The Ministry of Defence has said it has no plans to recruit a dedicated cadre of former defence industry executives, while also talking of the potential value of private sector experience in improving defence procurement.
In a written parliamentary answer published on 5 February, Defence Minister Luke Pollard responded to Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, who asked what assessment had been made of adopting the U.S. military’s “business operators for national defence” scheme.
Pollard stated: “The Ministry of Defence has no plans to recruit a dedicated cadre of former defence industry executives.” However, he added that the department remains conscious of the benefits that private sector expertise can bring, pointing to the appointment of Rupert Pearce as the UK National Armaments Director in October.
Pollard said Pearce brings “over 40 years of experience across law, technology, telecommunications, energy, and venture capital,” adding that his background in managing large organisations and driving innovation made him well suited to lead efforts to improve how defence works with industry. Pollard also noted that the department is currently running a competition for a new Director General UK Defence Innovation role, with applications being accepted from both within and outside the Civil Service.
In a separate written answer issued the same day, Pollard responded to Reform UK MP Andrew Rosindell, who asked what steps had been taken to improve cost and time efficiency in armed forces procurement.
Pollard added that the Defence Industrial Strategy and Strategic Defence Review set out plans to overhaul procurement, including a “new segmented approach” supported by accelerated commercial pathways. He said the aim is to allow programmes to reach contract faster and improve cost efficiency, with the MoD working towards a target date of 1 April 2026 to establish the segmented approach.
I don’t think anyone in Government or the MoD would know Cost Savings and Efficiency even if it slapped them in the face.
Quite right too. Can’t have people who know what their doing running around Whitehall.😁
Not sure how adding another layer of people with a clear bias would help with anything, other than topping up the members pension funds
External expertise in logistics, purchasing, repair and overhaul, inventory control, contract management, scope control and finance are desperately required to achieve a controlled and fast contract signing. They are also required to ensure the contract is managed with industry to deliver on time and cost.
Until this is in place and the government gets off its posterior, we will continue to not deliver sufficent equipment on time and the correct quality.
I see little in the US experience that suggests it’s a better acquisition solution than ours. Indeed only extremely large budgets hide just how poor it is. There must be better examples to follow for a Country like us.
Well in ship building I would say Italy.. there is no other Nation that gets the same bang for their naval buck as the Italians.. well other than China but that’s a communist state with a state controlled Maritime industry so they don’t count.
….yeah good point….Italy….they roll with it and seem to do ok….
Massive rheimetal order for new battle tanks and lynxkf41 looks like a relatively fair deal also.
As a massively in debt nation it always surprises me that Italy spends so much on defence….
I can only think that it’s risk directly realised by the physical geography of the country…..a narrow peninsula….
I don’t understand their defence spending but I think their procurement strategies are savvy and successful.
Definitely better strategies than the USA one for countries like us but we aren’t what we should be….
Ajax and variants need a rebuild and (as mentioned by others here ) pneumatic suspension plus rubber tracks and probs other mitigations…. It’s probably gonna cost a helluva lot but less than ordering another specialised, tracked vehicle class….it will standout as a rather unique capability within NATO and that might see it avoid being mothballed….add on some (as few as possible) tracked ifvs and you have a massively cumbersome and expensive to deploy and maintain outfit that will probably never be used for anything other than exercises and fun days but it will be credible in some ways and might stop wargamers from moaning so much.
The mod is now supposed to be looking at ‘good enough, deployed platforms’ aka playing it safe…..
If in all the time since Ajax class was first called off for vibration issues one or two have not been rebuilt with all the obvious mitigators then there is little hope for mod/gvmt procurement.
Boxer is the obvious answer but follow on orders have not materialised and now there is a lengthy, time delayed queue for them.
So we are back to mastiff and the very expensive xc (np aerospace) rebuild of underparts that seem to convert this truck into a capable section level off road vehicle….
