Military leadership beyond the SDR

The Strategic Defence Review will be published imminently, and the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, is due to retire in the autumn

[Note for readers: this essay is long, but then so are the Bible and Atlas Shrugged, while The Great Gatsby and the American Declaration of Independence are very short, meaning it proves nothing. As you will know, I think context is important in the examination of public policy, and there is a lot of that here; I had considered splitting it into two or more parts, but I wanted to publish it before the Strategic Defence Review is released, so I decided to get on with it.]

Defence is currently in stasis—sometimes

In mid-November 2024, the Defence Secretary, John Healey, announced in the House of Commons a number of cuts to the equipment of the armed forces, including the early retirement of HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, the Royal Navy’s amphibious assault ships currently in “extended readiness”. Anticipating criticism, he emphasised that these “difficult decommissioning decisions” had the “full backing from our service chiefs”, and offered his “thank[s to] the chiefs for their determination to work with me on this”.

This is taking part against the backdrop of the ongoing Strategic Defence Review, announced in July 2024 and being led by former Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. I argued in The Spectator and at greater length, with particular reference to the Royal Marines, that these are significant decisions to be making while the SDR is underway, as they have a direct impact on what the reviewers can consider and recommend, and limit their freedom of action. But Healey’s reference to the “service chiefs” prompts another consideration, that of leadership in implementing the conclusions of the SDR.

The initial timeframe given by the government was that the review would be published “in the first half of 2025”. That is still possible, although it is widely believed that several iterations were delivered to ministers at the beginning of this year. A fourth draft was supposedly presented in February, a level of revision which hints at problems either with the process or between ministers and the reviewers. It is likely that publication is now imminent, since the Prime Minister committed to producing the new National Security Strategy, which is being drafted by National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell and long-time Downing Street foreign affairs adviser Professor John Bew, before the NATO Summit takes place in The Hague on 24-26 June. The National Security Strategy will draw on the Strategic Defence Review and a number of other reviews taking place across Whitehall.

Assuming that the SDR, the National Security Strategy and, one would hope, other documents like the outcome of the “China audit” and the Defence Industrial Strategy are in the public domain before Parliament adjourns for the summer, there will be a short period of time for reflection and absorption before the focus needs to turn to implementation in the autumn. After all, the government is approaching its first anniversary in office; while a party which has been out of power for 14 years is perfectly entitled, and indeed well advised, to look again at some major policy areas, this process of reflection cannot be allowed to hamstring the conduct of government.

This timing is significant: the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, is due to retire in autumn 2025. He was appointed in November 2021, and there is a general assumption that the CDS will serve a term of around three years, but in March last year, the previous government announced that Radakin would stay on for a fourth year. He will reach the age of 60 on 10 November 2025.

Radakin’s appointment as Chief of the Defence Staff

If that plan remains in place, a new Chief of the Defence Staff will take up the post around the time the government gives an idea of its overall policy intentions for the rest of the parliament, reflected in the Strategic Defence Review, the National Security Strategy and other documents. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is also due to deliver the first phase of the 2025 Spending Review in June, followed by the Budget in late October or early November. The SDR may be relatively light on specific details and numbers; the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, David Williams, told the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee last month:

It is a strategic defence review that will need to be translated into a set of specific investment decisions in individual capabilities and projects. That will be work for later in the summer and into the autumn. I expect you will see confirmation of those areas of the current programme that remain critical for us to take forward to support our armed forces in the way that CDS has described, as well as pointers for those areas of new capability and new technology that the reviewers believe we should prioritise.

The understanding is that the SDR will be followed by a defence capability White Paper some time in the autumn, which will spell out how various programmes and changes to policy will work.

There has been no suggestion that Radakin will be asked to extend his tenure a second time. That he will be 60 years old is no barrier at all, as his six predecessors have all served beyond their 60th birthday. Holding the post of Chief of the Defence Staff for more than four years, however, would already make him the third-longest serving occupant since its creation in 1959, after Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1959-65) and Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Stirrup (2006-10); if he remained until the summer of 2026, he would pass Stirrup’s four years and 184 days. Next October Radakin will celebrate 35 years in the Royal Navy.

It might be worth remembering at this point that Radakin’s appointment as Chief of the Defence Staff in 2021 was a controversial one. He was the first Royal Navy officer to be given the top job in the armed forces since Admiral of the Fleet Lord Boyce (2001-03), and five candidates had been interviewed first by the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, and then the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. The other candidates were believed to be General Sir Patrick Sanders, Commander, Strategic Command; General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, Chief of the General Staff; Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Wigston, Chief of the Air Staff; and Vice-Admiral Sir Ben Key, Chief of Joint Operations.

Key was regarded as a long shot, since he was only a three-star officer, but Johnson had been keen for officers at that rank to apply in order to widen his choice of candidates. He had also impressed many, both military and civilian, in August 2021 with his leadership in organising Operation Pitting, the evacuation of civilians from Afghanistan during which the Royal Air Force flew more than 15,000 people out of Kabul in two weeks. Carleton-Smith, meanwhile, was a personal friend of the Prime Minister, having attended Eton at the same time, but was felt to be at least partially responsible for the appalling delays in the delivery of the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle, initially scheduled to be introduced in 2017 but now, due to recurring problems in trials, not due to be in service until 2028/29. Knighton was included as one of the three service chiefs but his chances were talked down.

It is believed by many that the candidate recommended by the Ministry of Defence was Sanders. He was highly regarded for his work as Commander, Strategic Command, on the armed forces’ cyber capability, integration with allies and operations below the threshold of full-scale war, showing a flexible and innovative mindset. It is hard to say whether his chances of being appointed had been affected by his admission earlier in 2021 that his combat service as a battalion commander in Iraq in 2007 had left him sometimes feeling suicidal and drinking alone in the middle of the night (one of his company commanders, Major Paul Harding, had been killed).

In the end, Johnson chose Radakin, then First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. He had won plaudits for his role in negotiating the AUKUS agreement between the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, and had overseen the deployment of the United Kingdom Carrier Strike Group 21, based on HMS Queen Elizabeth, to the Far East during Operation Fortis. That exercise was seen as embodying the “Indo-Pacific tilt” set out in the Integrated Review in March 2021. Radakin was also regarded as a capable media performer, down to earth and unstuffy and possessed of acute political antennae.

