Sorry about the centralised text - it's a bugger to cut & paste
The recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq came at a heavy cost to
Britain’s military capabilities. However, rather than replenish the forces with
the equipment they needed, spending reviews in the last parliament saw
defence expenditure so drastically reduced that the equipment used up in the
campaigns cannot be replaced. These cuts have left all three services with large
deficiencies in key areas. There is now considerable doubt among military experts
that Britain will be able to maintain its NATO commitment of spending two per
cent of GDP on defence, and this is at a time when new challenges and mounting
uncertainty in the world are likely to require our armed forces to be used at short
notice, and in circumstances which demand a more agile and adaptable military.
These issues have not received the attention they deserve. There is even less
acknowledgment of what is at stake in downscaling Britain’s defence production
capabilities and capacity. Key defence industrial programmes can take decades
to mature and R&D requires a much greater investment if it is to produce benefits.
Without immediate action to reverse this situation, the UK will lose even more of
its important technological capacity and know-how that cannot easily be recovered.
Defence Acquisition for the Twenty-first Century
lays out a completely new case
for the UK to adopt a radically different acquisition strategy; one which is much
more cost-effective and would allow for the adaptability, agility and flexibility
essential to modern militaries.
The book sets out the challenges ahead for defence acquisition and proposes
novel changes to the structure and culture of MoD and Whitehall generally to help
the UK to meet those challenges. Among other suggestions, it makes the case for
maintaining Britain’s industrial capacity to manufacture equipment when it is
needed, rather than focusing on maintaining the standing capacity of the forces; it
proposes establishing a system of long-term investment for defence with financial
arrangements that extend beyond the life-cycle of a parliament; it recommends
exploiting the huge pool of talent available in smaller enterprises rather than relying
solely on increasingly inflexible and unsustainable prime contractors.
In a series of supporting essays, the book also discusses the wide range of issues
which shape the environment for defence acquisition, including Britain’s strategic
posture; the rise of managerial culture and loss of technical skills in Whitehall; and
the introduction of unproven structures of management, such as government-
owned/contractor-operated organisations