Recommendation 114

Describing the key components of strategic readiness, the Minister for the Armed Forces highlighted the importance of the industrial base and its ability to increase its capacity; enablers which project and sustain the force (not just in terms of equipment and warfighters but also medical services, signallers, logisticians and engineers as well as Reserves who can form part of the second echelon force); and resilient (and therefore dispersed) warehousing and stores.228 He acknowledged that the Government needed to consider all of this as part of its future thinking: The MOD generates a first echelon force to get us into the fight. A war of national endeavour requires a whole of government, whole of industry and whole of society mobilisation to sustain us in the fight thereafter. No private business has a peacetime contractual obligation. So, thinking through how we mobilise the UK industrial base to sustain us is a really important piece of work. … We just simply have not had to think about this for a really long time. What is the skills base? What is the capacity to generate a second echelon force? How do you mobilise industry? How do you assure your supply chains? What are your access to the critical minerals, the semiconductors, and all the other things that are needed? The consideration of our national resilience and our ability to war fight will require us to consider what we need to be sovereign and then to start making policy to do so.229