The appointment was not without its sceptics. Some anonymous critics argued that Radakin had overplayed his involvement in the AUKUS agreement, and noted that he had less operational experience than Sanders. Another issue alluded to more tangentially because of the enormous sensitivity was the then-recent suicide of Major-General Matt Holmes. The 54-year-old had been relieved as Commandant General Royal Marines in April that year after less than two years in post, ostensibly because the role was being restructured to a three-star (lieutenant-general) appointment. The changes had caused a serious rift between Holmes and Radakin, previously good friends, and Holmes was under additional pressure because of marital problems.

Less than two weeks before Holmes hanged himself at his Winchester home, firearms officers from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary had attended a welfare call at the house and had seized a licensed firearm. The depth of the disagreement between Radakin and Holmes was subsequently revealed, and there was a feeling in the Royal Navy and especially among some Royal Marines that Radakin had handled the matter ineptly and insensitively.

Nevertheless, Radakin has proved a capable Chief of the Defence Staff so far, and has dealt with a number of very challenging and often unexpected issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with aplomb. He is now serving his fourth Prime Minister, and the fact that his third, Rishi Sunak, asked him to stay on for an extra year is a sign of the confidence he has inspired in his civilian masters. He has managed to make important public statements about defence, including the likely needs of the future and the mistakes of the past, without rocking the boat in the same way that Sanders did—the Chief of the General Staff was replaced after only two years largely because he had made a number of public statements which had grated with politicians in Whitehall.

Choosing the head of the armed forces

Since the post was created in 1959, the Chief of the Defence Staff has overwhelmingly been chosen from among the service chiefs. On three occasions, however, the position has gone to the incumbent Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff: Field Marshal Lord Vincent of Coleshill (1991-92); General Lord Houghton of Richmond (2013-16); and Air Chief Marshal Lord Peach (2016-18).

The reasons behind the appointment of a particular candidate as Chief of the Defence Staff are always many and varied, spoken and unspoken. There is the constant factor of semi-friendly rivalry between the services, but this comes in part from an inescapable imbalance. At the beginning of this year, including regular, reserve and other personnel, the Army numbered 108,413, the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines 37,601 and the Royal Air Force 34, 765. So the armed forces are in no way three equal partners. In addition, for most of this century, the United Kingdom’s deployments have been predominantly on land, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, further tipping the balance of power towards the Army.

On the other hand, the Royal Navy would argue that, with its Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines and their eventual Dreadnought-class replacements, it provides the UK’s strategic nuclear deterrent, and has maintained continuous at sea deterrence (CASD) since April 1969. The purpose of this, in the government’s words, is “to protect our people and our Allies from the most extreme threats to our national security and way of life”. The Royal Navy would also argue that the strategic focus set out in the Integrated Review place a greater reliance on maritime capability than has been the case for many decades. In addition, as well as the nuclear deterrent (which in today’s prices has cost £23 billion to acquire and £3 billion a year to maintain), the Senior Service operates the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers which, at a combined cost of over £6 billion, are among our most valuable and costly assets.

The Royal Air Force is much the youngest service, coming into being only in 1918, and marginally the smallest. It is the only service the abolition of which is ever mooted. From time to time, a radical reformer will propose that the responsibility for air power could be divided between the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm and the Army Air Corps; it was, after all, created in the first place by merging the Royal Naval Air Service and the Army’s Royal Flying Corps. In 2010, for example, Major-General Julian Thompson argued in The Times that the Royal Navy should take over maritime patrol aircraft, search-and-rescue and helicopters for amphibious operations as well as responsibility for air defence of the UK, while troop helicopters (“rotary lift” in the argot) and transport aircraft (strategic and tactical lift) would be assigned to the Army. A similar idea was put forward again in The Daily Telegraph in 2015 by author and former Royal Navy officer Lewis Page.

The F-35B Lightning strike aircraft which operate from Britain’s two carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, are already operated jointly by the Royal Navy and the RAF, in 809 Naval Air Squadron and Number 617 Squadron, while the battlefield helicopters of all three services and the Army’s uncrewed aerial systems are now operated by the tri-service Joint Aviation Command. With ownership and “parent services” becoming increasingly irrelevant as joint operations become dominant, it is not an impossible stretch of the imagination to see how three services could be trimmed to two.

This inter-service rivalry has led to a now-vague but incomplete rotation of the post of Chief of the Defence Staff. Originally there was a strict system of each service taking the job in turn, reflecting the practice of the Chiefs of Staff Committee which preceded it. This had been established in 1923 to achieve better coordination of military policy and planning, learning some of the lessons of the First World War (I touched on its creation in an essay on the slow evolution of the Ministry of Defence in December 2022). Initially a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence then of the War Cabinet and eventually part of the MoD, it comprised the heads of the three armed services, though from 1940 to 1945 the Prime Minister’s Chief Staff Officer, General Sir Hastings Ismay, was also a member. The service chiefs took it in turns to chair meetings of the committee until January 1956, when a permanent post of Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee was created and Marshal of the RAF Sir William Dickson, the Chief of the Air Staff, became the first and only holder.

In January 1959, the position was recast as Chief of the Defence Staff and Dickson remained in place until July. He was succeeded by the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who served for a record six years, and then gave way to the Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Richard Hull. This rotation continued with the next four CDSs, but in January 1977, Marshal of the RAF Sir Andrew Humphreys, who had only been in office for three months, died of pneumonia. For seven months, the former First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edward Ashmore, acted as interim Chief of the Defence Staff until he was replaced by another RAF officer, Marshal of the RAF Sir Neil Cameron. In a sense, Cameron served the balance of Humphreys’s notional term, and was succeeded by an admiral and then a field marshal, but the rigid notion of rotation had been broken.

There remained and remains an incomplete sense of fair distribution, but other factors now come into play. The fact that three of the four occupants between 2003 and 2016 were generals reflected the dominance of Afghanistan and Iraq in the UK’s global deployments during that period, and Radakin’s appointment as the first CDS from the Royal Navy for 18 years, and only the second for nearly 35, was both a recognition that the Senior Service deserved a turn, but also that maritime power had been relegated to a secondary position since the end of the Cold War. So the fact that Radakin was preceded by a general and then an air chief marshal in no way indicates the rotation begins again and the RAF has its turn, but it might, in some moderate way, make the appointment of another sailor slightly less likely.

It is worth noting that while the Chief of the Defence Staff is routinely described as “the professional head of the armed forces”, the sovereign being the ultimate head, he has not been a commander-in-chief with broad executive authority. He is the principal military adviser to the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary, and sits on the Defence Council, which exercises the delegated authority of the royal prerogative and is the highest governing body of the armed forces, and the Defence Board, the Ministry of Defence’s most senior committee, responsible for leadership on all matters except military operations.

