Speakers

Lieutenant Colonel John Bailey commissioned into the British Army and The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) in 2002. His early operational service included two tours as an infantry platoon commander in Iraq in 2004 and a tour in Northern Ireland in 2005 as a company operations officer. In 2010, he was assigned to the British High Commissions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, followed by a deployment in 2014 to train members of the Libyan General-Purpose Force. In 2015, he commanded the United Nations Multinational Mobile Force Reserve in Nicosia, Cyprus.

In staff roles, John has served as an intelligence officer in the Ministry of Defence’s Global Counterterrorism Team, a brigade intelligence officer, and a land warfare doctrine writer. After completing the Advanced Command and Staff Course in 2019, he led the British Field Army’s efforts to achieve "fight tonight" interoperability with NATO allies. This included British involvement in Project Convergence, the U.S. Army's campaign of learning designed to advance and integrate artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems into its warfighting formations and processes.

Following unit command from 2021-2023, he was appointed as a joint operations planner in the J5 Strategy Division of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), his current post. He is scheduled to take up the role of liaison officer to the U.S. Army’s Transformation and Training Command at Fort Eustis, Virginia, in 2026, with a promotion to Colonel.

He holds master's degrees in History and International Relations from the University of St Andrews and is a graduate of the Senior Course, NATO Defense College, Rome. In October 2025, he will defend his PhD thesis exploring the use of artificial intelligence in knowledge institutionalization within militaries.

John is married with two children.