General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, provided at the RUSI Future Land Warfare Conference in June 2008 a clear vision on how he saw the British Army should posture itself to meet future challenges. The operational challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan have shown a clear need to evolve the British Army so that it better meets the challenges of sustaining an expeditionary land force and allows capability upgrades in the field to enable it to seize the initiative from an adaptive enemy. Ultimately, the goal for the British Army is to be able to perform major combat and stabilisation operations simultaneously and as part of an integrated strategy that supports British foreign policy. How can such a vision be implemented as part of a comprehensive programme? How can systems engineering and project management processes make this task easier to understand and manage? This is a complex issue and requires some “Plan, Design, Enable” approaches to reduce the complexity and generate solutions that meet are appropriate for the British Army.
General Dannatt stated that we are at a “Question Four Moment” which he further clarified as “that moment that occurs occasionally when the Mission hasn't changed, but the situation and circumstances around it have and so a new plan is needed. We believe that our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere have called us to question whether our previous assumptions regarding current practice and future development have been right…”.
This “Question Four Moment” might also include a re-examination of how one designs land forces and the acquisition processes needed to support them. Advances in information technology based on open

architectures, human machine interface innovations (i.e. IPODs, Wiis, Playstations, etc) and “plug and “play” modular interfaces have changed the way military systems and networks are designed and engineered to meet operational needs.
General Dannatt states key factors that have influenced his vision of the British Army for the future:
Planning for the future
“First of all, we must be clear that the Army in 2018 will be shaped by our current campaigns; we have no clean sheet of paper from which to work and we cannot go back to where we were in terms of equipment or capability in 2003. We know too much about the future now. But equally, we will be constrained in our development for the future by the need to succeed on our current operations. There is no point in developing grand sounding future concepts if we fail to resource and structure to the required standard to deliver success today…”
National Strategy
“Secondly, the National Security Strategy and all that I hear from government and other political parties leads me to believe that there is a continuing national acceptance of the need to continue to conduct discretionary military operations in support of policy liberal interventionism has wide support and within those interventions land operations will be the decisive element…”
Nature of Future Operations
“The nature of future operations will be more complex and require a very adaptive land force that need to rely on the ability to perform effective human decision making…”