backdrop of Labour rebellion and serious questions about the Prime Minister’s political survival, three defence ministers, Healey, Pollard, and Carns, have not moved. I think this is for two reasons. First, these ministers understand the seriousness of Defence’s current predicament of no DIP against a backdrop of America’s $1.5T budget and Europe crowding capital at the rate of knots and them moving on would cause a level of instability that is truly untenable. Second, former Defence ministers who have served for mere months list their Defence ministerial experience first in their resumé. Defence is prestigious, even when unfunded. The fact that these three are holding their positions sends a signal about how seriously the centre is treating defence, even if the pace of delivery does not yet match the seriousness of intent.
The appointment of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a senior advisor with a specific brief around harnessing private finance for defence is another data point in the same direction. The government understands the problem: public spending alone will not close the capability gap, and private capital needs to be mobilised at scale. Whether Gordon Brown is the mechanism to achieve that, and whether the Prime Minister will still be in position to make use of him in the weeks ahead, remains to be seen. The Treasury remains the real structural blockage, as Robertson made explicit. The Defence Investment Plan’s continued absence is the most visible symptom of that friction.
6. The AI Hand-Raise: The Bigger Question It Points To
Last week, at the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham, a simple question produced a striking answer. Rachel Braun Schoenfelder, co-founder of an agentic AI defence company in stealth, asked the assembled cohort of the Advanced Command and Staff Course, around 290 officers, tri-service and international, how many of them were actively using AI tools: Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, etc.. Last year, she asked the same question of a similar cohort, and maybe just less than a third raised their hands. She asked the question again this year, every single person raised their hand.
This shift is not trivial; an entire generation of officers is now AI-native in their personal practice. The problem is that most of that engagement is happening outside official systems, because the official systems have not been reformed to accommodate it. Open-source reporting already points to classified information leakage as the pressure spills outward. The instinct from the centre has sometimes been to focus on who broke security protocol. That conversation is necessary but Hugo argued is not sufficient. The system has a responsibility to build the infrastructure that makes workarounds unnecessary, not simply to enforce against the workarounds that the failure to build that infrastructure has made inevitable.
There is a bigger strategic question underneath the tactical one. If AI genuinely frees officers from administrative burden, and it will, what kind of officer should we be developing? How should a defence education system optimise for what that future looks like? How do we develop, educate and train officers who are more creative, more capable of complex operational design, more steeped in the theory and practice of warfare, rather than simply more efficient at tasks that AI can now handle? That debate is beginning in academia. Given the adoption level of AI in individual officers, this thinking will need to move fast inside the institution.
The Ground Truth
April was a month in which the defence community’s patience ran visibly shorter. Lord Robertson said in public what many have been saying in private. The LDC showed the gap between ministerial confidence and sectoral confidence in sharp relief. Underneath the political noise, the real work, the partnerships, the commercial relationships, the operational problem-solving, continued at pace, driven by people who are not waiting for a political green light.
The concrete action from this month is simple, and it came from a lecture theatre in Shrivenham. When Rachel asked those officers how many had recently picked up the phone to call a tech company, not to procure, not to tender, just to learn, three or four hands went up. Her response was direct: call them. They are waiting for you. It is imperative we build trust between industry and defence at a sub-political level, and I argue that moment is now.
The political situation will resolve itself, one way or another, for better or worse. The threat environment, and our enemies, will not wait for it to do so.
The Ground Truth is a monthly podcast from Dr. Ali Hawks and Dr. Hugo Rosemont, unpacking developments across UK defence and national security from Whitehall policy to MOD buying behaviour.