Funny how procurement goes or doesnt
I think the thing people forget about Italy is that it is on the border of both the EU and NATO. Looking to it’s south and east it has a large arc of Syria, Leb, Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Libya as immediate concerns, and in addition to that it still maintains some responsibility for it’s former colonial possessions such as Somalia. During the 90’s it directly intervened in the Albanian Civil War, and had the break up of Yugoslavia on it’s doorstep.
Italy’s procurement strategy has had hickups, but it’s largely been focused and successful because Italy has very clear security threats near to them that they have to plan for, and have had to implement those plans in living memory.
That, and it owns Fincantieri.
And is the largest stakeholder in Leonardo
I’d argue that both of those are direct effects of it’s strategic situation.
Big difference is our military has been almost constantly in use for the last few decades which will have had significant cost factor, as repairs and spare parts and ammo are not free, not to forget the Human cost. Italy hasn’t. You can’t compare the two countries.
I agree our procurement is terrible, but with so many things being secret like supply of parts etc, and combine that with different needs /gearing strategies, it’s impossible to compare two nations.
That’s not the case. Italy has pretty consistently had it’s forces in use since the end of the cold war. In the 90’s they where in Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and as mentioned intervened in the Albanian Civil War, in the 2000’s they provided a Brigade to Iraq, and deployed a Brigade to ISAF in Afghan until 2021. The Italian Navy and Airforce where both very active during the 2011 intervention in Libya, the Italian Navy has been a major participant in Op Atalanta against Somali Piracy since 2008 and one of the main contributors to Operation Aspides in the Red Sea against the Houthis.
Just because it doesn’t make headlines in Britain doesn’t mean Italy hasn’t been using it’s military.
Fair just in far low numbers and lower intensity.
They also have capability gaps that we have much better coverage. Such as heavy lift, instar, nukes. There navy is also less capable across the board from subs, carriers and surface combatants.
But their land force and air force does seem better equipped, excluding heavy lift.
Steve, most of our defence procurement goes well. You only hear about the bad stuff!
This is true, big programs tend to go wrong all over the world. The Ajax program is a bit of an example of it going insanely wrong from the start. Mainly caused by the military not really knowing what type of war they would be fighting.
Steve, I always find your comments interesting. The armed forces never know what type of war they would be fighting – in 1981 probably no-one thought we would soon be fighting a war 8000 miles away in the South Atlantic centred around a massive predominantly naval task force with two carriers and that V-bombers would be conducting strategic bombing.
In 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, who would have thought that a year later an armoured division would be deploying to Saudi Arabia and readying for being in action for real?
But in 2009 the army staff certainly knew that a replacement for the CVR(T) family, that was then about 40 years old, was required. A tracked, armoured reconnaissance vehicle with better mobility, protection, firepower and ISTAR kit was clearly required for our warfighting (armoured) division. The core of the User Requirements Document finalised that year was surely not grossly wrong.
A debatable point is the insistence by MoD on the CTAS 40mm stabilised cannon as mandatory – I’m not sure what was behind that – was it a bit of Anglo-French politics?
The bigger issue was that MoD considered that GDUK had a valid Bid – the company had zero experience of designing, developing, testing and manufacturing any type of vehicle – they only had experience of avionics and military radios. At the time of the Bid they did not even have a ‘tank factory’. Their company finances were not strong. Their Bid should have been thrown out. That’s without even considering the possibility of technically achieving a success of adapting ASCOD2.
Agreed, but look at the history of the history of the FRES program, it’s requirements kept changing based on the current war being fought at the time rather than on a more strategic design of being ready for multiple known types of warfare. So many examples of this.
To be fair to them, the US is far more transparent in terms of oversight on their major projects than we are- there’s nowhere to really hide if you’re performing poorly. Those audit reports are far more detailed than the rubbish spreadsheet with a RAG on it that we put out every year…
The MOD and civil service have signficantly more experience than any commercial company, thanks to the sheer amount of stuff they buy every year. The expertise is there, it’s how it’s used, which I suspect comes down to political interference. Hard to come up with a long term procurement strategy when policiticans generally don’t think past the next budget cycle
Hi Steve.
