Nicholas Carter

About

General Sir Nick Carter is an accomplished strategic leader and advisor. He has over 45 years of military experience, culminating at the top of his profession as the chief of the Defence Staff for the United Kingdom, where he was the principal military advisor to the prime minister, the National Security Council, the secretary of state for defense, and the head of the UK armed forces. He also served as the chief of the general staff, professional head of the British Army. He is an expert on defense and geopolitical affairs, transformational and strategic leadership, and inclusivity.

Nick Carter has commanded military operations at every level of command and in a variety of different contexts, including the Troubles in Northern Ireland, UN peacekeeping in Cyprus, NATO peace enforcement in Bosnia and Kosovo, and Iraq, where he commanded the UK-led Brigade in 2003–4. He has many years of combat experience in Afghanistan from 9/11 until the present day, designing approaches to counterinsurgency and acting as the key facilitator to build confidence between the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

A modernizer and reformer, Nick Carter is a leader who shapes events rather than be shaped by them, using data, strategic acumen, and operational insight and experience to create and sell a compelling vision of the future challenge, aligning teams behind a creative concept for why and how an institution must transform at pace. His hallmarks are the defense element of the UK’s most recent Integrated Review, leading to the largest uplift in defense spending since the end of the Cold War; the fundamental restructuring of the British Army (known as Army 2020) following the national defense reviews of 2010 and 2015; and the design of the armed forces’ support to the national COVID-19 response.