Strategic leadership Seminar Series
Wednesday 16 October, 17.15
Wharton Room, All Souls College, Oxford, OX1 4AL
Strategic Leadership through the prisms of the UK Defence-UK Science-UK Industry relationship, the SDR & AUKUS.
Dr Carl Hunter
In this seminar, Professor Carl Stephen Patrick Hunter OBE will discuss strategic leadership through the prism of the UK Defence-UK Science-UK Industry relationship. He will address how UK Industry and UK Science can help the United Kingdom meet its defence and security objectives and how UK Defence-UK Science-UK Industry relationship can secure the most comprehensive possible defence enterprise.
In this complex geopolitical context, we are at a “near-war AUKUS” age. We face adversarial state threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and significant global threats such as corruption, terrorism, the growth of “ungoverned space”, a distortion of International Standards, water vulnerability, health and new pandemic risks. A National Strategy must be formulated and implemented to alleviate and address them from a health, wealth and security perspective.
Defence and Security are 2 of the 4 public service capabilities, alongside Diplomacy and Development, and mirrored by the 4 private sector capabilities of Trade, Finance, the Intellectual & Scientific and the Cultural. It is only when all 8 of the UK’s core capabilities are aligned and their interdependence understood that the UK’s most intractable problems can be identified at home and overseas. UK Science, and UK Industry must work in tandem with UK Defence and UK Security to make the next 75 years the gift that it should be for our future generations.
Dr Carl Hunter is Chairman of Coltraco Ultrasonics, a high-exporting advanced manufacturer, Director-General of the Durham Institute of Research, Development & Invention (DIRDI), Director of the Centre of Underwater Acoustic Analysis (CUAA), Professor-in-Practice at Durham University, and Chairman of the Council on Geostrategy Forum. Carl has long leadership experience in the aerospace, marine, energy, manufacturing, scientific, geostrategic and defence sectors and is committed to the development of a national strategy as part of a public service-led national, shared endeavour. Experienced in the private and public sectors, and a former Green Jacket Officer, Coltraco Ultrasonics focuses on ultrasound, acoustics, electro-magnetism and information engineering and has twice-won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2019 and 2022. Their instrumentation is aboard 20% of the world’s shipping fleet, leading allied Navies and across offshore energy. Earlier in his career, Carl was Managing Director International Markets for TIMCO Aviation Services in NC USA, becoming the largest independent aircraft engineering maintenance, repair and overhaul organisation in the world. Prior to that he was Senior Advisor International Markets to United Airlines/United Services, San Francisco CA USA, the largest B777/B747-400 wide-body and PW4090 aircraft engine operator in the world.
During COVID19 he was a member of the UK Government’s COVID19 Economic Recovery Taskforce. His company did not place anyone into furlough, instead establishing a new laboratory, co-located with the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation, part of the Department of Physics, Durham University. They developed via Innovate UK the first instrument to be able to check that negatively pressurised ICU Wards in NHS Hospitals were containing infection rather than spreading COVID19 into the rest of the hospital, which has since developed into the world’s most accurate instrument in the Built Environment to monitor building airtightness and energy loss. He advises several UK Government departments including as co-Chair of External Engagement to Director SONAC at the MoD 2022-24, where he supports Director Defence Innovation and Director UKDSE. He contributed to the Integrated Review in modest external engagement at No10.Carl is a Visiting Fellow of the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, an Honorary Fellow of the Strategy Statecraft Technology (Changing Character of War) Centre, at Pembroke College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, The Royal Institution of Naval Architects and The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology. He holds an Honorary Doctorate in Science from Durham University and Durham University Senate’s highest Dunelmensis Award, for his contribution to undergraduate development and scientific research. His research institute aims to be a strategic, nationally significant, “Ideas Factory”, bridging private sector capabilities to a public service-led scientific and geopolitical research ethos, aiming to identify and support the “Next Newton” and future UK Nobel Prize winners over 20-year periods. The CUAA is his “gift to the nation” and specifically to the Royal Navy. DIRDI consists of 325 senior academics and geo-strategists at Professor and Associate Professor level, from the Universities of Durham, Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College, University College and Kings College London. Carl was recently honoured with the OBE.
Seminars at 17.15, Wharton Room, All Souls College, Oxford, OX1 4AL.
All are welcome, no need to book.
