UK AFV Acquisition

[Tjay]

Depressing reading for the Christmas season. And the most depressing part is the fact that the MOD refuses to admit that any person or persons are or were actually responsible for the FRES shambles. But I doubt if any European country's Civil Service accepts the concept of personal responsibility. It must be nice to know that however badly you f**k up you will never have to answer for your decisions.

http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/from-scimitar-to-fres-to-ajax/

[Ssnake]

I have yet to read the whole paper. I feel compelled however pointing out that it seems highly unlikely that there really was a single person or committee responsible for all the major errors. Instead you're looking at a series of decisions which, at the time they were taken, may actually have made sense - except that the combined effect is obviously disastrous.

So, maybe it's not so much the individual decisions that were terrible, but the overall structures and acquisition processes. And these do not become highly dysfunctional because of a single individual, but because of decades of wrong decisions (or decades of indecision) - maybe because priorities at the cabinet level veered by at least 90...120° over three decades.

Whose fault is an erratic policy at the cabinet level? The prime ministers'? The individual ministers? one of them in particular, or all of them?

The parties?

The voters?

Seriously. It IS difficult to make out what, specifically, doomed an entire project if three decades are lost with countless of officers, civil servants, and politicians contributing to the decisions that were made (or not taken).

A favorite example of mine is the movie "The Pentagon Wars" which tells the story of terrible project management in a humorous or satirical manner that seems to have clear villains and one hero. Except that the villain general actually tries to salvage the entire project (the Bradley) from turning into a FRES like disaster. His methods are questionable, they are what makes him the villain in the film, but at least he's trying to get the whole project finished. The hero, a young airforce captain, has the best intentions. But he's focused on the methods of the villain, and his well-intentioned actions nearly bring down the whole project. A very possible result at about 2/3rds into the movie could have been that the Bradley project gets scrapped, the Army is left stuck with another two decades of inadequate M113s, and thus more soldiers dying because, despite the deficits at the time, the Bradley still was vastly superior to the M113 that it was supposed to replace. That, of course, is a possible reality that is never really discussed in the film. The film, like critics of the FRES project, has 20/20 hindsight goggles on and never attempts to take them off even for a moment.

AFV procurement is a quite complex process. It requires experience and the retainment of know-how both at the industry level (hard to do if there's no meaningful procurement going on for a decade or more to keep the industrial base alive), at the army procurement/testing level (hard to do if officers are routinely rotated to new jobs every two to five years), at the army project management level (again, don't rotate your officers too often), and particularly if the entire strategic disposition of your country changes a number of times (Cold war - Gulf war - "End of history" - emergence of non-state threats - resurgence of state threats).

[Tjay]

Many thanks for your insight - particularly the idea that the whole acquisiton process is not fit for purpose. That issue never seems to get addressed at high level. Why can't the politicos and civil servants say, 'This obviously doesn't work; let's do it differently'. After a while one just becomes resigned to the fact that there is no real leadership or moral integrity at high level and those involved are looking primarily to their careers rather than doing the job for which they are getting rather well paid. I suppose they might get their act together if they ever felt that their procrastination was putting themselves and their wives and families in danger. By which time it would, of course, be too late.

[Ssnake]

Well, after reading through all the many, many, many pages, I got to agree that the author made a compelling case. It's easy to blame the civil servants, but as the saying goes, fish starts smelling rotten at the head. It's the uniformed officers who changed direction far too often, and sometimes for the wrong reasons too.

I don't know who the sales team was that sold both the US Army on the FCS (and in its wake, the British army into the ill-defined fantasy land that was FRES at its culmination). Brilliant salesmen, but also highly dangerous people because either they knew that they were selling snake oil, or they weren't cynical but just vastly overestimated their ability to deliver. Which in itself isn't a problem, you get these sales types often enough. Armies should have the competence to see through the smokescreens that an unethical sales force will deploy.

The problem is that apparently they don't.

I'm not particularly well qualified to submit a complete and thorough analysis. But from my work in the field of army procurement in the last ten years I must say that the best working relationship we established with armies that leave highly qualified specialist officers in the same position for at least five years, better ten, some even up to twenty. You need the experience of years to see through dishonest sales pitches. Of course that must still be flanked by a strong organization to do a systematic evaluation of concepts. The key lesson to take home is, don't outsource expertise.

When the Deutsche Bahn stopped engineering their own trains and rather outsourced that to industry, they started running into serious issues with their rolling stock's reliability. Giving up this know-how comes at an enormous cost. I'm not suggesting that armies should go and engineer their tanks themselves. But they absolutely need officers with a solid engineering background that stay posted in the same project from start to finish, ideally. The Bundeswehr invested heavily into rebuilding this expertise from the mid 1950s to the end of the 1960s, and it culminated in

a) a failed MBT 70 project, and

b) a very successful Leopard 2 that rose from the MBT 70's ashes.

The Leo 2 was delivered exactly on budget and three months under the projected time, and had a major redesign of its armor concept right in the middle of the prototyping phase. It surpassed the highest expectations at the time. And much of this success must be contributed to the civil servants that filled the ranks of the Bundeswehr acquisition authority. This was also possible because the army was disciplined about its requirements (which were demanding, yes), but sticking to technologies that had a high degree of maturity.

FCS and FRES in its worst form were always in fantasy land. You just can't shrink an MBT into a Hercules and expect the same amount of firepower and survivability by the introduction of sintered pixie dust as the new magic armor.

Both the US Army and the British Army would have benefitted enormously had they kept a conventional development project open, parallel to FRES and FCS. If the programs had delivered a miraculous breakthrough on ALL the critical components - great!

If not, which was extremely likely from the outset, you still had a fallback option. In the end, solid engineering made the growth of all the armored vehicles possible that were designed in the 1960s and 1970s despite not being designed for massive weight growth, and yet they managed to cope.