However, the three service chiefs are supported by their own committees—the Admiralty Board, the Army Board and the Air Force Board—and although they report to the Chief of the Defence Staff, they all previously had the right of access to the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister. In essence, the Chief of the Defence Staff has been more like a chairman-cum-umpire, balancing the needs and responsibilities of the three services. Direct operational command of most military deployments is overseen by the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) at Northwood in Hertfordshire, part of the tri-service Strategic Command.

Major changes have been within the Ministry of Defence, however. As of 1 April 2025, the official leadership, underneath the Secretary of State and ministers, is now divided into a “Quad”. The Permanent Secretary, David Williams, heads the Department of State, focusing on policy and interrelations with other government departments, and is principal accounting officer for the MoD. He will be supported by four directors-general responsible for strategy and transformation, people, policy and finance.

The Chief of Defence Nuclear, Madelaine McTernan, oversees the Defence Nuclear Enterprise, bringing together organisations which “operate, maintain, renew and sustain the UK’s nuclear deterrent”, including the Defence Nuclear Organisation, the Royal Navy, the Submarine Delivery Agency, the Atomic Weapons Establishment and Sheffield Forgemasters, as well as private-sector partners like BAE Systems, Babcock International and Rolls-Royce Submarines Ltd.

The National Armaments Director, a role held ad interim by Andy Street while a permanent candidate is being recruited, will run a group which brings together Defence Equipment & Support, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Defence Digital and parts of Defence Support. He or she will also have ownership of the Defence Industrial Strategy. Effectively this group will control all acquisition, procurement and maintenance (except for that which related to the nuclear deterrent), and will be responsible for most dealings with industry and academia.

The fourth part of the Quad is the Military Strategic Headquarters (MSHQ), under the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Chiefs of Staff Committee. He now formally commands the three individual service chiefs and the MSHQ is responsible for, in MoD jargon, “force design and war planning across our integrated force”; basically the combat and deployment side of the armed forces, with a separate operations budget. Through the MSHQ, the Chief of the Defence Staff will have authority not only over the service chiefs but also over Strategic Command, which directs the deployment and action of UK personnel through the Permanent Joint Headquarters, the Directorate of Special Forces, Defence Intelligence, the National Cyber Force and other bodies. This should substantially streamline many decision-making processes within the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces, though it’s worth noting that it also concentrates authority in one person to a degree the British armed forces have never seen, at least in peacetime.

The trend in modern democracies has been towards a degree of diffusion, especially between operational command and administrative issues: in the United States, for example, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking officer in the armed forces and the principal military adviser not only to the President but also to the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council and the Secretary of Defense. But he is prohibited by law from having operational command authority over the armed forces, and command and control rests with the 11 unified combat commands under their four-star combatant commanders.

What qualities does the Chief of the Defence Staff require?

As mentioned above, when the competition for a new CDS was conducted in 2021, Boris Johnson was keen to widen the potential pool of applicants and encourage three-star officers (vice-admirals, lieutenant generals and air marshals) to apply. One reason for this is the contraction of the armed forces and the consequent reductions in senior roles, to the point where there are only seven positions for four-star officers: apart from the chiefs of staff, these are the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, the NATO post of Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (DSACEUR) and Commander of Strategic Command. By contrast, in 1989, before the reduction of the armed forces which followed the end of the Cold War, there were 16 four-star posts, while the Chief of the Defence Staff was a five-star officer.¹ The list of potential candidates is therefore less than half as long as it was.

Although the pool is smaller, the choice is now much more like a competition for, say, a senior civil service role than the CDS selections of previous generations. The predominant consideration will be who the military, civilian and most of all political leadership deem the most able and suitable for the post. However, the nature of the role of Chief of the Defence Staff means that candidates will not be assessed against clear, explicit, quantifiable and published criteria, but according to a number of considerations some of which are nebulous. It is not for me to make a window into the soul of the Ministry of Defence, much less the Defence Secretary or the Prime Minister, but I will suggest what some of these are likely to be.

The first is experience and a candidate’s overall career pattern. Ideally this should be a balance of front-line operational roles, staff jobs, senior commands and organisational and administrative posts towards the top of the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence. Radakin, for example, was previously First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff; before that he was Second Sea Lord and Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff; he had been Chief of Staff at Joint Forces Command (now Strategic Command) 2016-18, Commander UK Maritime Forces and Rear Admiral Surface Ships 2014-16, Director of Force Development at the Ministry of Defence 2012-14 and Commander of HM Naval Base Portsmouth 2011-12. He had also commanded a Type 23 frigate, HMS Norfolk. So he ticked the boxes of operational command, senior staff role, working in the MoD and senior command as well as being a service chief.

Not all operational experience is the same, however. The nine Army officers to become Chief of the Defence Staff have all originally served in the infantry, tanks or the Royal Artillery; the choice has never fallen on an engineer, or a logistician, or a signaller, let alone a military policeman or a medical officer. In the same way, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton is the first Chief of the Air Staff in 105 years who is not a pilot, having joined the RAF as an engineer officer. The Royal Navy’s candidates have generally come from surface ships, though two (Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fieldhouse and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Boyce) were submariners.

Recently, the Shadow Defence Secretary, James Cartlidge, tabled a written question to the Ministry of Defence about the establishment of the MSHQ and the forthcoming appointment of a new CDS, asking “whether there is a minimum level of operational experience required”. It is not an illogical or irrelevant inquiry: if the next CDS is going to have significantly more authority over the armed forces, including operational deployments, it is perfectly reasonable to ask on the basis of what experience as well as aptitude he or she will exercise this authority. Luke Pollard, Minister for the Armed Forces, gave a generic non-answer which said “operational experience is one of the criteria for eligible candidates, along with the requisite leadership and management credentials”, and no minister was likely to be more illuminating. This may, however, sharpen already latent considerations in the minds of ministers and officials; ironically, it could see likely candidates coming from a re-narrowed pool of “fighting” sailors, soldiers and airmen rather than other equally important disciplines.

One part of the candidates’ CVs which can be particularly influential is their particular specialism or individual operations and deployments. As mentioned above, General Sir Patrick Sanders was highly rated as a potential CDS by the leadership of the Ministry of Defence because of his work in cyber capability, while Vice-Admiral Sir Ben Key, an outsider, was probably a plausible contender largely because of his direction of Operation Pitting. By contrast, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith was probably hindered by his overall responsibility for the Army, and some of the worst setbacks in the disastrous procurement of the Ajax tracked armoured fighting vehicle and various woes relating to the Boxer wheeled armoured fighting vehicle had occurred on his watch.

