About this episode

Will Blyth discusses advancements in military technology and battlefield strategy with hosts Tom Ough and Calum Drysdale.

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…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale

Guest: Will Blyth

Topics covered

• military technology
• robotics
• battlefield strategy
• defense systems
• NATO training
• information warfare

Keywords

• Cobalt
• robot-heavy battlefield
• command-and-control
• sensors
• drones
• infantry
• military procurement

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Palantir, Helsing, Arondite

Places: Wales, Brecon Beacons, Helmand, Donovia, Afghanistan, NATO

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