MoD’s vehicle procurement incompetence taking toll on British jobs
November 20th, 2008 by Nick Harvey MP — Military action, Shortages, Welfare
Today BAE Systems’ announced that it is to cut 200 UK jobs in its land systems business.
The MoD’s staggering incompetence over its armoured vehicle procurement programme now seems to be taking its toll on British jobs.
It is hard to believe that while our troops in Afghanistan are facing a crippling shortage of suitable vehicles, the jobs to make those vehicles are still being cut in the UK.
It is little wonder that the FRES vehicle programme was recently described as ‘the worst procurement programme ever’.
The Government must get its act together for the sake of both our troops and British workers, and decide what it wants, what it needs and what it can afford. A comprehensive Strategic Defence Review is now more vital than ever.
The recession is already hitting jobs hard in Britain. The last thing we need is for this to be compounded by Government incompetence.
3 comments ↓
I am quite deeply unimpressed with the FRES programme so far, even though I doubt that it is the worst procurement programme ever. There is still some chance that vehicles of some kind might be delivered, even if they are only Mowag Piranhas with a false beard and stuck-on nose. Having worked on the TRACER/FSCS project, I doubt that any program could be managed worse, although FRES appears to be going around several of the same mulberry bushes; and it is making the additional mistake of trying to be all things to all men (something like sixteen vehicle variants for sixteen different roles, last time I looked).
I normally wouldn’t weep too hard for redundant BAE folks, but these people seem to be coming from the last remaining places in the UK where people know how to build tanks. Since Chertsey was closed there has been almost no AFV design experience left in the UK. A colleague of mine in an MoD agency recently pointed out that the reconnaissance variant of FRES represents (depending on how you count) something like the seventh attempt to replace the CVR(T) family of the seventies. There can be very few engineers working in the UK now who have worked on a successful AFV design; BAE’s voluntary redundancies will probably include a disproportionate share of the old, experienced folks who have acquired genuine expertise.
Sadly, although this country invented the tank, it seems we have now all but lost the ability to design and manufacture Armoured Fighting Vehicles in this country. If that is a capability we want to get back, it is not going to be cheap. Over the years we have got used to not being able to buy a British-designed motorbike or a British-designed car, indeed British manufactured goods of any description. This is just part of the same pattern of economic decline.
All the best,
John.
We have, it is claimed, the 6th largest manufacturing sector in the world. Slight exaggeration maybe but only Germany, Japan, China and the US are clearly bigger. It is very damaging to continually denigrate British manufacturing, what has been lost is it’s visibility. You can certainly buy British motorbikes (Triumph in Hinckley) and we may not have any indigenous mass-car manufacturer but we have several big, good car factories, lots of talented designers and are pre-eminent in motor-sport. This from someone who has only a passing interest in such matters.
2nd comment: ‘only the Piranha’? I cannot say if this is absolutely the best such vehicle on the market, there are a couple of competitors but it comes with a good pedigree, Mowag are one of the top design houses in Europe. It will be a vast improvement over AT105, CVRT, FV432 etc.
We need CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, ie what exactly is wrong and what to do to put it right? Maybe too much to sum up in a blog, so maybe a policy working group or something similar.
Steve Coltman
I am not denigrating British manufacturing; quite the reverse, I am lamenting its tragic decline. The manufacturing sector in this country has lost a very great deal more than just “visibility”. I don’t know where the “sixth largest manufacturing sector” figure comes from, and I am surprised and pleased to discover that at least one brand of British bike is still made (outside India, where I believe Enfield Bullets are to be had). But when did you last see a new British-manufactured microchip, supertanker, jet aircraft, locomotive? Or even a toy with “Made in Britain” stamped on it?
As far as specifically defence manufacturing goes, France, Spain, Italy, Israel and Sweden are probably at least as well if not better placed than we are. This was not the case as recently as twenty years ago. You’ll notice that there was no British-made vehicle entered in the FRES “Trials of Truth”.
Nor do I think the Piranha a bad product. What I object to is the silly FRES project flapdoodle of pretending that it is going to be some kind of revolutionary advance when the basic design dates from the 1970s. I must declare an interest here; I work for the company that acquired Mowag, so I have reasons for wanting Piranha to win apart from thinking it is the best vehicle for FRES utility, and the one the Army wants.
“What exactly is wrong” is a good question, but there are so many things wrong in defence procurement that it is not a question to be answered shortly. One of the main things, though, must be to abandon the delusion that Network Enabled Capability (NEC) will somehow make under-strength and over-worked forces magically capable of doing the job of organizations many times their size. FRES was born at the height of the “Medium Weight Capability” fad; what the Army needs now is a bunch of general-purpose vehicles for protected mobility and recce to replace the worn-out fleet of existing vehicles. Many such have been procured through UORs because of the continued inability of the mainstream procurement system to deliver them. This is not a question of doing things “better, faster, cheaper”, in the fatuous mantra of “smart” procurement; it is a question of replacing an existing bread-and-butter capability that is long overdue for replacement. Piranha is, basically, a wheeled spam-can, and while almost anything would be an improvement over Saxon, it can hardly be called a “vast improvement” over FV 432 (tracked spam-can) and CVR(T) (small tracked spam-can). But it is a good vehicle, available now, and a decision could have been made to procure it any time since the FRES requirement was framed had it not been an exercise in dream-sheeting.
The main thing we need to do, though, is provide more money. When you say “Better, faster, cheaper” to an engineer, his likely response is going to be “Pick two”. We cannot afford any more treasury cheese-paring in defence; we are going to have to pay more for it, especially as we seem to be paying for two land wars in Asia. There may be some capabilities we can and should ditch permanently to save money (I can only think of one, Trident), but light armoured vehicles isn’t one of them.
All the best,
John.
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