There is also an “X factor” which is almost impossible to define but relatively easy to spot: some senior military commanders are charismatic, popular with their colleagues and subordinates and relate well to ministers, but it is not a universal quality. When the current Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roland Walker, was appointed last year, colleagues were effusive in their praise for his personal characteristics. One contemporary from his early days said “Roly’s charming, he’s professional to the nth degree and he has a full understanding of his trade”, while Major-General Sir Christopher Ghika, who had been commissioned on the same day as Walker, added “Roly has a very good sense of how to work the very senior echelons of government… if anybody can pitch the Army’s case at the very highest level, it’s him”.

The candidates

General Dame Sharon Nesmith

Given that three of her predecessors have made the same leap, one contender must be the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, General Dame Sharon Nesmith. She was appointed in May to succeed General Gwyn Jenkins, selected by Rishi Sunak to become National Security Adviser but whose appointment was the cancelled by Sir Keir Starmer (and recently named as First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff). Nesmith has set most of the firsts for women in the British Army: the first woman to command a brigade, the first to command a division-level formation, the first to sit on the Army Board, the first to be promoted to lieutenant general, the first to reach full general and the first to serve on the Chiefs of Staff Committee.

In 2015, Nesmith was asked by a journalist if there would be a female Chief of the General Staff in the near future, and her response was part early Thatcher, part optimist. “I don’t suppose it will happen in my lifetime—but why not. Why couldn’t we?” In August 2022, she was appointed Deputy Chief of the General Staff and served for two years. She was reported to be a candidate to become Chief of the General Staff when the selection was taking place last year, along with Lieutenant General Sir Ralph Wooddisse, Commander Field Army, Lieutenant General Sir Nick Borton, Commander of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, and the ultimately successful Walker. Nesmith was described as “switched on”, but it was believed that her lack of a “combat edge” counted against her; Wooddisse and Borton are both infantry officers, while Walker had also served in the Special Air Service, while Nesmith was commissioned into the Women’s Royal Army Corps and then moved to the Royal Corps of Signals.

It is likely that Nesmith’s lack of combat experience will count against her as potential Chief of the Defence Staff. It should be remembered that she served three operational tours of the Balkans and commanded 215 Signal Squadron in Iraq in the second half of 2007 as part of 1st Mechanised Brigade in Operation Telic 10. This was very much an operational deployment to a combat zone: in six months there were 24 deaths of service personnel, 18 of them due to enemy action. Nevertheless it is true that Nesmith is not from the “fighting” units of the Army; the written question tabled by James Cartlidge, outlined above, could well be engaged if Nesmith is in the frame, and it is hard to see that it would be to her advantage.

However, it is not excessively cynical to suggest there might be a desire on the part of the Prime Minister and his advisers to take the historic step of appointing a woman to be the professional head of the armed forces. In October 2018, the then-Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, announced that he was opening all roles in the military to women, allowing them to serve in infantry units and apply to join the Royal Marines. In February 2017, Major-General Tonje Skinnarland was appointed Chief of the Air Defence (head of the Royal Norwegian Air Force), while in November 2018, Major-General Alenka Ermenc became Chief of the General Staff of the Slovenian Armed Forces and the first woman to head the armed forces of a NATO member state. In November last year, the first female head of the United States Navy was confirmed when Admiral Lisa Franchetti was sworn in as Chief of Naval Operations, and in July this year General Jennie Carignan was appointed as Chief of the Defence Staff in Canada, the first woman to be head of the armed forces of a Five Eyes country.

On the other hand, we should observe that there were several able, qualified female candidates for the role of Cabinet Secretary last autumn. Dame Melanie Dawes, Dame Sharon White and Baroness Shafik were mentioned in the media, and there were two women on the four-person shortlist, Dame Antonia Romeo, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, and Tamara Finkelstein, Permanent Secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was suggested explicitly by various sources that the Prime Minister was keen to appoint the first female Cabinet Secretary in the role’s 108-year history, but in the end Starmer chose the white, middle-aged, Oxford-educated Sir Chris Wormald. So perhaps that instinct for innovation has been overestimated.

Admiral Sir Ben Key: out of the running

Then we come to the individual service chiefs, and here matters have been complicated further in recent weeks. It was suggested on what seemed good authority late last year and early this year that the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Ben Key, had decided not to be a candidate for Chief of the Defence Staff, and instead to retire in the summer of 2025. He had told colleagues he “can’t fix the navy” due to the inadequate resources, with one noting that “he was dealt a terrible hand and hasn’t got the resources and levers he needs to fix the mess”. This was a matter of regret for many, as Key is a very well-regarded officer with experience of demanding operational situations, Operation Pitting being the most significant. However, as I said recently, he has of late had the air of a man who cannot put a brave face on adverse circumstances any more and has therefore chosen to step away from the need to dissimulate.

However, on 7 May, the Ministry of Defence confirmed media stories that Key had stepped down from his post as First Sea Lord “for personal reasons” or “private reasons”. Initially the department would not make any further comment, but it quickly emerged that he was stepping down while allegations were investigated that he had an extramarital relationship with a female officer under his command, which would fail the Royal Navy’s “service test” prohibiting relationships between commanders and subordinate officers (since Key was First Sea Lord, everyone was his subordinate except Radakin). The Ministry of Defence noted that the relationship was “consensual” but that the circumstances were “disappointing”. Given that Key had been so vocal about the need to eradicate inappropriate relationships within the navy, his position was clearly untenable.

There have been suggestions that Key’s departure was more than “a straightforward HR matter”. Given his rumoured unhappiness with the defence budget and the condition of the Royal Navy, some anonymous officers suspected that his disciplinary process had been manipulated to remove him from his post and neutralise any criticism he might make after leaving office.

I think he has been stitched up to get him out of the picture. He had constantly raised questions about the delays with new ships, funding for recruiting and the lack of frigates, and he was told to keep quiet. Now he can’t say a thing.

Another reiterated the idea.

There is literally nothing left to cut in the Navy without taking an axe to the body itself, and he may have been resistant to that. It might have been that a colleague dobbed him in to bring about his downfall.

