Equipment shortfall 'risks troops'

Aug 23 2009

A secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) report has concluded that the department's systems for acquiring new equipment are so inefficient they should be privatised, it has been reported.

The report by Bernard Gray, a former adviser to defence ministers, has found that the problems were so severe they were "harming our ability ... to conduct difficult current operations", according to The Sunday Times which has obtained a leaked copy.

It concluded that the MoD's equipment programme was £35 billion over budget, five years behind schedule, and could not be afforded in the long-term

"The problems, and the sums of money involved, have almost lost their power to shock, so endemic is the issue," the report states.

"It seems as though military equipment acquisition is vying in a technological race with the delivery of civilian software systems for the title of 'world's most delayed technical solution'. Even British trains cannot compete."

The report was originally commissioned by the former Defence Secretary John Hutton and was supposed to have been published before Parliament broke for the summer recess last month. However, ministers have now said that it will "feed in" to the forthcoming defence green paper, to be published early next year.

"How can it be that it takes 20 years to buy a ship, or aircraft, or tank? Why does it always seem to cost at least twice what was thought? Even worse, at the end of the wait, why does it never quite seem to do what it was supposed to?" Mr Gray demands.

The report warns that the MoD has a "substantially overheated equipment programme, with too many types of equipment being ordered for too large a range of tasks at too high a specification".

It says that agile enemies such as the Taliban were "unlikely to wait for our sclerotic acquisition systems to catch up" while delays in the shipbuilding programme meant Britain could not have fought a Falklands-style campaign any time over the last 20 years.

A MoD spokesman said: "The former Defence Secretary, John Hutton, commissioned a review on acquisition reform from Bernard Gray because we want to ensure that we are buying equipment as efficiently as possible. This report is currently in draft format and we are working hard with him on the issues he has identified. The work will feed into our recently announced Green Paper on defence."