RUSI Land Warfare Conference

Sanders lamented the state of the army’s armoured vehicles in a speech earlier this week at the Royal United Services Institute land warfare conference. He said they were like using “rotary dial telephones in an iPhone age”.The general also appeared to take a swipe at Radakin, who has argued that the UK no longer needs to prioritise tanks given recent investments made by allies such as Poland. He said it was wrong to “hide behind the armies of other Nato contributors”.

James Heappey told the Royal United Services Institute Land Warfare Conference on Tuesday that “technical infrastructure” was just as important on the battleground as the tanks that troops drive into the fight. Mr Heappey said: “Politicians have prioritised the count of tanks over the serviceability of our cranage, or the ability or the capacity of our technical workshops or our docking space.” He added that there was “no point” having lots of tanks, ships and planes if many of them do not work.

Mr Heappey told the Royal United Services Institute’s Land Warfare Conference in Westminster: “If in the 2000s the mistake was to say, ‘No more state threats, it’s all post-9/11 violent extremism’, we mustn’t make the same mistake by now saying, ‘Well, post-Russia and Ukraine it’s now all warfighting, there’s none of that’. “Because the reality is that if you look at the spread of Daesh (ISIS) and al-Qaeda affiliates across Africa, there is still plenty of violent extremism to deal with.”