I am sceptical of the idea of a conspiracy. On a point of principle, coincidences and cock-ups are far more common than conspiracies, but even on its own terms this suggestion does not seem wholly logical. Key had already decided to retire this year and concluded that he would not apply for the post of Chief of the Defence Staff, so his departure was already in train, and it is hard to see what a sinister cabal would gain from accelerating the process by a few months at most. The argument must be, therefore, that the circumstances of his departure—leaving under a cloud of inappropriate behaviour rather than simply retiring at the end of a long and distinguished career—would somehow detract from the effectiveness of any criticisms he might make of the Ministry of Defence or the government in retirement. That feels like a flimsy assertion: a former First Sea Lord’s views would still carry considerable weight, as the current public profile of Admiral Lord West of Spithead, who left the role of First Sea Lord nearly 20 years ago and whose brief ministerial career ended 15 years ago, will demonstrate.

It is just as possible, surely, that a former head of the Royal Navy whose departure was front-page news and around whom rumour and intrigue swirled would be able to attract more rather than less publicity if he was so minded, and I am not convinced that the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus would dismiss Key’s views on defence policy, military posture and the role and funding of the armed forces because of a professionally improper but wholly consensual sexual or romantic relationship. The notion of someone being brought down by an extramarital affair was surely given the Last Rites when Boris Johnson kissed hands as Prime Minister.

General Sir Gwyn Jenkins

Even before Key’s abrupt departure, an intriguing rumour was gaining currency: that General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, the Royal Marines officer whose appointment as National Security Adviser had been reversed by Sir Keir Starmer almost as soon as he became Prime Minister and who had been relegated to the nebulous post of Strategic Adviser to the Secretary of State for Defence, might be the favoured candidate to replace Key when he retired later in the year. Although the Royal Marines are formally a branch of the Royal Navy, and while there has never been a formal bar on the possibility, no Royal Marines officer had ever risen to the top of the service to become First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. It was a prima facie shocking and unlikely scenario, but, as I explored, there are few valid reasons to oppose it on principle and many reasons to think it should be perfectly conceivable.

Indeed, the “culture shock” argument may even have been overplayed. Many senior military personnel to whom I spoke were very relaxed about the prospect, much more likely to dwell on Jenkins’s ability and performance as an outstanding and experienced officer than on the colour of his uniform. He had, after all, served two years as Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, responsible for matters across all the services, as well as a period as Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff (Policy), sitting on the Admiralty and Navy Boards and responsible for the direction and development of the Royal Navy’s strategic policy and strategy.

Five of Jenkins’s predecessors as Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff—Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach (1976-77), Field Marshal Lord Bramall (1978-79), Marshal of the RAF Sir Peter Harding (1985), Admiral of the Fleet Sir Benjamin Bathurst (1991-93) and Admiral Sir Jock Slater (1993-95)—had gone on from the post to be heads of their individual services. It seemed to represent a kind of redemption and restitution for the sudden nature of Jenkins not taking up the post of National Security Adviser (he could not even remain in his previous role, as General Dame Sharon Nesmith had already begun her tenure as his successor as VCDS). A short period of relative inactivity as “Strategic Adviser” would soon be forgotten if he became the first Royal Marine to become First Sea Lord.

The twisting, turning saga was not yet over. On 12 May, the BBC’s Panorama revealed accusations that, during his time as Director Special Forces in 2021-22, Jenkins had allowed UK Special Forces an effective veto over applications for resettlement in the United Kingdom by former Afghan commandos who had served alongside their British counterparts. This mattered because if the former commandos were allowed to come to the UK, they could be called as witnesses to the independent inquiry into the conduct of Special Forces deployed to Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013, whereas potential witnesses outwith the UK were beyond the reach of the inquiry’s summons. There have been worrying numbers of extremely serious accusations of war crimes against Special Forces personnel, which Afghans serving with UK counterparts could have witnessed. This matter was even more serious because Jenkins had been head of Special Forces in Afghanistan in 2011-12, after serving as commanding officer of the Special Boat Service; he had received written reports of atrocities by British personnel, of which he had notified his superior, Director Special Forces Major-General Jacko Page, but he had not reported the allegations to the Royal Military Police as he was required to do, and had instead created a classified dossier and placed it in a locked safe.

We should be quite clear on this point: the claims of atrocities, of extrajudicial killings, of murdering prisoners and innocent civilians are so widespread as to be almost systemic and concealed by the connivance of senior officers reaching far up the chain of command. If true—and I do stress “if”—they would ask very profound questions about UK Special Forces as a whole, their training, discipline and ethos, and complicity within the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence. At the moment, they remain allegations. However, their gravity must surely have given pause in Whitehall as to Jenkins’s future.

Nevertheless, shortly afterwards, it was confirmed by the Ministry of Defence that Jenkins had indeed been appointed First Sea Lord. The Defence Secretary, John Healey, described him as “a proven leader with a distinguished career in both the military and at the core of government”, while Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff, under whom Jenkins had served as VCDS, acclaimed his former deputy as “one of the outstanding Royal Marines of his generation” with “the instincts and ambition needed to continue the modernisation of the Royal Navy, ensuring it can meet future threats and continue to safeguard our nation’s security and prosperity”.

It seems to me that Healey and Radakin are either allowing enormous, potentially career-ending hostages to fortune, or that they have strong reason to believe that Jenkins will not be found culpable of any serious offence in the investigation of the conduct of Special Forces in Afghanistan. If they had even slight doubts about his role and any potential liability, either legally or morally, for any atrocities which had occurred, it would surely be reckless to an incredible degree to proceed with his appointment to the most senior role in the Royal Navy, given the potential fall-out if the inquiry was substantially critical of him. The safer option would surely have been to appoint the Second Sea Lord, Vice-Admiral Sir Martin Connell, the Fleet Commander, Vice-Admiral Andrew Burns, or Admiral Sir Keith Blount, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe. (It is astonishing to think that the Royal Navy now only has one four-star or full admiral post, that of First Sea Lord, plus the possibility of four-star naval personnel serving as CDS, VCDS, Commander UK Strategic Command (never yet held by an admiral), DSACEUR or Chair of the NATO Military Committee.)

