We’ve published several articles on the current drive for “efficiency” and “affordability” by the U.S. Department of Defense.  Our most recent article provided details regarding how Secretary of Defense Gates proposed to reduce Pentagon bureaucracy, and noted the almost immediate creation of a group of politicians united in opposition to any cuts that might take place in their states.  But the U.S. is not alone in trying to rein-in out of control defense spending.

As this article at FlightGlobal.com reports, the U.K. government has unveiled plans to reorganize its Ministry of Defense, in order to “stop programme delays and cost overruns.”  This is not the first time we noted acquisition system reform attempts within the government of our former colonial masters.  In October, 2009, we reported—

It seems that the USA is not alone in seeing an urgent need to reform the aerospace/defense acquisition system. The UK MoD faces similar problems and has received several recommendations to address them. Just as in the U.S., true reform will require a fundamental shift in how the legislative branch (i.e., Parliament) authorizes funds to the Defense Department (i.e., MoD). In the U.S., though, such heresy has not been well received. Perhaps the UK will undertake the difficult yet necessary reforms, and will reap commensurate benefits. We wish them the best of luck.

In that same article, we noted with approval the publication of a nearly 300 page-long report from an independent review team, in which problems were catalogued with candor, and feasible recommendations were put forward.  We asked if the U.S. DOD could benefit from those recommendations, since the problems reported seemed so familiar.  Nearly a year later, the MoD seems to be moving forward on those recommendations. 

Not only is the MoD going to be reorganized, but the U.K. armed forces will also be reformed, so as to ensure “more efficient provision of defence capability and generation and sustainment of operations".  According to the FlightGlobal article—

The department is to be ‘reorganised into three pillars’, namely: policy and strategy; the armed forces; and procurement and estates. The new three pillar structure is designed to ‘stop the constant over-specification and then respecification of programmes which has led to so many cost overruns and programme delays’.

The envisaged cultural shift would render the department ‘leaner and less centralised’.

Addressing the efforts to reform the armed services, the article reported—

The armed forces review, meanwhile, is intended to ‘challenge some of the fundamental assumptions which drive force generation, such as tour lengths and intervals’, says [the MoD spokesperson], noting that it takes armed forces of over 180,000 to sustain a combat force of under 10,000 in Afghanistan.

The article also noted—

Estimating the unfunded liability in defence at £37 billion ($57.6 billion) over the next 10 years - £20 billion of it attributable to the equipment and support programme – [the MoD] said that ‘short-term reductions’ were required to ‘return defence to a sound footing’ and that the SDSR was being faced with ‘unavoidably constrained finances’.

Moreover, the MoD spokesperson stated—

The defence reform unit will liaise with senior personnel to ‘find ways of devolving greater responsibility for the running of the services’, says Fox, adding: ‘We must get away from the over centralising tendency that has become the hallmark of the MoD in recent years.’

He anticipates changes to the services' senior rank structure, commenting: ‘We cannot demand efficiency from the lower ranks while exempting those at the top.’

As we noted above, the U.K. and U.S. seem to be facing similar problems, and also seem to be addressing those problems along similar lines.  Yet we can’t help noticing that the U.K. reform efforts seem to have both an overall strategy and concrete, implementable short-term plans.  Although the U.S. is also moving ahead with its Defense reform efforts, we do not see a similar picture.  Instead, we hear Secretary of Defense Gates’ intentions without much support … and with some die-hard opposition already emerging from the politicians who control the purse.

Once again, we suggest that the U.S. DOD can learn something from its U.K. kin, and it ought to be actively liaising with the MoD to see how it can accelerate and improve on its on efforts.  We wonder why DOD leadership appears to be ignoring this obvious force-multiplier?