The amount they order is not the issue it is how. I have experience in this process snd I can assure you that there is significant room for improvement.
Of course there is, but I work for one of the largest private companies in the world and their procurement process is all over the place. Ive never worked for an employer that it isn’t. No one wants to waste money and they end up over engineering the solution that ends up wasting way more
We could adopt the US.. don’t buy anything foreign unless the U.S. product is over twice the price or does not exist.
And don’t ever have develop a “clean sheet design” until you have used the “Law of Diminishing Returns” to continue to develop basically the same core product “ad infinitum” with each increment costing more and more.
That one usually ends when they find that in combat someone else has a better weapon because they started afresh.
Examples would be the M47/48/60 Tanks and Terrier to Standard missiles.
There are rare occasions when a foreign design is either so superior or specialised that they quietly admit defeat and either buy the product or licence produce or even buy the company.
The power train for T45 was a clean sheet design, which is why it didn’t work properly. Refining solutions you already have experience with is inherently less risky.
We can’t have defence industry experts telling clueless civil servants what to do, that would threaten their phony jobs.
Well it’s not like defence industry ‘experts’ come without baggage though does it so who sorts the truly competent from the grifters of whom there are plenty in British industry. Competent or otherwise, the process is generally headed in the opposite direction after all. Trouble is the truly competent probably wouldn’t want to work directly for the armed forces and why would we presume they are being truly objective if they do? In the end you still come back to civil servants having to make judgements on their dedication, suitability and competence let alone objectivity, don’t think there is a single silver bullet.
The thing is Italy spends piss all on defence.. 27 billion pounds vs our 60 billion.. but they have used the money more efficiently and have not had the catastrophic waste.. like the army spaffing 12 billion and showing nothing for it other than 600 boxers on order and 400 broken Ajax..
So they have 55 f35 another 40 on order for 95 purchased and a plan for 115
90 typhoons and 24 on order
11 harriers
35 tornadoes ( both going as the F35s come in… see they kept their perfectly good tonkas and harriers and did not throw them away a decade or 2 early) .. so there fast jet fleet will be betters than ours at at 114 typhoons and 95 F35s.. they even have more AEW aircraft 2 new already in service and 3 ordered
They also have 350 rotors compared to the UKs 150 ish
Escort wise they have about 18 all but 1 modern with plans to go to 21 including 3 13-14 thousand ton heavy destroyers.. about 15 of those escorts will have towed array sonar and all with have Aster 30 with the majority ( over 10) having aster 30 block 1 NT and ABM defences on top of this they have a fleet of about 16 corvettes and OPVs this is being modernised with the new builds having 76mm guns with guided dart rounds and CAMM..it’s also got 3 8000 ton amphibious vessels which is ordered 16,000 ton replacements for and two 30-40 ton carrier amphibious hybrids ( can only carry 1 squadron of F35 each )
And 8 electric diesel submarines.
It’s army is 96,000 strong..
What it does not have.. 4 ballistic missiles submarines and 250 nuclear warheads
7 SSNs
2 dedicated 70,000 ton carriers that can carry 3 squadrons..
The point class strategic sea lift
Only half the air to air tankers
Zero strategic air lift vs the 30 strategic air lift fleet of the UK.
Its escorts are not as exquisite as the RN escorts the 2 horizons are not 6 T45s and is ASW frigates are more numerous but less effective than a T23/26
Does not have air based scattered across the globe..
The harriers we ‘threw out’ had been extensively used and were at the point that the airframes were no longer viable. They were good for spare parts, so the USMC snapped them up in an effort to keep their own increasingly worn out airframes flying.