If Jenkins is judged fit and proper to be First Sea Lord, we must assume he is also at least in theory a candidate to make another leap to a role never before held by a Royal Marine and become Chief of the Defence Staff. Here, situationally it would seem unlikely, since he has only just become First Sea Lord and if Radakin were to step down in November, Jenkins would have served barely six months at the head of the Royal Navy. That would be a shorter tenure than anyone since Admiral Lord John Hay in 1886 or perhaps even Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Saunders Dundas in 1857-58. However, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Hill-Norton was First Sea Lord for just nine months (1970-71) before becoming Chief of the Defence Staff (1971-74) when the incumbent, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Michael Le Fanu, had to resign without every functionally holding the office when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is not impossible, therefore, that the Defence Secretary or the Prime Minister might view Jenkins as so overwhelmingly the best candidate for CDS that his brief time as First Sea Lord would not be treated as an insuperable obstacle.

Jenkins had been regarded as in contention for the top job before his appointment as First Sea Lord anyway. His candidacy was certainly regarded as sufficiently credible in January for attempts to be made to prevent his appointment. If we are to assume for a moment that the allegations against UK Special Forces, however accurate or inaccurate, would not disqualify Jenkins, then his record is outstanding and broad: combat deployments, including with Special Forces, operational and administrative command positions, decoration for gallantry and distinguished service, experience of policy across government as Deputy National Security Adviser for Conflict, Stability and Defence and senior roles within the Ministry of Defence including, of course, Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. It is difficult to find a significant gap in his experience, and he is said to be liked and highly rated both by Starmer and by Healey.

General Sir Roly Walker

If Jenkins were to be ruled out on the grounds that he has only just started his current role, the argument applies, albeit with less force, to the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker, who assumed his current position in June 2024. Succeeding Radakin in November this year would mean he had only spent 17 months as head of the British Army, a short period but not absurdly so. I profiled Walker in The Spectator in September 2023, when it was known that General Sir Patrick Sanders was standing down early as Chief of the General Staff after falling out with ministers, and Walker was widely assumed but not formally confirmed to be his successor.

Walker was Jenkins’s predecessor as Director Special Forces (2018-21), and before he was appointed as CGS, he was Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Military Strategy and Operations) while Jenkins was VCDS. Re-reading my analysis of him, I broadly stand by what I said nearly two years ago: he is a brave, decorated and respected officer, an Irish Guardsman before he transferred to the SAS, and has the additional and inevitable kudos of having being blown up while serving in Afghanistan (the Ridgeback Protected Patrol Vehicle in which he was travelling ran over an improvised explosive device and was thrown into the air, though thankfully no-one inside was injured).

If there were reservations about Walker when he was appointed Chief of the General Staff—and there were, albeit relatively minor—the most significant is his background in Special Forces. As I mentioned in my Spectator article, a senior officer had told The Times that Walker was “a special forces man who believes the army should be converted into small bands of determined men”, suggesting his focus might be too narrow to be responsible for the activities of the whole British Army. That, of course, is triply true in relation to the post of Chief of the Defence Staff.

This is not a fault particular to Walker. Until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the idea of old-fashioned, tank v. tank kinetic warfare had faded from the memory and started to look less and less like a feature of future warfare. Western armies, with the exception of a few early skirmished against Iraqi units both in the First Gulf War in 1991 and in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, had not engaged anything even close to a peer adversary for generations. Instead, asymmetric warfare became the fashionable concept, and counterinsurgency dominated our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. This offered a huge opportunity for special forces and similar units, and there has been a great focus on the SAS, the SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and the Special Forces Support Group in the UK armed forces, as well as the special operations-capable Ranger Regiment. Meanwhile the United States Special Operations Command boasts units like the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (Delta Force), the US Navy’s Naval Special Warfare Development Group (SEAL Team Six) and the US Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron.

This kind of warfare is still important, and it is a vital part of an ever-broader spectrum facing the armed forces. Russia in particular has shown itself very adept at recognising opportunities from mis- and disinformation through grey zone activity all the way to armoured warfare (even if its performance has not been universally good). But even the unconfirmed reports about the contents of the Strategic Defence Review have indicated the incredible variation of threats and missions which the next Chief of the Defence Staff will have to take into account: homeland defence, resilience, protection of critical national infrastructure, robust maritime patrolling and defence, maintenance of the nuclear deterrent, development of doctrine, practice and procurement of drones, conventional land warfare, anti-missile defence, space operations, cyber warfare.

Walker has certainly not shied away from the potential dangers facing the United Kingdom. Last year, he talked about a possible conflict with Russia by 2027 or 2028, and drew attention to Russia’s growing ties with China, Iran and North Korea. He has been realistic about the scale of losses Russia has suffered in Ukraine and the unlikely nature of a swift victory for either side, but has implied that a frustrated and bloodied Russia may be all the greater a threat to the West.

It is encouraging that he has made careful but measured interventions in wider public debates, arguing that investors are wrong to avoid the defence industry on moral or ethical grounds and taking issue strongly with the inclusion of defence in the same category as adult entertainment, gambling or the tobacco industry under crudely drawn ESG guidance. And he has been forceful in advocating the need to increase the British Army’s lethality. While four of the last seven Chiefs of the Defence Staff have come from the ground forces, Walker does have the air of a man who “gets it”. His operational experience is beyond question, and his nine years as Director Strategy at Army Headquarters (2015-18), Director Special Forces (2018-21) and Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Military Strategy and Operations) (2021-24) represent an impressive grounding in higher command.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton

The remaining service head is the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton. He has not yet marked two years at the head of the Royal Air Force, yet he has been in post longer than the other two service chiefs and the VCDS, which could in a slightly simplistic way give him a head start in the race for Chief of the Defence Staff. He is an engineer by training, working on the Harrier, Nimrod and Tornado F3 as an airframe specialist. It was widely noted when he was named to succeed Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston as Chief of the Air Staff that he was the first non-pilot to reach the top of the RAF in its then-105-year history.

Knighton was awarded a first-class degree in engineering at Clare College, Cambridge, as an RAF-sponsored cadet. During the Kosovo War of 1998-99, he served as Senior Engineering Officer for No. 1 Squadron, which was operating BAe Harrier GR7 strike aircraft, and he returned to the type as a wing commander in 2004 as part of the Integrated Project Team for the Joint Force Harrier, based at RAF Wyton and examining how commercial industry partners supported the maintenance and repair of the RAF and Royal Navy’s Harrier fleet. In 2007, he was appointed Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff Strategy and Plans at RAF Air Command, then, after attending the Royal College of Defence Studies, became Logistics Force Commander for the RAF and Station Commander of RAF Wittering. In 2011, Knighton became Director of Air Plans at the Ministry of Defence, then established and led the Future Combat Air System programme exploring the possibilities of unmanned combat air systems and the options of extending the service life of the Eurofighter Typhoon, replacing it with additional Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightnings or developing a new aircraft. (The last has matured into the tripartite Global Combat Air Programme which will deliver the Tempest.)

