British Defence Procurement & Industrial Strategy: The New Minister Speaks

UK MoD Recently, DID has covered Britain’s defence transformation efforts and its concerns in Britain that recent defence procurement approaches were locking them into an anti-US, EU-centric model that would have major defence and foreign policy implications, and noted a key implication of network-centric warfare for the defence industry. This is a debate we’ll see in many European countries over the next decade, due in part to the EU/EDA’s continent-wide industrial integration efforts. Nevertheless, the debate can be expected to burn hottest in Britain, a strong defence power in its own right with a special transatlantic relationship and ambivalence about its role in the EU political project. A subsequent DID article covering Britain’s futuristic FRES land vehicle family examined this idea further, in the course of explaining the FRES program its defence implications. Now Britain’s new Minister for Defence Procurement Lord Drayson weighs in. His speech outlines some of the government’s current thinking regarding British defence procurement policy, the country’s industrial base, and its approach to a globalizing defence industry. His stated intent is to produce the outlines of a Defence Industrial Strategy by Christmas 2005. As he puts it in his speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), […]