The Ministry of Defence employs 29,000 people in its procurement branch. Its equivalent in a country under actual military threat, Israel, employs a reported 400. Few would say that Britain’s Armed Forces were better equipped than Israel’s.
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A counter-argument could be that people are prepared to volunteer in Israel, or are conscripted- in either case, this would not apply to Britain. A purely volunteer army, with an unpopular war (Afghanistan) might mean that Britain needs those 29,000 to get the numbers to where they are now!
My bad! Procurement is not recruitment. But the high usage in the war might be a reason for the large number.
If that was true then presumably the numbers of people employed for procurement would have increased sharply from a very significantly lower number soon after 9/11 and UK involvement in the two US military adventures.
I do not have access to the relevant figures but I am willing to speculate that ain’t the case 😉
Isn’t it a known fact that British grunts in Afghanistan are seriously under-equipped?
The technical term is “squadies” Alisa…
Back in the 1980’s there was a lot of talk of saving money by going to fixed price contracts – not “cost plus”.
Supposedly the government would just ask for what it wanted and would then accept the lowest bid (with any cost over run being the responsiblity of the company that won the contract).
No changing specifications in mid project, and no vast numbers of procurement officials to manage projects (etc) either.
What happened to the dream?
Parkinson explained that. The number of people employed in procurement and other administrative tasks grows as a function of time, unrelated to the work that is done. Each new clerck creates work for additional clercks.
Give Israel another couple of centuries, and it’s procurement arm will overtake Britain’s.
Thanks Perry – my bad:-)
Jacob: true, and besides, that 400 figure sounds questionable as it is.
“No changing specifications in mid project” is a requirement that can’t really survive multi-decade lead times.
An MP I once worked for used to complain that in 1900 Britain’s Foreign Office managed with a staff of only 400 people.
My wife works for them, so I will have to be circumspect, but if you, like me, have seen the drongo’s who drag themselves into Abbey Woods everyday, then that’s 28,000 too many.
Her own department has recently moved location for no earthly reason that anyone of them can discern. It certainly isn’t saving money, and the mainframe doesn’t work, the laptops dont work, even the bloody landline phones didn’t work.
And that is the quiet end of the MOD, just think of the lash ups they are making at the sharp end.
The UK is building its two biggest warhips ever.
What a farce.
Brian follower of D.
I know projects take decades – that is part of the problem.
If something takes decades it is likely to be useless by the time it becomes available.
The whole system is messed up.
Once it took months (not decades) to design and produce military equipment.
Have a look at the Ford Motor Company during World War II – what they achived after the government and union (the union was backed by the government) war on them in the 1930’s was called off.
Of have a look at ship production – sometimes whole cargo carrying ships built in a single DAY.
“But that was wartime”.
The Empire State building was built in 18 months – not a military project and not wartime.
What has happened to us is called “cultural decline” – there is no getting round the truth.
It is the same as the Romans being destroyed by bands of barbarians – barbarians no better organized than those Rome had defeated with ease centuries before.
It was not the barbarians who had changed – it was Rome. The late Empire was an accident waiting to happen.
And the Byzantines also.
We still use the word “Byzantine” to mean complicated, expensive, time wasting (and generally hopeless) bureaucracy.
And with good reason.
“But we have technology”.
All the technology in the world (and the Romans and Byzantines had more tech than you might think) is no good if the people trying to use it are trapped in a system that does not work
Only an idiot WOULDNT say that Britain’s armed forces are better equipped than Israel.
Israel has a bloated conscript army, practically no navy and a much smaller airforce than Britain. Britain spends 3-4x as much on the military as Israel.
“If something takes decades it is likely to be useless by the time it becomes available.”
No it isn’t. Trident isn’t useless. Astute isn’t useless. Type 45 isn’t useless. The new carriers aren’t useless. Challenger II isn’t useless. isn’t useless.
Large engineering projects take decades. It’s a result of the complexity of the system, not just bureaucratic bloat.
The article from which the quote is taken also references a series of articles from the ‘secret diary of a senior civil servant’. RTWT!!! at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/series/diary-of-a-civil-servant
The latest missive dated July 11 is quite revealing of the mindset of the ‘senior civil servant’. A palpable sense of excellence/seniority, an overweening sense of entitlement, an underlying tinge of fear that ‘the universe is not unfolding as it should’.
“I am writing because something fundamental has changed in our political system. The process may have started under the previous government, but has accelerated. The civil service is being eroded by a pungent acid that will soon dissolve the foundations of our politics. The solid oak beams of state are being cut to pieces and the roof will come crashing down. This process is moving fast. A brain drain has begun and our brightest graduates have got the message that this is not a good place to be. The implications will not be felt for some time, but the results will be devastating to our society and our economy. It is still not too late. It can be reversed, but we all need to be open about what is happening and speak up for the civil servants who will otherwise suffer in silence.”
