Jason Alderwick

One time Royal Navy Officer and former IISS Defence Analyst now works in defence. Loves family, food and politics in that order. All tweets my own views etc...

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

@BloodyPolitics @UKDefJournal Ramp riding at its finest

[IISS News @IISS_org]

Control and security of chokepoint and sea-lanes of communication has become increasingly debated in light of the war in the Gulf.

This research paper analyses why and how maritime Southeast Asian states are seeking to develop and implement anti-access/area-denial strategies and capabilities to respond to major conflicts.

Find out more I Dr @EvanLaksmana I https://t.co/0A9nBxd8AY 

IISS Shangri-La Dialogue   
29–31 May 2026 
#IISS_SLD26   
https://t.co/aj642880tE

[Lord Hanson of Flint Labour Peer & Minister @RTHondavehanson]

In a corner of parliament at the far end of the Royal gallery a box lies permantly open containing sand from all five Normandy beaches -a reminder to both houses of the sacrifice & the cause of freedom fought for by brave service people on DDay June 6 th 1944. #DDay

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

This cheered me up @gregbagwell you may have a full time job given your new hobby and it's no less important!

[Greg Bagwell @gregbagwell]

@johnkonrad Having retired over 10 years ago, after 36 years fighting & working alongside my American allies, I mostly marshal(l) my pension these days. But my new hobby is to marshal(l) misinformation and conspiracies on here - turns out that’s a full time job with all the nut jobs on here.

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

@BenWallace70 @BowesChay Facts should define his narrative apparently 🙄

[David Taylor MP @DavidTaylor85]

Yesterday I went to @DefenceHQ to speak to the Defence Secretary @JohnHealey_MP and to receive briefing about UK-Japan security relations in my role as Trade Envoy.

The UK and Japan have shared values and I'm looking forward to continuing the good work we do together.🇬🇧🇯🇵

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger on Brexit: “Putin would have been absolutely delighted by our decision.”

“So would Xi. France has effectively eclipsed us. Brexit has marginalised us.” Most striking of all: “Just nobody mentions the UK.”

Very sad that Sir Alex Younger, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, born on July 4, 1963, died of pancreatic cancer on June 2, 2026, aged 62

[UK in Singapore 🇬🇧 @UKinSingapore]

The UK is proud to participate in the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore with our largest ever delegation.

It reflects our deep commitment to the Indo-Pacific region and to working alongside our partners to support stability, security and shared prosperity. 🇬🇧🇸🇬 #IISS_SLD26

[ben moores @benmoores2]

@MtarfaL @larisamlbrown @gjb70 We have a cultural bias to trade out people & infra in place of the kit we cant afford. We dont value & then blame the people who deliver the kit. If we had the cultural freedoms to take risk on alternatives and properly fail occasionally we would be in a better place.

[Greg Bagwell @gregbagwell]

A few months ago five UK veterans sat down and decided to add their voices to a National Conversation about Defence & National Security. This book (out Monday) is the result. In 10 short chapters it covers different aspects of a future conflict only 4 years hence.🧵1/8

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

@benmoores2 Good god man get a tie on!

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

Curiously I feel the bond markets may stage an intervention on our behalf...

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

In 1851, physicist Léon Foucault hung a pendulum from the ceiling of the Panthéon in Paris and proved the Earth was rotating, just by watching it swing.

No satellites or computers needed. Just a weight on a wire.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

In a workshop on the outskirts of Bletchley (it had to be there, didn't it), on the 26th of March this year, a small British company called Pulsar Fusion did something that has not been done by any other company or government on Earth.

It ignited a controlled plasma inside the test chamber of a working nuclear fusion rocket engine.

The plasma held, along with the chamber. The fusion reaction was the kind of reaction that, contained inside a sufficiently engineered magnetic bottle, will one day take a crewed British vehicle to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months, and that will, within the working lifetime of the engineers presently building it, make the outer planets of the solar system accessible to anyone with a British passport.

The geography of the achievement deserves a longer moment of pause. Bletchley, in 1942, was where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma cipher and almost certainly shortened the war in Europe by two years. Pulsar Fusion's headquarters sits roughly 600 yards from the Hut where they did it.

