King, country, and a sword called Arondite

There is a knock at the airlock this week, and the King Charles III Space Station’s radar detected nothing incoming. The undetected arrival is Will Blyth: major in the Army for twelve years, infantry platoon commander in the Rifles in Afghanistan, then Palantir, then Helsing, and now founder of Arondite, the London company building Cobalt, the command-and-control layer for the robot-heavy battlefield. He has come to upgrade the station’s defences and, first, to show off: the hosts spend the opening stretch war-gaming a Donovian invasion of Wales on Cobalt’s live map — Donovia being NATO training doctrine’s standard enemy, nothing whatsoever to do with Russia — adding javelin viewsheds and enemy units to the Brecon Beacons and marvelling that government software now ships in dark mode. Behind the toys sits the serious claim: the modern battle space has hundreds of sensors, drones and robots built by manufacturers who never expected them to work together, and the question is how you orchestrate all of it, plus the humans, at machine speed.

Will’s answer starts in Helmand in 2009, where his patrol base sat a kilometre or three from the next one and, if that base was on a different VHF net, “you really never spoke to them, ever” — an information black hole courtesy not of Taliban electronic warfare but of British procurement. Fifteen years on, the reconnaissance patrol of six plucky infantrymen is three robots from three different companies, the drone you bought six months ago is already the wrong drone, and Ukraine has proved you can own ten thousand airframes and still not know where to send them. Cobalt is the answer to the common data fabric that was, in Will’s words, literally laughable in 2009 — and he wants Britain to garden its way there, with the centre setting data standards and the edges buying fast.

Britain built its entire post-war security apparatus on the belief that America would be there when it mattered, and Will — emphatic that betting against the United States is historically a losing trade — argues that recent behaviour means things can never be the same again. It is not a cheerful conversation — the ghosts of 1915 and 1937 both make appearances — but it is, in the end, a romantic one: Arondite is Lancelot's sword, unsheathed in the name of Arthurian Anglofuturism.

The episode explores

• War-gaming a Donovian invasion of Wales, live, from the Brecon Beacons down
• How British procurement, not the Taliban, made a kilometre of Helmand an information black hole
• Why the six-man reconnaissance patrol is now three robots from three companies — and why Will remains long on plucky chaps
• A weapons programme as HS2 with an active adversary, and whether Arondite has a drone for NIMBYs
• Drones as ammunition: Britain’s wartime ramp-up maths for 5.56mm and its total absence for the munition that defines Ukraine
• The 1915 shell crisis as political dynamite waiting to be re-detonated
• Procurement as gardening: data standards at the centre, fast buying at the edges
• Why a country whose infrastructure is struck day after day changes its politics very quickly — and the national conversation about sacrifice Will wants started now
• 1939, minus the rearmament programme
• The one thing that hasn’t gone wrong with Ajax
• Fifty years out: keep NATO strong, reassure the Americans, move one notch — just one — towards the French model
• Muddy boots at VC events, Lancelot’s sword, and the ideals of Camelot

Are you a general with C2 problems — and not a Donovian? Arondite is at arondite.com. Anglofuturism remains open to sponsors — get in touch with aeron@anglofuturism.co.