I sat down to have a quick skim of the report and an hour later, even on a cursory read-through, my blood is boiling.
I left the RAF two years ago after seventeen years as an engineering officer. (Comms-electronics rather than Aerosystems, but I did two nominally AS tours in my time.) This report comprehensively tears to pieces nearly every change foisted upon us during that period, not least of which was the almost fetishistic worship of change itself.
There's so much I want to say that it's probably best if I take the time to properly read and digest this report first. Even on a quick read-through, so many of the changes, bad decisions and cultural and organisational failures highlighted are ones that I and my fellow EngOs shook our heads at at the time. But if there's one phrase from the report that epitomises the decline in the RAF and MoD's engineering standards and culture in my time it is "...outsourced its thinking." (p11).
I took my ORD for several reasons. But one factor was my growing feeling that if a job required you to think (something pretty important for my job satisfaction) then it was assumed we'd outsource it to contractors. That, together with the removal of a specialised professional engineer career past my own rank, made me feel that the job I'd joined up to do was fast disappearing. Being told in a career brief that "the problem is that you're seen as an expert" was the last straw. Funnily enough, the Haddon-Cave report has quite a lot to say about engineering expertise, or rather the steady erosion of it.