The country that did the maths inside that hut has just, less than a mile down the road, ignited the plasma that could power the next century of human space travel. There is a continuity of British scientific lineage here that is, on the face of it, almost embarrassingly providential, and it is almost completely unreported in the British press.

It's not quite Kitty-Hawk-to-the-moon in 61 years, but it's close.

Like so many great companies of profound importance, Pulsar Fusion is pretty small. It was founded in 2013, and employs around 50 staff. Its chief executive, Richard Dinan, is a working British physicist who has spent the last decade quietly assembling the team and the capital to do what the world's national space agencies have been promising for 60 years and consistently failing to deliver.

The competing American programmes, principally at NASA's Glenn Research Center and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, are years behind on the propulsion side. The competing Chinese programmes are obscure but, on what is known publicly, also behind. The European Space Agency is, as ever, organising a workshop. Pulsar fired its plasma in March and has been preparing the next-stage tests in the months since.
What this kind of capability means, when commercialised, is genuinely vast.

The economic argument for getting a payload to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months is not principally about the human passengers, though there is one. It is about cargo. Given a 30-day transit, Mars becomes a logistically tractable destination for the kind of infrastructure-build that turns it from a flag-planting science mission into a working industrial site.

The argument for the outer planets is even larger. The asteroid belt alone, on conservative mineralogical estimates, contains more economically viable platinum-group metals than the entire crust of the Earth has been mined for in industrial history. The first country with reliable fusion propulsion is the first country with reliable access to that supply. The country that holds that capacity, fifty years from now, will be holding the most consequential industrial advantage of the 21st century, and there is no obvious second prize.

The standard British response to this kind of thing is to either ignore it entirely, sell the company to an American buyer at series B (the DeepMind path) for fire-sale prices, or fund it at the level of a Whitehall departmental tea and coffee budget (the Skycutter and Orbex paths).

The standard British response will not be sufficient. Pulsar Fusion needs the kind of patient capital that turns a working demonstration into an operational engine, and that, in turn, into a manufacturing capability. The British state, on present form, is structurally incapable of providing it, British pension funds are structurally incapable of investing in it, and the British political class will, on present form, only notice if it somehow manages to swing a leadership election.

I wantt= Pulsar Fusion treated as a national-strategic asset, and beyond that as a potential subject of national destiny.

The Sovereign AI Fund that backed Ineffable Intelligence has a clear template. The Prosperity Zone programme we designed at Progress that anchors heavy industry at SaxaVord and Teesside has the geographic flexibility to include a fusion-propulsion cluster in Buckinghamshire, six miles from the most evocative site in modern British scientific history.

The procurement architecture of every major British defence and space agency should, from this autumn, be writing offtake contracts contingent on Pulsar's milestones. There's nothing extreme about these ideas. We could have been doing it decades ago.

I always conceived of Britain as being as much among the stars as it is on Earth. To buy into the idea of Britain as a culture and polity is necessarily to buy into the concept of the human being as an illimitable force. Our history is littered with happy instances of people of great fortitude hitting upon obstacles and, with a cry of "This will not stop us", clearing the way for our brothers and sisters to follow through.

A small British company in Bletchley has, while nobody was looking, extended that arm of our tradition, by accomplishing one of the most important pieces of scientific engineering of the decade.

The country that produced them is, in a measurable sense, the same country that produced the Bombe, the Colossus, the jet engine, the structure of DNA, and the World Wide Web. The capacity is intact. The political class capable of recognising it must catch up, and will.

[🥥 𝙇𝘼𝙏𝘼𝙈 🥥 @TheLatamGuy]

In the 1980s, Brazil’s elite CIGS (Jungle Warfare Training Center) in Manaus had rescued jaguars roaming free during PT as a way to build soldiers' mental fortitude and get them accustomed to realities they may encounter in the jungle | 🇧🇷🐆

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

Some sad shit right here but 😆none the less

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

@LTGHRMcMaster @cepa It’s good in part but seems to ignore the policy challlenges across NATO-EU coherence and no covererage on UK-EU where addressing the defence coherence and industrial cooperation piece is critical.

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

Iran War not going so well … ahhh look ALIENS…

[Jason Alderwick @JasonAlderwick]

@benmoores2 A good summary of the challenge in only one sector of defence 😭