UK Ministry of Defence ‘Unfit for Purpose’

(Via Small Wars Journal) I’ve just been reading this blistering denunciation of the MOD ‘The MOD – Unfit For Purpose | Standpoint.Online’ written by an anonymous uniformed staffer.

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. Some 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.

I’ve had relatively limited contact with the bureaucracy of the MOD myself so I’d not put myself forward as an expert witness. But the account squares with similar stories/gripes I’ve heard recently and I’m inclined to believe that the situation really is as bad as it is described.

I wonder, however, if there is a larger point here: it’s not just the MOD which is ‘unfit for purpose’ it’s the whole bureaucracy of government which is out of step with reality. Across the spectrum from education and health through defence and policing the state provides services which deliver minimal satisfaction at phenomenal expense. I think this is because state capacity and activity is still primarily generated and delivered through institutions designed for and operating under the cultural imperatives of another age. This is perhaps more obvious in the security sector than it is in others because war is the ultimate ‘reality check’. Highly-capable, transnational irregular adversaries increasingly operating in the cyber or ‘virtual’ environment have a vastly superior bang-for-buck ratio.