Why The UK MOD Should Establish A Non-Profit Engineering Organisation
The UK thinks it has a process problem in defence procurement. It doesn’t. The real problem is that, too often, no one can tell who is telling the truth, and too few people care to find out.
That should be obvious by now, but I’m not sure it is.
In procurement, the hardest judgement is whether a proposed solution will actually work. In the most complex parts of the market, that judgement has become harder for the buyer and easier for the seller to manipulate. That is what knowledge asymmetry looks like in practice.
When the deepest specialist knowledge sits inside the companies bidding for the work, and the buyer cannot consistently separate what is credible from what is simply well presented, that gap gets exploited. Bid craft starts to matter more than engineering capability, and that is a bad way to buy serious capability.
The problem did not appear overnight.
The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA, used to give the MOD something every serious buyer needs: a technical gamekeeper inside the system. After the 2001 split, Dstl stepped away from exploitation, production and supply chain at scale, while QinetiQ went from gamekeeper to poacher.
The result is that the MOD lost an internal referee just as the technology environment was about to become much more complex. In that time, cloud, smartphones, cheap sensors, modern software tooling and now AI have compressed development timelines and increased technical complexity. The government’s own Defence and Security Industrial Strategy says the UK needs to identify promising technology, exploit it and get it to the frontline faster than its adversaries. That ambition is right. But ambition without strong technical judgement simply creates a bigger opportunity for those who can play the system rather than improve it.
You could say: DERA disappears and we use the private sector instead, no big deal. It is a big deal. Contrary to the usual public-sector-bashing commentary, there is a real desire inside government to deliver, with little true incentive to delay, though that should not be conflated with difficult trade-offs.
Too much of the space left behind by the DERA divorce has been filled by professional services firms whose incentives are tied to time, headcount and lengthy analysis. Many of the people in those firms are capable individuals, but that is not the point. The point is that the model is structurally incentivised to extend projects, not deliver quickly.
There is a cultural angle too, and it matters more than people admit.
The best scale-ups and engineering-led businesses move quickly because bad news moves quickly. Problems get surfaced early and trade-offs get made in the open. In too much of defence procurement, that kind of honesty is still treated as disruptive. Teams that challenge assumptions, surface delivery risk and push for hard decisions can end up being penalised simply for making the room less comfortable. Meanwhile, those who make people feel good fare better.
This is fixable.
The UK should create a genuinely independent, not-for-profit engineering organisation with one clear job: restore technical judgement to the system. It should be an engineering referee that can hire talent at market rates, operate independently, and focus first on the areas of technical assurance where conflicts and complexity are highest. Give it a two-year prove-or-stop remit and a defined role where it gets first refusal on policy-defined professional services work (PSS, in old speak).
None of this is anti-industry. Quite the opposite.
Better judgement would help the best businesses win for the right reasons. It would favour companies that can actually build, integrate and deliver. And frankly, the fact that I’m a founder arguing for more scrutiny should tell you something. Any company that sees tougher technical discrimination as a threat is probably benefiting from the ambiguity.
The UK already knows what it wants: faster exploitation, quicker delivery to the frontline, and a stronger industrial base. What it still lacks is a buying system with enough independent technical depth to tell the difference between a persuasive answer and a real one.
New companies have spent a lot of money building genuinely impressive teams and capabilities. They want to know that the MOD is operating a procurement system that is meritocratic.
It is simple to fix, and I remain consistently confused as to why nobody has just gone and done it.
Books for Builders
This is the literary toolkit I’d recommend for building:
If you want to build a great business, read High Output Management by Andy Grove.
If you want reassurance that the chaos is normal, read The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
If you are engineering systems that have to work away from desks, read Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson.
If you spent too many years carrying heavy things and breaking yourself in the process, read Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett.
And obviously, read The Lord of the Rings, followed by Discworld (starting with ‘Guards! Guards!’).
You can do most things based on that list.