The guy must be Irish to have such a rich case of the blarney! “The solid oak beams of state”!! And: “…our brightest graduates have got the message that this is not a good place to be”. How revealing that he believes that, until now, the civil service *was* a ‘good place to be’.
I think it can be fairly stated, also reaching the level of a ‘law’, that those of the nanny-state controlling mindset, suffer from anosognosia concerning their condition.
I do know that the procurement process is now so complicated that companies have to be paid to put in tenders for them (these tenders can cost several million pounds).
I’m not sure what the procedure is for deciding who to invite to tender. Perhaps companies have to put in bids for the supply of tenders? The five lowest get a contract to tender for the contract, or something.
This issue, as raised by Andrew Gilligan, is based on hyperbolic rhetoric, to at least twice the extent of fact.
It is not credible that the 29,000 and the 400 are measuring the same thing.
Back in April 2007, the MoD’s Defence Procurement Agency was combined with the Defence Logistics Organisation to form Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S). According to that linked Wikipedia article, DE&S currently has 29,000 employees, which might be where Gilligan got that figure from.
Also according to Wikipedia, the erstwhile Defence Logistics Organisation had 20,000 employees, back in 2007. Thus, subject to changes over the last 3 years, probably only something around 9,000 of those 29,000 are currently involved in ‘procurement’.
I’m not sure where the Israeli 400 comes from, but I’m quite sure that it does not cover the full extent of Wikipedia’s definition of Military Logistics, which the UK Mod’s DE&S might now be assumed to cover. This is together with the additional 3,500 in DSTL and all those others contracted suppliers providing R&D, and manufacture of equipment, ammunition and logistics; the latter including food and -I suppose- drink).
Thus we have an incredible argument that claims 72:1 between the UK and Israel, where 20 minutes shows the UK figure is over 3 times too high just for procurement (thought that is excluding research and manufacture). And surely some of the other 176,100 members of the IDF, above the 400, are actually involved in procurement (as practised by the MoD), as well as many thousands in logistics.
Whilst I do not doubt vast inefficiency and wastefulness within the UK government (of which the MoD has a well established appalling record on major systems procurement), I do not think gross exaggeration helps, especially when two thirds of it can be so easily disenfranchised from the actuality, without having much of a track record within the field.
My ‘love’ of numbers, and their meaning, might be somewhat out of the ordinary: however, I do assure you it is the modern view that the numbers matter. Human civilisation has moved well beyond binary classification, whether that is belief in God or not, belief in a clear division between good and evil, belief that we are all just rich or poor, or all other things more earthly.
Best regards
Pete – “the U.K is building its two biggest warships ever”.
Actually we used to have battleships (the last battleship build was HMS Vanguard – which went to destruction in 1961) and full sized flat tops (not the pretend aircraft carriers that are being planned).
Government press releases tend to be a very misleading source of information.
Of course the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland doesn’t get all the free ironmongery it wants from America…
DE&S as Nigel Sedgewick said doesn’t just do procurement, they handle logistics as well, which isn’t to say they aren’t a bunch of ‘drongos’.
How so? If one ships displacement is greater than another then it is bigger. The new carriers will each displace more water than HMS Vanguard and will be considerably bigger than the old flat tops.
It’s more of a factoid rather than a fact, the personal kit is fine and the vehicles have come on leaps and bounds. Compare a photograph of a British soldier on Operation Herrick in 2010 with one on Operation Telic in 2003. Look up ‘Urgent Operational Requirement’ for an example of ‘quick’ procurement.
At the moment a new camoflague pattern is being introduced called Multi-Terrain-Pattern (MTP) replacing both the Woodland and Desert Disruptive Pattern Material (DPM) CS95 uniforms. It’s not being worn at home yet, but 40 Commando are wearing it in Sangin. It looks really weird to see British servicmen in non-DPM camo.
@ Nigel Sedwick:
I’m sorry; I have always found Gilligan fairly reliable in the pass, and I did not check the numbers in what seemed a compelling snippet.
There are of course also some big differences between the functions served by Israel’s forces and Britain’s, and Israel’s defence budget is between 3 and 4 times the size of Britain’s as a proportion of GDP, so the procurement problems are different.
Perhaps it would be more sensible to compare France and Britain, which have similar wealth, size and strategic problems. (Though France has more overseas territories to defend.)
France spends fractionally more on defence than Britain, and for that gets a slightly smaller navy, army and airforce – all in effect home-built – and a genuinely independent nuclear weapons programme. If one is going to be serious about the question, one should ask is the French approach better, and in what ways? Are those forces better equipped? Better able to sustain attrition? If Britain were to resign from the world police, and pursue national interests more directly, would its forces look similar?