You may have noticed that, in all the posts, are pictures of British Army soldiers and equipment involved with field defences.

This was deliberate to illustrate a point that it is not ignoring the subject, far from it.

At unit level, in the Royal Engineers, and across the MoD such as DSTL, there are people looking, developing, testing and doing. Whether that is specialists in force protection engineering and geology, to plant operators, civil engineers and those fine people of the Engineering and Logistic Staff Corps

I would also imagine there are reservists from the agriculture, building, and forestry industry with expert levels of knowledge and experience of current practice and equipment.

Many of them won’t be in the combat engineering house either.

We actually have an almost embarrassment of riches.

To that, I would add British industry.

Again, where possible, I have showcased British manufacturers in this series, from those that make nets and fencing products, to those that build forestry trailers and cone crushers, and battle trench and shelter construction systems.

Yet more to add to the mountain of actual and potential capability we have the great fortune to sit atop.

The problems we face in ‘doing more’ are those of time and money.

These are not isolated, and neither are they divorced from institutional inertia and wanting to avoid being locked into a static mindset.

There is a danger that too much focus on defence leads to being fixed in place, isolated, and destroyed by manoeuvre

Every hour spent digging a battle trench is an hour not spent on skill at arms training, and every Pound we spend on drone nets is a Pound not spent on drones.

Field defences and force protection engineering has to compete for time in a busy training calendar and finance in an overheated budget.

It is, therefore, a discussion on organisational priorities and gazing into the crystal ball of future conflict, and not for me.

I truly hope you enjoyed reading the series, even if not wholly.

It started as a discussion of what a modern MEXE Shelter might look like and kind of snowballed from there!

In the finest tradition of the Internet ‘modest proposal’ meme, I would like to put forward a few ideas, from among the thousands of options in this series.

We could focus more on detection avoidance, in an age of pervasive drone surveillance and loitering munitions, can we rely on basic cam nets? Multispectral camouflage is not just for vehicles, it can be at the individual level. We rightly spend, £10k on optics for a rifle, is a thermal poncho really beyond us?

We could also look beyond the traditional defence primes and even defence focussed SMEs. There are hundreds of applicable systems from UK and non UK manufacturers, we can’t just publish a requirement and hope they put two and two together. Active exploitation, seeking their products, getting their technical people and users/practitioners involved. Get the MoD’s credit card out and get among them.

As I mentioned above, we have the skills, across the defence enterprise, and we even have development and experimentation units to evolve concepts. It is more difficult to say this than do this, but are we pleased with fifties era defence stores and designs national servicemen would be familiar with?

Training estate is another thorny issue that is more difficult than imagined. We could perhaps go back to BATUS, or more realistically, partner with other NATO nations and develop locations for both trials and practice.

Drones aren’t going away.

And finally, let’s realise the value of this stuff in the urban.

Thanks for your valuable time, see you in the comments.