More reports criticising the poor performance of the defence procurement process filled the Sunday papers. The catalyst was two leaked post-Kosovo commanders' reports on their problems in the field. The most publicised issues were those of problems with communications and personal weapons. The media quickly focused on the delays and cost rises that have been associated with the introduction into service of the new communications system for the army known as Bowman. The replacement of the army's radios was first proposed in 1980, and yet the system is unlikely to be in Service before 2003 and costs have escalated considerably. If the current policy of Smart Procurement had been in place would it have been a different story?
Let us assume that the new radios were given priority in the 1981 defence programme, that there were no technological glitches and that the procurement process was perfect. Under such impossible circumstances, new radios should have been in service within 4 years of the start date. That would mean that the troops in Kosovo would have been operating with 1985 analogue radio sets, which would already be 15 years old and likely to be suffering as many problems as Clansman. The shaping assumptions for army communications have been changing faster than any procurement process can track. When the specifications were being formulated, the British Army needed radios to operate within its 65km of the Inner German Border over the flat German plain. In the post-Cold War era the distances, the terrain and the nations involved have all changed. In 1985, perspex and chinagraph were used for plotting the battlespace. In 2000, we need to transmit broadband digital data. The changes that we have seen over this period in civilian mobile and fixed telecommunications give some idea of what would have been lost by a design freeze in the 1980's.
What then is the answer? Is the army to be stuck with obsolete equipment because the procurement process can never catch up? The only sensible answer is to move as far as possible into the use of civilian equipment and devote fast track procurement to the minimum necessary military add-ons. This will probably be in the area of cryptography, although even that is available commercially. Civilian equipment may not be as robust, but perhaps the disposable mobile phone is a more appropriate piece of kit than the everlasting, super-robust, military-spec, comms centre.