Thank you.
It's an interesting challenge to be asked to talk to you this evening. It's evening for me; obviously, it's afternoon for you.
What I would like to say, first of all, is that I observe that Canada, like Australia, the United States and certainly the United Kingdom, has a kind of constant effort to improve its acquisition systems. This is to be applauded, but it does say something about how difficult it is, actually, to get everything right.
One conclusion that I reached quite a while ago—and it relates to something with your last speaker—is that different things have to be bought or procured in different ways and need different acquisition strategies to deal with them. It's quite a complex challenge to specify, but you don't buy office desks in the way that you buy combat aircraft. It builds on that.
Well done, Canada, for trying to make things better, but you're in a club where defence acquisition is a soap opera rather than a novel with an ending.
I'm not going to talk too much about the British acquisition system. I'm happy to take questions on it. I did put some written paper to you and I'll just underline the headlines from that.
One is that there's a role, I think, for expectation management. People have extraordinary expectations that defence equipment can be delivered in 10 years' time with a particular performance for a particular amount of money. On the way here, I just tested my views with a cab driver. I asked him if he'd had any work done on his house. He'd had various jobs done, including a new bathroom. I asked him if it was on time. He said it wasn't and that it took 10 days, not five. I asked him if he wrote to his minister and he said hadn't. When our equipment is a year or so late on a 10-year program, we have to appreciate how difficult these things are. I think there's a role for expectation management.
I think there's a fundamental challenge now to defence acquisition at the high level. I will put it in these terms. We are accustomed to defence acquisition processes being very deliberate and careful. There's a kind of formal way through where you specify a requirement, you think of an acquisition strategy and then you implement it. Eventually, you sign a contract and all that. It takes a long time, as everybody in this business knows.
The reality of the world in which we are living now is that technology is moving very quickly in many important areas. Also, world politics are moving very quickly in important areas. Therefore, the idea that you can write a really useful requirement now against which you'll sign a contract in four years' time seems absolutely ludicrous.
The way in which it's moving—reluctantly, I must say, in some parts of the U.K., at least—is that there's a need for a closer dialogue between industry, which knows more about the technology, and the government, which knows more about needs. They talk together and the relationship between them becomes more important than the contract that may exist. It's a big and radical way of moving, but when you think of the speed at which.... It's the sort of way in which we operate with urgent operational requirements, but it's not the sort of way in which we usually work with major platforms.
There's a real challenge for defence acquisition in ambitious countries that ask how they can make their acquisition system move at the same rate as technology and politics are moving. Now, I know that Canada is trying to go more quickly with acquisition processes, so there's awareness of this. However, I think one particular point is that if you go for fixed requirements, then those requirements are going to become unsatisfactory to your military users before you've had a chance to deliver the system. That means contract changes and all that.
The next point I want to make is that Canada does not—nor does the United Kingdom—buy military equipment to achieve a single objective of military capability. It's going for prosperity and for improving wealth distribution within the country. In the U.K.'s case, it's trying to keep the union together and help cement the union. We place work in Scotland to help to do that because it binds the Scots closer together.
We have procurement for multiple objectives. We have debates now about what is meant by “value” and what the dimensions of value are. It's much more than whether a general in a division thinks it's a very good piece of kit. That's an important consideration, but it's not the only consideration. Foreign policy considerations can also feed in.