From 2015 to 2017, Knight served as Assistant Chief of the Air Staff, then Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Capability and Force Design) (2017-18) and Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Financial and Military Capability) from 2018 to 2022. For a year he was Deputy Commander (Capability) at Air Command at RAF High Wycombe, responsible for the strategic planning and delivery of all aspects of the Royal Air Force’s capability, including people, equipment, infrastructure, and training; in effect, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, as which the role was renamed when Knighton moved up to be Chief of the Air Staff in June 2023.

As an engineer, Knighton does not have operational experience in the traditional sense. He does have formidable experience of the Ministry of Defence and of the senior echelons of his own service, a high degree of technical expertise and an understanding of how equipment works in terms of procurement and development. He is reckoned to know how HM Treasury operates with regard to defence, and a friend told The Times that he has the “deepest expertise in the MoD and Whitehall, which will be crucial in implementing the recommendation of the [strategic defence] review”.

Knighton certainly grasps some of the challenges in terms of recruitment and retention, saying in an interview shortly after his appointment:

People who can program, people who understand some of that digital technology, understand cyberspace, and are able to understand space and are able to make sure that we are extracting the maximum value out of the investment we’ve already made and exploiting that technology that’s emerging. We’ve got to offer people exciting opportunities that they can’t get working for Google or for Microsoft or for a local garage. And I think we still offer those things. We offer the opportunity to do things you can’t do elsewhere. And we offer a wider set of opportunities around the camaraderie, the spirit, and the community that we join.

It hinges on what the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister want from the next Chief of the Defence Staff. Does the fact that a candidate has never been in a slit trench firing a rifle at the enemy in close proximity matter, compared to experience of dealing with multi-billion pound equipment projects, rapidly developing technology and the future geopolitical context in which the armed forces will operate? What elements are required for credible and effective leadership of the armed forces as a whole, especially with the establishment of the Military Strategic Headquarters? Recent rumours suggest Knighton is now the front-runner to become CDS, and rumours are more often accurate than we like to remember, but nothing is certain until the decision has been taken.

General Sir Jim Hockenhull

The remaining “mainstream” four-star officer is General Sir Jim Hockenhull, Commander of UK Strategic Command. He has been in post for three years, so, while it is a basic and simplistic consideration, moving to a new position would not be premature. Unusually among the most senior echelons of the armed forces, he is a career intelligence officer, having been commissioned into the Intelligence Corps after graduating in politics from the University of York in 1986.

Hockenhull served three operational tours in Northern Ireland with the Joint Support Group as detachment and company commander then as commanding officer. He was Chief Campaign Plans at the Headquarters Multi-National Force—Iraq in 2005-06, and was deployed to Afghanistan as Chief Plans at the Headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in 2008 and Director of the Ministry of Defence Advisory Group in Kabul from 2012 to 2014.

In staff terms, he had held a variety of positions: Deputy Director Force Development at the Ministry of Defence (2006-08), Director ISTAR at HQ Land Forces (2009-11), Head Military Strategic Planning at the MoD (2011-12), Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence (2014-15), Director Cyber, Intelligence and Information Integration, Ministry of Defence (2015-18) and Chief of Defence Intelligence (2018-22). In addition, in 2003 he was British Exchange Instructor at the United States Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Hockenhull’s career stands out sharply from those of his colleagues. He has obviously spent a number of years in intelligence-related roles—at a senior level, from 2009 to 2011 and 2014 to 2022—but can also point to operational deployments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while his tours of duty in Northern Ireland show he has served at the sharpest and in some ways most hazardous end of irregular warfare; intelligence roles in Northern Ireland have never been for the faint-hearted. It is also worth noting how many of his appointments have been joint ones rather than single service: 2005 to 2008 and 2011 to date.

On the publication by the Ministry of Defence of considerable amounts of intelligence relating to Russia and the conflict in Ukraine, Hockenhull has said that “it’s important to get the truth out before the lies come”, showing that he understands the breadth of the threat that Russia poses and the different ways in which the UK and its allies will have to meet that challenge. In particular, he has paid attention to the ongoing threat of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons, a gambit to which President Vladimir Putin has often alluded in an attempt to intimidate Ukraine’s Western allies into inaction.

As head of Strategic Command for the past three years, he has essentially been in charge of delivering defence policy and maintaining the armed forces. As the organisation’s website explains, Strategic Command is responsible for preparing for and managing joint force operations, via the Permanent Joint Headquarters and UK Special Forces, providing leadership in the cyber and electromagnetic domain, educating and training service personnel and Ministry of Defence civil servants, providing information and communications technology, the health of the armed forces through Defence Medical Services, logistics, engineering and equipment support and supplying intelligence to policy-makers both in the MoD and across government through Defence Intelligence.

Hockenhull calls himself “the Accidental General”. While his ambition was to join the Army—his father was an NCO in the Royal Navy then a taxi driver—he did not expect to rise to the highest ranks, and still, as a four-star general, does not see himself primarily in leadership terms.

My role is to support people. So I really don’t command. My job is to support, enable, empower and help people be what they can be. My job is to help them be successful. My job is not to be very grand about anything. My job is to get down and help… I never really expected to be here. But whilst I am here, I want to do the maximum good I can and crucially make it work for the organisation.

It is not to detract from the other candidates to suggest that Hockenhull’s straightforward, low-key approach might resonate with the current government. Remember the speech Sir Keir Starmer when he arrived in Downing Street on 5 July 2024 and the kind of rhetoric he used.

Our country has voted, decisively for… a return of politics to public service… My government will serve you… You have a government unburdened by doctrine, guided only by a determination to serve your interests… I invite you all to join this government of service, in the mission of national renewal.

Whether or not you feel that the Prime Minister has lived up to those sentiments, it is easy to see a shared notion of unshowy duty and dedicated with which he and Hockenhull would feel comfortable. That said, Hockenhull was reported to have turned down the opportunity to be considered for Chief of the Defence Staff in 2021.

There were a number of people invited to apply. My sense then was that there were better people, who were better suited to have that sort of leadership role… I’m not convinced that would have been the right job for me, and that I would have been the right person to do that… I think there’s an important element for all of us, to try and understand ourselves and understand not only our abilities, but also we should be able to recognise our own limitations… me serving in Strategic Command offers a better contribution to UK defence than it would have been me trying to compete for a job where I think actually I wouldn’t have been the right choice and where there were people far more suited to that role that I would be.

