Aimless

A review by the Ministry of Defence’s top civil servants has concluded that R&D at the department, on which the UK spends £2.6 billion a year, has “no unifying vision or clear strategic direction”.

"Maximising Defence Capability Through R&D" was posted unannounced by the MoD on its website earlier this month. It was written by a team co-chaired by Roy Anderson, the MoD’s Chief Scientific Adviser, and Peter Spencer, the Chief of Defence Procurement.

The review team found that R&D management is segmented, with little re-use of crosscutting technology. Development is not managed as a programme and there are no metrics to assess performance.

Interpretations of what counts as R&D differ across the MoD, leading to a lack of clarity.

The value and utility of R&D outputs are rarely measured in their own right, in part because payment milestones are not always linked to development achievements.

The review team spent part of their time looking at a sample of individual projects. Several had not been exploited successfully, nor were they likely to be in the future, thanks to lack of coordination between R&D sponsors.

The team also found that there is no central repository of knowledge and findings from MoD-funded R&D and no formal mechanism for disseminating R&D findings for possible use on other projects. The quality of road mapping and technology planning was variable, especially for immature and cross-cutting technologies.

The majority of MoD’s R&D spending results in intellectual property owned by industry to which the government enjoys user rights. This is not catalogued centrally and the team found little evidence of localised IP management. As a result, the MoD does not sufficiently value past R&D or realise its full potential benefit.

In a forward to the report, Paul Drayson, the defence minister, promises change will now be "vigorously pursued”. But that seems a pretty wimpish response to what is in reality a damning verdict on recent years at the MoD. It seems the top brass have been going into the technology battle without a plan of any kind. Feeble.