The Ministry of Defence is 'built to move slow', newly appointed top official warns
Rupert Pierce, the newly appointed National Armaments Director, was put in post to drive change and innovation across the Ministry of Defence in a bid to get the department on a war footing.
Now he is warning the MOD's built-in risk aversion is stopping them move at the pace they need, saying: "The default setting for the Ministry of Defence through the last 40 or 50 years of peace has been slow, and sometimes that was far too quick.
"We're built to move slowly, we're built to not spend money and we're built to wrap everything in the processes to make sure we operate in a truly riskless environment.
"That is not a recipe for moving quickly. The biggest challenge we face is to be able to up the pace."
Speaking at the defence company Thales' recent Tech Summit, he underlined his point, saying: "We thought we had 10 years last summer, by the autumn we thought we had five years.
"The intelligence suggests there is a grave risk of us being at war by 2030, unless we project the right kind of deterrence.
"And to do that, we need to move at pace. That is hard."
Mr Pierce made the remarks in front of a defence industry audience, pointing out the need for suppliers to also adopt this attitude.
He said: "Our supply chain aren't used to moving at the right pace either… because it's firmly believed that innovation at the pace of relevance is one of the things we have to have, that while we create all of the right capabilities today and we train our Armed Forces to be ready, if we just think that's it and we step back and we wait a few years, we will be out of date.
"We will be overturned by disruption and innovation by our adversaries."
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