Calibre interview: Rob Taylor, Managing Director of 4GD

A soldier moves down a narrow corridor with a rifle to his shoulder, he hears the voice of someone up ahead and stops. The voice has heard him and his section approaching, moving quickly. the soldier advances bursting into a room to his right. The figure shouts in surprise and three gunshots ring out. A whistle sounds, bringing the exercise to a stop and an instructor enters the room. He was watching the entire procedure from the 4GD top-down After Action Review system and observed the way the section had moved through the building in fine detail. The SimStriker – the source of the voice – is coated with three neat splats of blue paint. The lead soldier had fired Simunition, a type of realistic training round designed to simulate the sound and impact of live ammunition. The instructor is satisfied that the rounds have hit the centre of mass, so he orders the section outside. As they leave, he and his team begin rearranging the SimWalls, creating new rooms and approaches that the section has never seen before. They move the SimStrikers into new positions, cleaning the paint off as they do, and within an hour they have created a brand new training scenario. 

The chain of events I have described here is fake, but the capabilities – the moveable walls, which are part of the patented SimWall training facilities, the SimStrikers that they provide to enhance realism, and the top-down After Action Review system are all real. They are the products of British company 4GD, an urban warfare training specialist. Urban warfare is a vital skill for modern soldiers, it can be learnt in theatre, but effective room clearing drills reduce casualty rates and improve mission outcomes. However, training those skills can be hard, and there is a lack of realistic training estate in the UK and Europe to support urban operations. So, Calibre met with the 4GD’s Managing Director, Rob Taylor, a former Royal Marine, to learn more about the company and the challenges of running a small enterprise in the UK. 

A challenging start

As a young Royal Marine officer, Rob deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 where he first experienced the distance between training and reality. “It’s hard to get mortars, fast air providing close support and helicopters into the same space for a training exercise,” he explained. “I think I saw some of those things once in training, and then it was out to Afghanistan where I had a mortar fire control officer and a Joint Terminal Attack Controller in my section and I had to learn how to use them.” 

This presented several challenges; Rob was unfamiliar with the effects of the munitions that he could request from a fast jet, as well as the process required to ask for them. It is important to know what effects a weapon delivers – a large guided bomb delivered by a Tornado for example – might require friendly troops to be at least 100 m from the target. And yet, that same bomb might not be capable of defeating a building with a single strike. It’s important to understand and learn this through training if possible. 

“By the time I redeployed to Afghanistan in 2010, the marines were a lot better in the urban space. We had brought in trainers from the US Marine Corps in 2008, who shared the lessons they had learned from Fallujah,” Rob said. However, this training, and the realities of combat in Afghanistan, still did not match the training experience of young Royal Marine officers. “We should have been training how we actually fight, rather than how we fought in the 1980s. We should push ourselves to train in an appallingly difficult conflict, and I think our training systems can enable that,” he said. 

Cashflow breeds innovation

Fast forward to 2016, Rob founded 4GD after a brief stint in the commercial sector, hoping to bring that realism to the training methods of the West’s armed forces. Since then, they have set up the flagship facility with the UK’s 16 Air Assault Brigade in Colchester, which includes the moveable SimWall, SimStriker, and After Action Review. They have delivered two Urban Fighting Skills Houses to the British Army, one will be installed in Catterick at the Infantry Training Centre and one on the Salisbury Plain Training Area. 4GD is also set to digitise the British Army’s urban training village known as Copehill Down, which will introduce sound and smoke effects to the site to make it a more realistic training environment. 

4GD is not without its share of success, and it has achieved this with a small team of just six full time staff, but the nature of SME contracting in the UK is creating problems. “Most SME contracts [with the British MoD] are single year or for the delivery of a single piece of kit,” Rob explained, which means they get paid for delivery of the work and may have to use earlier profits to keep the company alive in the interim. By contrast, “primes will sub-contract SMEs to deliver capability through manufacturing and then take the maintenance and support contracts, which give them multi-year, regular income,” he added. 

This makes it difficult to innovate, especially when payment for many contracts is only provided upon completion. “There was a lot of resistance to providing any funding at the start of a contract, so we started adding interest to our contracts to help absorb some of the costs, and the MoD became more willing to provide some funding upfront. Innovation costs money and time, but a company’s directors have to ensure that their cash flow is healthy to cover core costs. If contract payments are intermittent, or on a single year basis, this locks them into yearly cycles of constantly trying to win new business, rather than innovating.

Stimulating market demand

Moreover, as outlined by Rob, the conditions for the growth of SMEs in the UK are currently unfavourable. “Recent tax changes now mean that it is financially easier to run an American company and compete in the UK than it is to run a British company and compete in the UK, because the taxation policies mean that I will have to increase the cost of my products,” Rob said. This is coupled with more favourable approaches to SMEs in the US.

“A US state is offering free property, a 50% break in taxation and even investment to set up there. We want to be a UK company, but as we start looking for our series A funding, the likelihood is that it will come from the US. This leads to pressure to become a US company.” This is reflective of some of the challenges faced by the UK’s SME ecosystem, while there are some positive signs of investment, with recent large funding rounds announced for defence tech companies, Europe and the UK are notably behind the US in market capital that is available. 

“Until the MoDs can increase their budget and so increase market size, or spend their money better by increasing the amount spent with SMEs, why would private capital increase their funding in the UK or Europe?” Rob made this point in reference to recent statements from senior figures in the British MoD, who feel that private capital has a key role to play in supporting defence. While this is certainly true to some extent, it is clear that the MoD’s also have to create that market demand. 

Specifically for SMEs, this would mean more direct spending with those smaller companies, rather than through prime manufacturers. “There’s lots that could be done,” Rob suggested. “Offsetting R&D spending in the UK and offsetting British PLC so that bids from UK companies are scored at a more favourable rate than foreign bids for example. If a US company is bidding 1 million and a UK company the same, the UK company’s bid could be considered as 0.9 million,” he said. 

Calibre comment

Defence ecosystems require a balance of capabilities and actors to meet all of the needs of an armed force. Supply chain and platform complexities typically mean that primes are responsible for managing a network of small manufacturers and suppliers and integrating their products into a finished working platform. Innovation can be fostered through supporting a range of clusters, allowing each to individually explore problems and solutions. This is where having a healthy ecosystem that supports SMEs becomes valuable; the more SMEs an ecosystem can support with sufficient cash flow to innovate, the more likely it is that the ecosystem will produce meaningful solutions. This approach is broadly taken in South Korea in the commercial sphere and has led to a culture of innovation and some very successful companies. For the UK, it stands to reason that embracing SMEs and supporting them to innovate and deliver will help ensure that the state will always have the resources it needs to meet the threats that emerge.