General David Julian Richards, Baron Richards of Herstmonceux, GCB, CBE, DSO, DL (born 4 March 1952) is a retired senior British Army officer and Peer who was formerly the Chief of the Defence Staff, the professional head of the British Armed Forces.

[5][6] Having been born at Fayid in Egypt where his father was an officer in the Royal Army Pay Corps, the family later moved to Devizes in Wiltshire and Cyprus before settling near Herstmonceux, East Sussex.

[11] In 2000, during the Sierra Leone Civil War, Richards was in command of Operation Palliser, ostensibly to rescue British and other foreign nationals but which he then independently transformed into a commitment to support the embattled national president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and lead the defence of his capital Freetown against the Revolutionary United Front.

Although not initially sanctioned by London, the action was cited as a second example of the kind of liberal military intervention previously seen in Kosovo, and as such attributed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

[19] In April 2001 Richards became Chief of Staff of NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, with the rank of major general.

[24] On returning from Afghanistan in February 2007, he reverted to his previous rank of lieutenant general, and spent another year commanding the ARRC.

[27] On 17 October 2008, The Independent revealed Richards's appointment as the next Chief of the General Staff, the professional head of the Army.

[28] In early August 2009, just before taking up his post, Richards was widely criticised when he claimed that British troops may have a role in Afghanistan for up to 40 years.

Richards said that: "We expect the military conflict to trail off in 2011," who was visiting British front-line forces for the first time since taking command of the Army last year.

David Cameron told Parliament that Britain would "take every step to cut out the terrorist cancer that lurks in the Arabian Peninsula", but Gen Richards said an intelligence-led approach was the current strategy.

So we have to find other ways of doing these things and in the meantime making sure Afghanistan doesn't revert to becoming, if you like, a 'second Yemen' – that is the Army's primary duty at the moment.

Our role is to remain very close to them, to help them where they most need it and in the meanwhile focus our efforts on Afghanistan and assisting Pakistan to ensure they don't become the threat Yemen is beginning to be.

[36] In May 2011, Richards and other senior NATO officers expressed a wish for backing from member states to intensify the war effort in Libya by directly targeting Col Gaddafi's regime, rather than simply protecting Libyan civilians.

"We are not targeting Gaddafi directly, but if it happened that he was in a command and control centre that was hit by Nato and he was killed, then that is within the rules.

[41] Richards worked as a consultant for the government of the United Arab Emirates[4] and has advised American arms company DynCorp.

On pay to soldiers, he said:[45] But because we look after them and because it's socially at every level acceptable to be in the Army, whether you're a private in the Green Howards from Yorkshire or the heir to the throne and you are a captain in some smart organisation, the fact is there is a consensus that it's a good to be in the armed forces.

We have outstanding people and we need to look after them.On 7 October 2014, Richards criticised the contemporary Western strategy employed to defeat ISIS.

[47] In a November 2016 interview with the parliamentary magazine The House, Richards said of Western involvement in the Syrian Civil War: If the humanitarian situation in Syria is our major concern, which it should be – millions of lives have been ruined, hundreds of thousands have been killed – I believe there is a strong case for allowing Assad to get in there and take the city back.

The alternative is for the West to declare a no-fly zone and that means you’ve got to be prepared to go to war with Russia ultimately.

[48]In June 2022, Richards made similar criticisms of the West's incrementally developed approach to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.