Defence Reform in the United Kingdom: A Twenty-First Century Paradox

Summary:

The context of budgetary constraint offered a strong incentive for the 2010 Coalition Government to improve its management of defence equipment.

Before that, the previous Labour governments already focused on smart acquisition so that the procurement process could reach a trade-off between military performance, the R&D costs and the purchase value. Thus, several smart acquisition reforms aimed at importing private sector skills and behaviours into the defence public domain. By building its logic around public-private partnership (PPP), smart acquisition can be apprehended as an interlocking of three factors: organisation, the high level of process and body of knowledge, and the people who promoted and enacted its processes, behaviours and objectives. Due to organisational confusion, ineffective project management and unclear objectives, successive UK governments have failed to manage operational and financial risks, cost overruns and diseconomies.

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