Those comments have to be taken on board, but so too does Hockenhull’s use of the past tense: “my sense then”, “there were better people”, “I wouldn’t have been the right choice”, “there were people far more suited”. In 2021, when he was a three-star Chief of Defence Intelligence, all of that may have been true. It does not necessarily mean that it remains true after promotion and three years at Strategic Command.

Other candidates

At the beginning of the year, there was a suggestion that a senior officer could be brought out of retirement to succeed Radakin. The two names suggested were General Sir Patrick Sanders (59), Chief of the General Staff 2022-24, and General Sir Nick Carter (66), who previously served as Chief of the Defence Staff from 2018 to 2021 and before that was Chief of the General Staff 2014-18. In all honesty, I never thought this was a likely scenario. Apart from anything else, to have appointed either officer would have been effectively to tell the armed forces that none of their four-star or even three-star commanders was good enough to be Chief of the Defence Staff. Both are highly respected officers: Saunders, as mentioned above, was the Ministry of Defence’s choice for CDS in 2021 but Boris Johnson chose Radakin instead, and Carter actually held the position for three years.

Saunders was removed from his post early by the previous government for being too vocal about where he thought defence policy was wrong and failing, and I have no reason to think that the incumbent Prime Minister and his ministerial colleagues are any more open to public challenge. Indeed, it was reported in March that Downing Street was preventing senior military personnel from speaking openly about the Strategic Defence Review.

Carter, meanwhile, has a reputation as a fearless moderniser who advocated higher defence spending while in office. He also pledged firmly that he would not allow vexatious legal claims against service personnel for actions while deployed in Northern Ireland, a subject of ongoing sensitivity, and faced some criticism from former United States senior officers (admittedly refuted by others). Both Carter and Saunders would seem to cause as many problems from the government’s point of view as they would solve.

The other possibility raised, reflective again of anxiety that the obvious candidates might in some way each be unsuitable, was to look beyond existing four-star officers. As one MoD source put it, “the other option is you jump a couple of ranks, and rather than pulling in old people you bring in new”. As we saw above, this was an option Boris Johnson wanted to explore in 2021, and Ben Key was regarded as a plausible candidate despite only being a three-star officer as Chief of Joint Operations. It should not be out of the question for an outstanding three-star to leapfrog his senior colleagues and go to the very top of the armed forces, but equally it should only be a viable option for an officer of exceptional ability and/or in the event of a dearth of four-star candidates.

The only three-star who seems to me even a possible contender is Lieutenant General Sir Robert Magowan, a Royal Marines officer who was until very recently Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Financial and Military Capability) and a two-time former Commandant General of the Royal Marines (2016-17 and 2022-23). He served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has worked for the Cabinet Office Assessment Staff and in Defence Intelligence, and was Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff (Capability) and Controller of the Navy (2017-18), Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Capability and Force Design) (2018-20) then Deputy Commander UK Strategic Command (2020-22). As part of the Defence Reform programme, he has been appointed to a new role of Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Force Development), which may indicate he is not seen even as an outsider to become CDS.

Lieutenant General Nick Perry is the Chief of Joint Operations, the role held by Admiral Sir Ben Key when he was considered as a possible CDS four years ago. Like Walker and Jenkins, his background includes Special Forces: he was Commanding Officer of the SAS from 2012 to 2015 and Director Special Forces from 2022 to 2024. He has operational experience in Afghanistan, and commanded 16 Air Assault Brigade 2017-19; he has also served in several roles in London, including Military Assistant and Private Secretary to the Prime Minister (2015-17), Director of Capability Joint Plans at the Ministry of Defence (2019-21) and Assistant Chief of the General Staff (2021-22). Perry took up his current position as Chief of Joint Operations last November. Given his recent appointment and relatively junior status, it is hard to see why he would be preferred over any of the more conventional candidates.

Who? Who?

Larisa Brown, Defence Editor of The Times, has reported that there is a shortlist of four candidates: Nesmith, Walker, Knighton and Hockenhull. That would certainly be a plausible scenario. One difficulty in appointing Knighton would be that neither the Chief of the Defence Staff nor the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff (Nesmith) would have any front-line operational experience; while it would be possible for one of those posts to be held by someone who has not been on the front line, is it tenable for both? Nesmith could perhaps switch places with Walker and become Chief of the General Staff, if Walker was willing to become VCDS, perhaps with a hint that he might be favoured as Knighton’s successor (if the next CDS serves three or even four years, his or her successor is likely to be appointed by the current government).

The Whitehall rumour mill is neither infallible nor representative of an unchanging truth. Brown is an experienced journalist with a solid grounding in defence and security, and I don’t doubt she is accurately reporting what she is being told by sources of all kinds across government. Again, however, I return to the appointment of the Secretary to the Cabinet last December; sources within government claimed that Sir Olly Robbins was all but a shoo-in and had a good relationship with the Downing Street Chief of Staff, Sue Gray, or the Prime Minister wanted to look beyond Whitehall and/or to appoint the first female Cabinet Secretary, or Dame Antonia Romeo was neck-and-neck with Robbins. There was very little discussion of the candidacy of Sir Chris Wormald, a male, Oxford-educated mandarin who had never worked outside Whitehall, yet it was Wormald who was appointed.

So Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the longest-serving of the service chiefs, is tipped as the front runner. That is perfectly possible and he would bring many strengths to the role, as would Walker. Nesmith is more of question mark, not least because, obviously, she is the highest-ranking woman in the history of the armed forces, so she is continuously creating precedents. It is not impossible that, even if only the four candidates mentioned above have been interviewed, an appointment could come from left field.

My hunch, and it is no more than that, is that General Sir Jim Hockenhull will get the nod, and there are many reasons, as I have touched on above, to think that he might be an extremely effective Chief of the Defence Staff. He is from a slightly different mould from his predecessors, but that is not in principle to his detriment. If I were the Prime Minister, it is his background, experience and skill set I would find most interesting, given the challenges which lie ahead in implementing the Strategic Defence Review. But we will see soon enough.

1. First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, Chief of the General Staff, Chief of the Air Staff, Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Military Representative to NATO, Second Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Personnel, Commander-in-Chief Fleet, Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command, Master-General of the Ordnance, Quartermaster General to the Forces, Adjutant General to the Forces, Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces, General Officer Commanding British Army of the Rhine, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Strike Command, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Support Command.