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A FEW months ago Britain’s Ministry of Defence finally managed to balance its books. The National Audit Office, which scrutinises government, validated the ministry’s plan to spend £159 billion ($243 billion) by 2022 on military equipment and support. For a pariah department with a reputation for financial fecklessness, that was a milestone. It now wants to follow up by attempting a reform that has never been tried by any country.

At present the £14 billion a year Britain spends on buying and servicing military kit passes through an outfit called Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S). This arm of the ministry is based in Bristol and employs 16,500 people, mostly recruited from the armed forces and the civil service. Later this month the government will announce that it is to assess whether to continue with a reformed version of DE&S or to outsource its functions to a new organisation that would be owned by the government but operated by a private contractor—known by its acronym, GOCO. To the alarm of many in the defence industry and the armed forces, a GOCO is the government’s preferred option.


The idea sprang from an independent report on acquisition policy carried out in 2009 for the previous government by Bernard Gray, a former journalist and businessman. Mr Gray, who became head of defence materiel in 2011 (and thus boss of DE&S), lambasted a “sclerotic” system which had resulted in a “substantially overheated” equipment programme. Too many types of military kit had been ordered for too large a range of tasks at too high a specification. Mr Gray concluded: “The problems, and the sums of money involved have almost lost their power to shock, so endemic is the issue.” When the coalition government took over in 2010 it found a hole in the equipment budget of £45.6 billion. That swelled to £74 billion following a strategic review of defence, which trimmed spending.

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Just saw this. Young Pioneers from the German Democratic Republic.
Now who says the Communists did not know how to let their kids have a few good toys to play with?
Now the question is, they are T-55's or T-62's?

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