Hello and welcome to this special edition of Spectator Radio. I'm Katie Balls.

What is the role of intelligence in defence? Knowing your enemy has always been vital in traditional warfare.

But with the dawn of digital technology and social media, defence seems to have taken on a different character,

one where information is not just vital to war and peace, but it's defining characteristic.

Our relations with Russia is a case and point.

Though we are not at war, the British government is constantly battling information attacks

from Moscow, whether in the form of disinformation campaigns or cyber attacks.

To win in this new age of defence, Britain establishes information advantage.

So, how well equipped are we?

To break down the notion of information advantage and what

British Defence needs to do in the 21st century, I'm joined by Professor Peter Roberts,

Director of Military Sciences at Roussey, Dominic Nichols, the Telegraphs Defence and Security

correspondent, and Simon Fovarg, the UK and Europe Chief Executive of Lydos, a technology, engineering and science solutions

and services provider, which is sponsoring this podcast. So to begin, Dominic, could you help us out

by explaining to those who are perhaps not yet in the know, but will be very much so by the end of

this podcast, what exactly is information advantage? Thanks, Keddy. It's helpful because no one's actually defined what information advantage is

that I can have a stab at it and people will take issue and that's great because it then

moulds what we understand it to be. But to my mind, at its most basic war, confrontation

is a clash between two, let's say two people

over an issue where I decide that going to war will sort it out to my advantage better than

using other mechanisms and you think the same thing and we decide to have a war and then one of

us is proved right, that's the kind of old model. So in that model decide to have a war and then one of us is proved right that's

...