Britain could be drawn into a major conflict within three years, yet its armed forces remain trapped in a previous era of warfare, according to a government minister delivering one of the most candid threat assessments heard from a serving senior figure in recent memory.
Al Carns, minister of state for the armed forces, has broken from the measured language of government to deliver a blunt verdict on the country's military preparedness.
"When it comes to deterring Russia, we have three to five years before we have to fight a significant confrontation with a major state, a geographically constrained conflict in some shape or form," he is reported to have said. "And the reality is, whether we like it or not our military in a lot of cases hasn't changed from the Eighties and Nineties. We've got to move faster, and on everything."
Carns cuts a different figure from most of those who hold ministerial office. Until two years ago he was a colonel in the Royal Marines, having devoted the majority of his 24-year service to the Special Boat Service (SBS) and earning multiple gallantry medals in the process.
His journey to minister of state for the armed forces has been swift — he was first elected as a Labour MP just 20 months ago. The 45-year-old Scot, raised on a council estate, is already being discussed among his 2024 intake colleagues as a future Labour leader. When given repeated opportunities to rule it out during an interview this week, he declined to do so six times.
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During an interview with the Telegraph, Carns outlined how the Ukraine's war, entering its fifth year this week, proved the turning point in Carns's life. After spending time in Kyiv observing the battlefield firsthand, he was brought into the Ministry of Defence to update the military's most senior figures on the pace of change he had seen on the ground. Promotion to brigadier was two days away, with the rank of general a realistic prospect beyond that.
"I walked out of the room and I don't think everybody got it," he recalled. "The world of warfare is changing to such an extreme but I didn't think the system was going to move as fast as I wanted to.
"So at that very moment, within four steps out of that office, I said, 'I've got to leave and make this change or we're going to lose lives.' I wanted to change the country to get it ready so I stepped aside and went into politics."
Above all else, it is drone warfare that dominates Carns's thinking on military reform. The technology has moved so far so fast that even the conflict's opening two years now look like a different age. Two statistics frame the transformation: one drone now delivers the same lethal effect as 22 artillery rounds, while drones account for 87 per cent of every casualty sustained along Ukraine's front line.
To put the magnitude of that shift into perspective, he turned to an agricultural comparison.
"It's like a farmer using a scythe, and then he sees a combine harvester," he said. "It's that type of moment we're at. You've got to see it to believe it.
"The army and the Marines are training a sniper to shoot one round 800 metres, from the point of aim to the point of impact. I could train my son in two weeks to kill you from 45 kilometres away with a fibre optic drone. So have we got the balance right?
"I'm pushing really hard to move as fast as possible on drones and autonomous systems, and can they be overlaid with AI, with the AI revolution taking hold in the military space?"
He distilled the argument to its essence: "Whoever integrates drones, autonomy and AI into the way we fight will win the next conflict."