The sea harrier FAS 2s were scrapped when some of them were less than 10 years old and were at way less than 50% of their indicative flight hours.. having only about 1500 hours flight time.. the tonka fleet again had less than 50% of its indicative flight hours with the fleet that was left sitting at 2500-3000 hours against an indicative life of 8000 hours… some of the tranche 1 typhoons had less than 100hours on the clock.. one had 5 hours.. it was literally flow to marnham stored for a decade and then removed from service.. the entire fleet of tranch 1s only flew an average of 2300 hours.. well below 50%…. The UK is profoundly profligate with its fast jet aircraft fleet scrapping probably somewhere in the region of 300-400 hundred combat aircraft with half the indicative life still on the airframes. I keep records of the airframe hours.
I have said for a long time, that all major defence projects need a “Reality” Manager.
The role: Independent person based in DE&S, who does nothing but attend both internal and external meetings, and when someone makes a comment or suggestion that is totally stupid, they give said person and “Paddington Bear” stare and say …Are you for real !,,,😦
To often during my career I have heard people suggest something that is absolutely stupid, but due to their position in the team or supposed expertise, a large amount of people in the meeting will nod and agree with what’s been said.
Conversely, I have encountered people belligerently questioning why we are devoting time to exploring ideas that are a clear non-starter, despite it being repeatedly explained to them that you still need to document the reasons for it being a non-starter in order to a) demonstrate objectivity and b) formally close down that line of enquiry to prevent future nugatory work.
Slightly off topic but relevant to the perennial bottlenecks in most western defence procurement processes, the ADF has begun bypassing (or at least speeding up) the traditional tendering and multi-gate style approvals process. Recently they have adopted the Minimum Viable Capability (MVC) approach to rapidly acquire defence systems – getting good and capable systems fielded quickly (sometimes experimentally and often more cost effectively) rather than waiting for the perfect system. The approach goes hand in hand with spiral upgrades to keep pace with technological change and operational experience.
Project LAND 156 to develop a MVC counter drone capability for the Australian Army is probably the best example. Request for tenders issued in March 2025 with MVC field tests achieved by December 2025. In that time a lead integration contractor was appointed. An Australian C2 system developed and an integrated system of sensors, radars, EW and kinetic ‘effectors’ including Vampire missiles and EOS Slinger 30mm canons. Next stage spiral upgrade to include high powered lasers (EOS Taranis).
Not quite Ukrainian speed of innovation but rapid nonetheless by western standards.
I worked for RMMV, when the ADF contracted Jacobs (Australia) to project manage the purchase of the Dry Support Bridge from WFEL (part of KDS, now KNDS), which was built on an MAN 10×10 chassis. It was an absolute pleasure working with their team, who brought a massive degree of pragmatism to the project. Quite a few of the DSB chassis requirements were either identical or similar to those stated in the L121 programme to replace the ADF heavy vehicle fleet. Instead of ponderously going through every requirement with a fine tooth comb, if we could show compliance from L121, it was immediately signed off, with just a few random checks on the built chassis as they came of the production line.
There was also excellent cooperation between Jacobs, WFEL and RMMV with an open and honest working relationship that ensured the project wasn’t bogged down in petty issues.
Of course the MoD don’t want change , it will just show how inefficient and incompetent they are .
Levin was brought in to that by during the Thatcher years it made no difference. The idea that US procurement is somehow better is ludicrous. They haven’t built a new class successful surface ship in 30 yearx
They also have massively larger orders, creating the perception of things being cheaper. But as you say they have plenty of issues not just the frigates but also the laterial combat ships and the booker to name a few.
A Minister said, “The UK has no intention of speeding up its procurement or having the budget required for items that were needed by the Armed Forces in 2021 and are yet to be delivered. We will continue with the disorganised method of buying equipment and platforms that will be out of date, cost three times as much, and be unfit for service by the time they arrive. Get into wars without the equipment and hardware required to prosecute them effectively, needlessly costing lives and causing undue casualties. Finally, we will continue to pay lashings of platitudes to the bereaved families because none of our children will be dragged from their ski trips or work experience in the United States, where they will be 100% safe”
I believe I have become jaded.