Jack Watling is a Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, where he advises the UK and allied militaries on future operating concepts, force design, and the realities of fighting and winning on contemporary battlefields. Trained as a historian with a PhD in Civil Conflict from Birkbeck University of London, he combines academic rigour with operational experience, having been embedded with forces from the Donbas to the Sahel to understand how doctrine, technology, and leadership interact under pressure.
Jack's research is grounded in extensive fieldwork across active and recent conflicts, including repeated visits to Ukraine throughout Russia’s invasion, time in Iraq during the campaign against Daesh, and deployments to Mali and Rwanda. These experiences give him first-hand insight into how modern armies adapt in real time, from improvising battlefield innovation to absorbing losses, managing logistics, and integrating new capabilities while under sustained attack, an approach that keeps his analysis sharply focused on what actually works.
Alongside his role at RUSI, Jack was a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center from 2022 to 2025, and he regularly advises government committees on defence and security policy. He publishes widely in leading journals and is the author of The Arms of the Future, which examines the evolution of close combat in the information age, and in 2023, he was awarded RUSI’s Trench Gascoigne Prize in recognition of outstanding contemporary military analysis.
As a speaker, Watling is hired for his ability to translate complex, high-intensity conflict into clear, practical insight for military, government, and industry audiences. His talks on modern land warfare, lessons from Ukraine, deterrence against authoritarian states, electronic warfare, and multi-domain operations are grounded in current operations and rigorous analysis, offering audiences concrete examples, such as how Ukrainian units adapted drone use and electronic warfare under fire, and clear takeaways for future planning, decision-making, and resilience in contested environments.
