Defence Digital, Support now part of Armaments group

Hopefully, when they’ve stopped rearranging the deckchairs, they can do something useful.

Procurement at speed has to be at the core. It involves increased risk, buying 80% solutions and spirally developing those solutions. It involves bringing together those who previously had written requirements with those who previously bought and those who previously built, to vreate a three arm group to take procuremnet through the entire cycle without handovers. We also have to get the Treasury on board. No more war between Traesury and MOD with each believing the other is always wrong. Treasury and MOD have to find a better way ahead together.

None of that requires a hierarchical reorganisation with a new and different top-level segmentation. That just delays the necessary changes by a year, while nobody knows what they are doing.

Jon has already said what my initial thoughts were, reading and rechecking that organisational diagram.
Re arranging the deckchairs.
I recall that DD was previously under Strategic Command, as it has operational outputs, and DSTL sat separately in MoD alongside the CSA.
With yet more management on top.
Interesting.

The shuffling of the deckchairs, involving playing musical desks and the old game of making yourself and your MoD office empire look important is a response to the current Labour SDSR. The MoD employs about 65,000 civil servants and they are looking – aghast – at Wes Streeting’s cull of NHS England and the Integrated Care Boards. About 50,000 duplicated NHS admin jobs will go

For generations the MoD has been a bottomless pit into which successive Defence ministers have poured taxpayers money. Where is the hardware? Where are the combat ready Typhoon and F35 pilots? Why are most of our CH2 tanks in bits? Why are we selling perfectly good ships like Albion and Bulwark to save a few coppers? Why is the Army chronically undermanned? Why are we still waiting for replacement artillery and SPG’s?

For a long time I have been advocating root and branch reform of defence procurement. We do not need so much high-tech star wars type spending – we need drones, ammunition, more ammunition, ships, ammunition, operational tanks, yet more ammunition and trained RAF pilots. Also even more ammunition with better recruitment and improvements in retention

As much as you can call this a paper shuffling exercise it does seem to have some merit. Putting all the ‘thinking’ elements into one group and making them all answerable to one director should make them more productive. Instead of all pursuing individual aims our ‘thinkers’ can be centrally directed and thus work complementary to each other.

More groups, more meetings, more civil servents. Not a lot else. The MOD and the Government is just one big talk shop. They never do any thing. No new orders, nothing just statements and warm words. This defence review best be as big great as they keep banging on about but it boil down to money, cutting some thing to pay for something else.
Stop gapping something until god knows when, moving the numbers about a bit or counting them in new greater way, all in all a farce to save money. I’ll say it, the war in Ukraine is bleeding the money tree dry, its ruined what the Army had left that worked, its drained our weapon stocks. Warrior replacement/up grade cancelled still no order for an IFV, AS90 run down to a less than 20, still no replacement. No AWACs that works replace 10 with 3 that makes sense but buy the parts for 5.

Strong rumours flying around the corridors on Friday the the RAF are to lose the C17s.

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These hierarchical organisations are essential to prevent waste.😛

The idea that the Armed Forces cannot manage their own procurement is just plain dumb. They outperformed the NHS dramatically during the ‘pandemic’ in setting up nightingale hospitals at the drop of a hat. Going back a while, they kicked off Volkswagen in 1945. Arguably, fresh eyes on programmes every three years is a positive, given a professional handover/takeover. The trick is to make procurement a key role, as it rightly should be..

I do not like this reorganisation one bit, for a lot reasons.

* It transfers too much power and authority to civilians in general and to civil servants in particular. At present, the MOD’s budget is divided between 7 top level budget holders (TLBHs), 4 uniformed (air cmnd, army cmnd, navy cmnd and Strategic cmnd), and 3 civilian (Defence Eqpt & Support, Defence Nuclear and ‘Head Office & Corporate Services’. So a prevalence of uniforms.
Under the reorg, the seesaw will go the other way, with the 4 service budgets rolled into one, ‘Military Strategic’, while the civilian budget holders become the majority – National Armaments Directorate, Defence Nuclear and of course, the civil servants ‘Head Office & Corporate Services’, the latter including (civvy) personnel, PR. DEI and enough accountants to man a frontline regiment. The reorg panders to the view that, while civil servants have no experience of serving in the forces and, in most cases, no technical or scientific knowledge, no experience of change management, or of working in industry or procurement, it’s still best if they run everything, leaving the service chiefs in a room arguing about strategy, procurement and who gets what slice of the pie.

It seems to me to be a very back-to-front way of running Defence.

* The reorg will create one super department under this ‘National Armaments Director’, with tremendous power and the majority of the defence budget. That is a heavy load for one top person to be charged with. It is basically a clumsy bureaucratic job, shoving all sorts of disparate things into one unwieldy organisation.

It shouldn’t include the Defence Infrastructue Organisation, as that is nothing to do with armaments. Nor Defence Support, for the same reason.

* The idea of a ‘Challenge Board’ is a good one in principle. In practise, can’t see it working properly with the Civil Service calling the shots. To work, it would need a host of senior people from different backgrounds, including senior uniforms, to analyse and disect service staff requirements. Done properly, a lot of awkward but vital questions would be posed.

Why are we planning a T31 frigate for overseas patrol without any useful ASW capability, surely it will just be an attractive sitting duck for any opponent with a couple of submarines? Why are we designing a carrier with next to no integral self defence, making it wholly dependent on one or two T45s? Why does an arm recon sqdn need every Ajax to be ISR capable, at a great cost and weight premium, surely 3 standard recon troops with one ISR troop would be a more practical and affordable balance? Plus umpty questions about how 3 Wedgetails or Rivet Joints or 9 Poseidons can possibly provide the cover needed. Etc, etc.

You are not going to get these practical questions asked or answered unless their are senior former uniforms and defence think-tank specialists there, engineers, scientists, accountants and civil servants are not going to be looking at the wider picture.

And so on. The reorg looks like a rather amateur hour production that will just produce a bloated, top heavy, dysfunctional mega department, cf National Health Board England, in which the Civil Service have ever more primacy over defence matters, of which they basically have little understanding and even less experience. It looks like a plan by the Civil Service, for the Civil Service. I don’t think for one second that it constitutes a logical solution to our less than stellar procurement history, it just stacks more layers of bureaucrats onto the process. And I don’t think that the underlying transfer of power and decision-making away from the armed forces to Civil Service meddling is a useful or desirable step forward.

We are going to arrive at a position where the services set out their staff target for a new item of kit, which will then disappear into this new civvy labyrinth to reappear in some very different shape and form. This

… is not the way to do defence procurement and lacks joined-up thinking