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The MOD - Unfit For Purpose
Social Affairs Unit Magazines Limited
Anonymous
I am often asked why the MOD makes so many strange decisions and seems to
care so little about the welfare of its personnel. People are surprised to
read about expensive computer systems that fail to pay service members their
proper salaries - or pay them late. So me are shocked by the apparent dumping
of severely wounded personnel from Afghanistan and Iraq into civilian
hospital wards, remote from their regiments and families, or the massive
contracts for systems that are delivered late and don't work properly, or
the strange failure to publicise genuine successes and minor victories
achieved "against the odds" in Afghanistan and Iraq.
None of these scandals - or many others less well known - would surprise
anyone who knows the MOD and what it has become.
Most people still believe that the MOD is essentially a military
organisation. It is not. It is an organisation dominated numerically,
culturally and structurally by civil servants and consultants, many of whom
are unsympathetic to its underlying purpose or even hostile to the military
and its ethos. You just have to spend a few days at the MOD before you
realise that the culture there is not just non-military, but anti-military.
That is one reason why so few of us (except for the chiefs of staff)
regularly wear our uniforms to the office. Officers who desire a career in
politics or the Civil Service try to seem as civilian as possible, and soon
start speaking in the consultants' jargon favoured by the "fast-track" Civil
Service. (It is telling that senior officers have generally failed to
champion the wearing of uniforms in public by members of the armed forces.)
I once attended a meeting of MOD civil servants about "outsourcing" parts of
the military. I was out of uniform. My colleagues were keen on outsourcing
as much as possible; I argued that stripping out logistics and other
capacity from the armed forces is dangerous - it means no longer having
cooks and technicians who can be handed a weapon and told to fight. I asked
the people around the table, "Who actually loves the military in all this?"
There was an awkward silence. So I repeated the question in different form:
"Who is putting the military requirement first?" One of the civil servants,
a woman on the "fast track", actually giggled. I reiterated that this was a
serious question and noted that I was the only service person present. There
was then great embarrassment as no one in the room had realised beforehand
that I was a serving military officer. I probably wouldn't have been invited
if they had known.
The contrast with the US Department of Defense could not be greater. The
Pentagon is a first-rate military organisation (at least in terms of status)
where the MOD is not. At the Pentagon, every military person is expected to
be in uniform; and it's the civilians who feel and recognise that they are
the supporting cast. Military officers are frequently loaned to other
ministries such as the State Department and they continue to wear their
uniforms there. The reverse is true in the UK where the Civil Service and
"unions" not only resist the wearing of uniforms but also any systematic
secondments (as opposed to hand-picked placements) from the military.
The MOD has slipped from being one of the top five ministries to one of
second or even third rank. Moreover, even if our top generals wanted to
oppose some aspect of defence policy, they would find the MOD's structure is
now rigged so that civil servants increasingly come between them and the
government.
Back in the late 1980s things were very different. It was only two decades
since the Admiralty, Air Ministry and Ministry of War had been folded into a
combined HQ. In those days there was broadly a one-to-four ratio of civilian
to military personnel. On any project you would have one member of each
service, plus a "scientific civilian".
After that two doctrines came into play - "jointness" and "equivalency".
Together they drove out specialised military professionalism and brought in
a new managerial, non-specialist cadre of civil servants. The result was
that MOD projects needed only one member of the armed forces. A pre-existing
and efficient culture of interaction and debate and testing of ideas was
driven out.
Now the ratio of civilians to service-members is closer to six to one - not
including the ever-growing numbers of consultants and Spads (special
advisers) or the parallel government structures in the cabinet office and
the PM's policy unit which may be driving the ratio towards 12 to one.
Essentially the military has lost command of its own HQ.
Worse still, the civil servants who now dominate the MOD are a different
breed from those who staffed it in the 1980s. In those days there were still
many civil servants who had served in the Second World War or Korea, or who
had at least done national service. They respected and understood the armed
services; they believed an effective military was important and had usually
learnt essential skills of leadership and management. They were loyal to the
Queen (then the head of the Civil Service), to the Civil Service itself and
to its code, and to the service arm they were working for. They have all
gone.
Their successors tend to see the services as a tiresome anachronism, peopled
by unsympathetic, old-fashioned social types. For many of them the MOD, with
its part-time minister, is merely a stepping stone to greater things. From
the perspective of such bureaucrats, the main point of the organisation,
apart from furthering individual career paths, has less to do with the
defence of the realm than with policy goals such as European integration,
the implementation of UN mandates and the expansion (and therefore dilution)
of Nato.
Cost-cutting at the MOD comes at the expense of the uniformed services. That
is partly because military officials are more expensive: the civilian
equivalent of a colonel is paid less. But it is mostly because military
people get in the way and ask awkward questions.
At the MOD, while there's endless talk of "throughput" and other jargon,
there is surprisingly little technical knowledge. There used to be a strong
cadre of science civil servants but they went too, after the Defence
Research Agency was sold off to Qinetiq, leaving behind a managerial rump
known as DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) - soon probably
also for the chop. Qinetiq, through a process of asset-stripping, has gone
on to sell what were the crown jewels of British science. Our famous wind
tunnels, and also the "Dark Hangar", where some of the most important SAS
techniques and weaponry were developed, have all been demolished. And where
have the public millions gone? Often to the private pockets of the public
servants who led on privatisation. It is a national disgrace.
The real point of most MOD contracts is industrial strategy. We buy planes
or vehicles or systems not because they are the best we can afford for the
task in hand but because they mean jobs in some part of the country. Or
because they further European integration. This is why we buy helicopters
like the Merlin that cost more than three times the price of the US
Blackhawk. As a result we don't have decent airlift capacity in Afghanistan,
and our infantry in Basra were the first British troops to=2 0go into battle
without dedicated "on-call" air cover since the First World War.
Though all the services suffer under the MOD regime, relations between the
forces are worse than ever. The Army is angriest because it is bearing the
brunt of actual operations. It used to complain about the RAF. Now that so
much money is being spent on maritime projects unlikely to see action, it
increasingly resents the Royal Navy. This is only deepened by the arrogance
and incompetence of the Navy itself, as exemplified by the Shatt-al-Arab
incident last year.
Because the services haven't had the budget increases they need to fight the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military is running out of everything.
We're running out of trucks, for instance. And when things break they aren't
being replaced. Increasingly one gets the impression that the civil servants
don't care if the forces are broken - their careers will not be affected.
But it may also be that some civil servants and a body of politicians, from
both Left and Right, would actually be happy for the military to be broken
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then they will have truly achieved the
Europeanisation of Britain's armed forces along the lines of a purely
defensive "UK Defence Force". War will somehow have been abolished - until,
of course, it returns at a time of our enemies' choosing.
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Merda taurorum animas conturbit
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Brilliant post Judge and what a lot of sense you make.
Maggie
