The Chief of the Defence Staff told us that the Reserve was also being mobilised under Exercise Agile Stance with a series of mobilisation exercises of Active Reserve elements taking place across each of the single Services, between January and March 2024 and in September 2024 which will “inform and develop the UK’s ability to mobilise Reserve Forces at pace and scale”. This will be followed by a strategy and concurrently an updated Agile Stance directive “to develop the capability and capacity to mobilise the Strategic Reserves at scale”—something which has not been done since 1991.240 In December 2023, the Permanent Secretary told us that the “the use and availability of, and ability to call out, a strategic reserve” had been a neglected area of MOD thinking in recent years.241 The role of the defence industry in the UK readiness