Defence - a game of two halves?
When the DRU recommendations are implemented Defence UK will inexorably slide towards a two-team race as is the model in many countries. There will be the MOD – largely civilian staffed, that covers inter alia strategy, policy, procurement and budget and the Armed Forces (let’s call them UKDF) - who, err, do the fighting. Certainly, there will be little need for a rash of 4* at the top – one per service, who could be called, hmmm, let’s see….CinC Air, for example. The paradox in this model which will exist in practise, if not name, is that the single-service chiefs won’t have much discretion in the use of their budgets, as effectively they will only cover salaries and other operating costs – in spite of what Lord Levene has desired. Procurement will remain centralised and funds bid for accordingly across the Department(s). Ironically, a HQ UKDF will be required to coordinate the peacetime activities of the forces – whereas the enhanced PJHQ will be primus inter pares.
Moreover, the single Services will have less say on MOD decisions on, for example, tri-service personnel matters, (employment models, TACOS, pay award levels, policy on housing, schooling etc) and there will be fewer service personnel in the MOD to apply the handbrake to even more vindictive policies thought up by an increasingly politicised civil service, where individuals are ‘incentivised’ to make greater year-on-year savings . ‘Career’ (executive stream?) offices will have no great desire to serve in the MOD on 5 year tours as it will damage their advancement prospects within their own Services (apart from the appeal of spending 5 years living in a dingy squat/SFA in Bushy).
As a by-product of all of this (and I am not appealing to the tin-foil hat brigade here), the Service Chiefs will no longer be in Whitehall but reside at their operational HQs, and even fewer SP will serve in MB. This is the first time since before Samuel Pepys’ time that the heads of the Services have not been in Whitehall (or the Strand, as in the case of the RAF in 1918). This is a cataclysmic shift in power and presence of the key apparatus of State. Perhaps the MOD and HQ UKDF will be rusticated (like the BBC) to, oh, Tyneside or (in an effort to appeal to the independent-minded Scots) Clydebank.
But then again, I could be dreaming this Kafkesque-like nightmare.
Last edited by Whenurhappy; 28th Jun 2011 at 07:50.