National Defence committee  With procurement reform, it's not massive, but I think there is a decently close government contact group with the major companies and major suppliers. They articulate and spell out—not that the government always takes notice—some of the costs and risks of the processes that the MOD uses.

National Defence committee  The Upholder procurement process actually predates my awareness of the situation. I can tell you how we are looking at procurement for submarines. We have two things about procuring submarines. One is that we left a big gap between procuring the last of our nuclear bomber fleet and the attack submarines.

National Defence committee  The quick thing is that when there's a crisis, we do very well, because we cut out a lot of the process. Because the risks of being late are greater than the risks of perhaps a bad choice or a priority that shouldn't quite be a priority, those processes are shortened. We have an urgent operational requirement process that enables people to avoid competitions—not always, but sometimes—or, if there is a competition, it's on a very basic level.

National Defence committee  I have a quick answer to that. You used the word “blame”. If inquiries into why things have gone wrong are looking for blame, then people of course don't speak accurately because they don't want to put in evidence that leads to it being put on them. In the recommendation that I've made—and our minister actually took it with regard to one of our major programs that did go wrong—accountability should be asking people what they decided when and why, and seeing what grounds they had.

National Defence committee  Every project is different and has particular characteristics. I think you acquired your ship by a competitive process and that may have been vulnerable. It's also a slow process. I don't know how the requirements have changed since the commitment to a contract was made. My view is that in this day and age, we have to have a more co-operative view about trying to calculate what the cost is likely to be.

National Defence committee  Again, the situation in the U.K. is very different from that in the U.S., because the volume of law that Dr. Ross has referred to doesn't exist in the U.K. There is a lot of guidance and a little bit of law about procurement. Processes are there for two reasons. One is to make sure you're buying just the right thing and the right priority with the money.

National Defence committee  Well, Alexis, if I may call you that, you made the chief points. The defence industry sizes itself according to the level of demand, and in the U.K., too, we're boosting munitions production capacity. I think there's an important point, which is that, the simpler the product—and an artillery shell is, let's face it, a fairly simple product—the more it can be automated and the easier it is to increase production capacity in an acceptable way.

National Defence committee  There are two aspects to this. One is that when equipment gets delivered, a high-technology new kit, there are often small, or sometimes not so small, defects in it that get fixed by engineering processes either in government or in the company. That's quite normal. You don't expect a big, complicated piece of kit to work absolutely perfectly from day one.

National Defence committee  The Ministry of Defence and the government are quite open about their policy stances, and you can read about them in policy documents. Whether the general population wants to take on this burden is quite a different matter. What we have done in the U.K. is that.... Where they feed into the formal acquisition, procurement processes very much come to the fore when you try to do a competition, because you have to provide what we call an assessment scheme.

National Defence committee  One hesitates to make a recommendation to another country in different circumstances. I'd go back to my comment in the very beginning on thinking about buying different things in different ways. We practise that very heavily in the United Kingdom, without doing it explicitly. For our next combat aircraft, under GCAP, which we're doing with Japan and Italy, the companies are chosen, the partner countries are chosen and they're working as one team to develop what they know must be a competitive product.

National Defence committee  If you have a word limit.... That's a really big question, by the way, and a difficult question, but I think the quick observation I would make is that if you have a small number of suppliers and a customer who makes only very occasional orders, those suppliers are desperate to win an order.

National Defence committee  Okay. That's fine with me.

National Defence committee  That makes my life easier.

National Defence committee  Not to my knowledge. We have a separate group who do the operational side of the military, if you like, or the military sciences part. I'm sort of aware, because I deal with procurement, of things like your new ship, the Type 26 variant, but I don't know of any studies. We've been in existence since 1831, so when you ask me if we've ever done that, I can't give you a clear answer.

National Defence committee  I think the quick answer is that it's very important but not absolutely important. The U.K. wants to present itself as an operationally independent major international power. They recognize this means that you cannot depend entirely or excessively on a foreign supplier. I think Ukraine has brought out the importance of supply chains in the defence capability.