Originally Posted by
BVRAAM
In which case, it's for the Secretary of State for Defence and his Ministers to lead any such review.
If memory serves, all Ministers in the MOD have a military background, including Mr. Wallace, himself. They will therefore have a more realistic idea of the needs of the Services to prevent wastage. The Department has wasted billions in cancelled projects and delay, it can't continue but it must be looked at by those who know what they're doing.
Cummings was good for BREXIT (I may be biased) but he is not a smart choice for something so critical to our way of life.
I’m afraid I disagree completely with your thoughts on the military backgrounds of MOD ministers. There are very few individuals in the military with the breadth of knowledge that would be useful to a minister and most of them are very senior officers of the sort who don’t tend to reappear as politicians. Having been a major or a lieutenant 10 or 15 years ago is damn near irrelevant and perhaps even risks bringing out-of-date preconceived ideas into an environment of perpetual inter-service rivalry. To be fair, most ex-military ministers are keenly aware of this and play down their service.
As to Cummings, well, I tend to agree that he won’t get very far with an acquisition review. But that’s not where I think the problem lies. The problem is in how the National Security apparatus (which includes the MOD, Cabinet Office, security services, FCO and No10) strategises, plans and prioritises. What is Britain’s place in the world? What do we need our forces to be able to do? What can we afford them to do, at what readiness and from what industrial base? Those are more political than military questions and Cummings, a disciple of Bismarck, understands that implicitly. The last couple of Defence reviews have not grappled properly with them, being more about electioneering (eg Army of 82,000), balancing the books (2010) and balancing single-service interests (2015).
Sir Mark Sedwill tried to crack this nut with his National Security Capabilities Review but Theresa May was too weak to prevent Gavin Williamson from splitting Defence off into its own completely inconsequential mini-review last year. The difference now is that Cummings has carte blanche to come in and call the Emperor (or Admiral or industry CEO...) naked, while having been thought likely to go to Washington as Ambassador, Sedwill is now staying put and reportedly on the same page as Cummings. Having those two working together puts paid to any notion of institutional resistance by MOD. And there are military people in the Department who positively welcome the opportunity for a long-overdue rinse through of exactly what we need and what we get from the billions we spend on Defence. Bring it on, I say.