Simon Chelton

Simon Chelton is an Associate Fellow at RUSI. In a long Royal Navy career as a logistics officer, he served in ships and submarines, in the Ministry of Defence and in senior officer education, both as directing staff at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, and as deputy director of the Defence Leadership and Management Centre.

He qualified as a Japanese interpreter in the 1980s and graduated from Japan’s National Institute of Defence Studies in 1995. He served as Defence Attaché in Tokyo from 2003-07. Simon left the Royal Navy in 2009 to help BAE Systems create a strategic approach to the Japanese defence market and was then regional Vice President for business development in northeast Asia. In 2012, he created his own consultancy which focuses on defence industrial relationships, primarily between the UK and Japan, but also more widely.

This work has followed Japan’s increasing engagement with global defence markets, and the development of closer security relationships with new partners. A long-term student of Japanese defence and defence industrial policy, Simon has written on Japanese and wider east Asian security issues, particularly Japan's emerging multilateral approach to security, both for RUSI and elsewhere.