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Equipment shortfall 'risks troops'
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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.
An 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."
Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said that the report had exposed a "black hole" in the defence budget and called on the Government now to publish the document in full.
"It is serial incompetence by the Labour Government and the Ministry of Defence to allow our defences to get to this state," he told Sky News's Sunday Live programme. "There is a catastrophic black hole, so much so that the defence budget is little more than a con-trick at the present time where the Government pretend that they have procured equipment for the future when they have never actually set aside the money to do so. This is a disastrous state of affairs - governments have resigned for less in other countries."
