Multimillion-pound push to transform 'broken' UK military is a 'fiasco'
A multimillion-pound push by the defence secretary to transform how the UK rearms and fights is a "fiasco", with too much focus on changing structures instead of preparing for war, according to interviews and conversations with a dozen defence sources.
Time has even been spent inside the Ministry of Defence (MoD) quibbling over the name of a new organisation charged with procuring billions of pounds worth of weapons - despite war gripping both the Middle East and Ukraine, and Donald Trump mocking British military weakness.
Two sources said some people would like to rename the newly established National Armaments Director Group, or NAD Group, as the Royal Armaments Directorate.
One of the sources claimed this was in part because the abbreviation "NAD" also means testicle - an unfortunate source of amusement. The other source said it was because the word "royal" would engender a greater sense of pride.
Sounds serious. If they can't agree on a name then the lanyards won't be ready for the first round of meetings.
5 comments:
The large organisation I once worked for *believed* in the power of reorganisation. "If only we were organised differently the 'work' would flow much more smoothly".
The consequence was that minions continued to do work they had always done, but the names of the bosses and the 'org charts' changed. And the work continued much as before apart from a brief hiatus while everybody tried to find out their new place.
So, in my view, reorganisations without a compelling business logic are just 'theatre'.
DJ - that was my experience too, although gradual increases in centralisation tended to make the ethos of the organisation more political and less practical.
In my University days I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Every now and again two departments would agree to merge some activity - typically their mechanical workshops. From this great economies would flow.
Yet I never once saw a post hoc demonstration that such economies were ever realised. Funny, that.
There's an example of the opposite result from the old days of computers. Once upon a time ... actually around the late sixties IIRC ... three large computer companies decided to pool resources to build a new software operating system for their products. They called it "Multics". After a while their project fell apart and was cancelled. However, one group (at AT&T) wanted to save something from the mess and put together a smaller system based on the (for the time) advanced ideas, mostly for their own use, and called it Unix. They gave away copies for free at first, because obviously no-one wanted to pay good money for something like that.
Fast forward 50+ years, and Unix - including the re-implementation called Linux - is probably the dominant operating system in the world. Your phone runs it (the two are the basis of iOS and Android) and so do a great many other systems.
dearieme - mergers in the public sector seem to work like that. The economies worked on paper beforehand and apparently that was enough. Afterwards there was no great interest in demonstrating that those economies were achieved.
Barbarus - that's interesting, sounds very much like one of those early computer stories which is worth reading because as you say, the modern world is largely built on it.
My father worked with computers from the early sixties, maybe a little earlier, and he would occasionally mention developments which made life easier. One was when the OS handled file storage instead of computer operators having to define where files were stored on disk.
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