Chaotic MoD is wasting taxpayer billions

It has been a bad week for the Ministry of Defence. And even with the hoopla at Westminster over lobbying and the multi-coloured smoke signals from COP26, it has not been able to bury the bad news.

On Monday we got the publication of the Public Accounts Committee Report on “Improving the performance of major defence equipment contracts”. The committee under the redoubtable Dame Meg Hillier MP did not mince its words. The system of defence procurement is “broken” and probably has been for years. Nine out of the top 13 major equipment procurements are on amber or even red signals – Whitehall-speak for saying they are hitting or have hit the buffers. Some cannot be rescued.

This has produced a needless cost to taxpayers of billions. Last year the Defence Department was awarded a real increase in its budget of £16.5 billion. The Public Accounts Committee states that there is no guarantee that this won’t be used to plug existing gaps in the accounts, or squandered further on existing programmes.

The PAC suggests there is something fundamentally flawed in the culture of the Ministry of Defence, and raises serious questions as to why successive governments, Labour and Conservative, have allowed matters to drift. There have now been 13 reports from the National Audit Office querying the conduct of major projects, including the aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, the F-35 fighter, and a whole gaggle of army fighting vehicles still not fit for purpose.

One ugly little practice is to postpone existing programmes and contracts, only to incur greater cost when the equipment is delivered much later than originally planned. The new Protector strike drones, state of the art machines bought from the United States, have been deliberately delayed, incurring a further, and unnecessary, cost of £326 million. The analyst Francis Tusa, of Defence Analysis, calculates that the MoD is currently wasting well over £1 billion a year on unnecessary charges and delay fees.

The two shockers illustrated by the admirably succinct PAC report are the Crowsnest Airborne Early Warning System for the new aircraft carriers, and the Ajax Armoured Reconnaissance Vehicle – on which £4 billion has already been spent. So far only 14 vehicles have been delivered for trials – and from those trials more than 300 soldiers have been treated for serious hearing injuries from excess noise and vibration.

Already £4 billion has been spent, £3.1 billion going to the manufacturer General Dynamics UK, all out of an overall lifelong costing of £5.5 billion. Senior officers think there is little prospect of the vehicle, effectively a 40-ton light tank, ever functioning fully. Writing the project off, now regarded as probable rather than possible by much of the Army, will be the most costly ditching of a British defence project since David Cameron binned the failing Nimrod MRA4 maritime patrol aircraft in 2010. That cost about £1 billion, a quarter of the Ajax bill.

Ajax was based on a Spanish prototype which was unproven – and largely a paper concept. The Spanish forces didn’t order it in the end. The MoD went for the Ajax because it didn’t want to favour the more obvious candidate, the CV90, because it is made by Bae Systems – whose role in defence procurement was becoming too dominant some Whitehall mandarins feared. The CV90 made originally by Hagglunds–Bofors, now part of Bae, has been hugely successful and gone through several upgrades with a dozen armies. Meanwhile the Army and MoD bodged the Ajax, adding armour and kit so a light vehicle of around 25 tons now weighs well over 40.

The Crowsnest, a kit fitted first to the Sea King Mark 7 helicopter, is a vital piece of early warning radar apparatus for the aircraft carriers. A much needed update has been delayed a further two years, no doubt at further cost.

The PAC says more or less that the MoD’s accounting and procurement should now be put into special measures. It should be audited by the Treasury and Cabinet Office, and reported on every six months.

It has put its finger on a very real difficulty. There are too few dedicated experts in the relevant departments, and a culture of gifted amateurism seems to waft through the department – as it does in parts of the three armed services. Senior reporting officers on major projects need to be in post for at least four or five years, rather two or three at present – and it should be seen as a major career path whether you wear a uniform or suit. The idea that a former Permanent Secretary such as Sir Stephen Lovegrove, could do a simple transfer to become the National Security Adviser seems almost risible. No wonder former senior commanders like Lord David Richards think the job and the National Security Council are a busted flush.

The NSC and the NSA himself have been cruelly exposed by the debacle in Afghanistan – they didn’t see it coming and don’t seem to appreciate its consequences.

But the problems of the Army don’t stop there. It is ill equipped – largely through not planning sufficiently beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. Today it cannot fulfill a commitment to supply Nato with a fully equipped strike brigade to the best current standards for another two years.

Worse, there are now serious questions about morale and discipline. These are highlighted by the grim circumstances of the suicide of a young female officer cadet from Sandhurst and the allegations of the murder of a Kenyan mother by carousing troops then on exercise in the country. Both enquiries are ongoing.

The legacy of Afghanistan is important and must be addressed. Other armies are already doing this, but the British seem incapable of mounting a transparent and productive exercise of lessons learned.  The Dutch parliament is doing this very thing next week.

The problem outlined in the brilliant study of British, Dutch, and Canadian governments and forces for operations in Southern Afghanistan by Lt Col Mirjam Grandia Mantas of the Netherlands Army is that military forces were asked to undertake tasks and roles in Afghanistan for which they were not trained and were inappropriate. The central problem was mitigating fragile governance – which the allies, the Americans especially, were incapable of addressing.

In a review of Colonel Grandia Mantas’s book “Inescapable Entrapments”, the brilliant American strategist and geopolitical analyst D Michael Shafer – author of the ground-breaking “Deadly Paradigms” – points to a fundamental problem for the armed services and the Ministry of Defence. “Most frighteningly, the book suggests they understand the world in which they (and their foes) wield their weapons, despite the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that suggest they represent the future.”

To which Col Grandia adds, “I don’t think our leadership appreciates the complexity and variability of the environment in which they have to work.

“The most telling symptom of this is that they keep telling you what they know, and appear unwilling to be questioned. They purport to be uncurious about what they don’t know, and need to.”