Part 1: Right, where were we?
In the space of six weeks this summer, we got a new Prime Minister, a third Defence Secretary, and a Defence Investment Plan that turned up roughly a year late with a lot of money to find. For those living in a cave, the Defence Secretary who resigned over the funding settlement is now the Chancellor.
I am not being sarcastic when I say this is the most interesting moment in defence procurement in ages. It also has a very high probability of going wrong.
Why I went quiet
I used to be vocal - very vocal - about the state of UK regulated procurement. In British institutional culture, this was treated as though I had chosen the path of outright anarchy.
Then I stopped commentating, which sounds like it ought to have a story behind it but doesn't; I have simply been heads-down building Rowden, and anyone who has built something genuinely new will recognise how all-consuming that becomes.
In the years since - 2021 to 2026, give or take - a good deal of what I said became accepted. Ideas once dismissed as disruptive, naive or simply inconvenient are now delivered with great seriousness by the same institutions, and occasionally the same individuals, who once messaged me to explain why they did not like me saying them. A trendsetter, you might say. Much like my M&S-fuelled interpretation of industrial chic.
The tricky bit was always going to be implementation, and that is still not happening at any meaningful pace or scale. What has changed is the urgency behind it: in 2020 the case for reform was largely technological, whereas today it is being forced by threat and by money - and the fight over both is now happening (publicly).
And none of this can be passed off as ‘crazy guy in the corner’ anymore. The Defence Committee titled its 2023 report It is broke - and it's time to fix it. In May this year the MOD said that 96% of its major projects had problems with delivery or cost.
Some housekeeping on intent
I am going to talk about ‘the public sector’ and ‘industry’ as two amorphous beings. The reality is obviously more nuanced, but the groupings are useful, so bear with me.
Do I believe military personnel and civil servants want things to improve?
Yes. Overwhelmingly. Almost everyone I meet cares deeply - about better kit in users' hands, better outcomes for the Department, better value for the taxpayer.
The problem is how decisions are made and how ideas are formed. Bureaucracies - and by extension bureaucrats - trust people who look and think like them, and they tend to read challenge as criticism rather than as help. IMO, we ended in a decade long doom loop: the same people advise the same people, the same assumptions are repeated, we get the same outcomes, and everybody acts surprised at the results.
Do I believe the industrial base wants things to improve?
Mostly not, in any meaningful sense.
The traditional industrial base will back reform enthusiastically when reform moves the goalposts in its favour. It will talk about agility, innovation and partnership. It will sponsor the conference with the terrible coffee, sit on the generic panel, and publish the thought-leadership paper on why software matters. It will hire the person who never had any verifiable accountability for their decisions/indecision.
What the traditional industrial base actually objects to is consequence. A reformed system that puts end users and taxpayers first has to be able to say no, cancel things, and let weak companies fail - or at the very least make them pay for failing, in money and in reputation.
Consequence sorts people. The good companies take the accountability and get better, because there is now something in it for them: they move faster, carry more risk, build before they are asked to. The weak ones, big and small alike, do two things at once. In public they call for reform of the structures that shelter them. In private they fight a spirited rearguard action, spreading FUD about the new entrants and about the incumbents who have actually changed.
Those are also the firms the Department turns to for advice. That is the doom loop in commercial form: we ask the companies least likely to survive change to set aside their own interests and tell us what change should look like.
They will decay eventually, I just expected it to be quicker. The decisions being taken keep buying them time.
Obviously, I am conflicted
I run a company that stands to gain from most of what I am about to argue for. Rowden does better in an environment that buys on merit, moves quickly and pays for outcomes, so discount me accordingly.
…but for that to be worth anything you have to discount the people arguing the other way at exactly the same rate (and take a look at who is paying for their exhibition stand while you are at it, because it isn’t private capital).
What I would offer in mitigation to my bias is the unique vantage point. Having been inside the system and then led the kind of new entrant UK industry insists it wants to see succeed, I have watched supply-chain trade-offs, pointless regulated competitions, good decisions and terrible ones from both sides of this debate. None of that makes me right, but it does mean I am not guessing.
It is also why I will argue for what is right for the end user even when it costs Rowden work. I would rather be the company someone rings for a straight answer than the one that won the contract it should have told them wasn’t even required.
What follows
I am going to start by writing on a topic uncharacteristically high-brow: the UK's post-Thatcherite attachment to free markets, and why it does not survive contact with this new environment (protectionism et al.).
That will lead me straight into ‘fair’, which has become one of the most expensive words in regulated procurement.
‘it wouldn’t be fair’
Fair to whom? To the other suppliers promising they can build something they can’t? To the taxpayer? To the person who has to use the thing? To someone who has to work late?
In practice ‘fair’ now means defensible in court, and any organisation that optimises for not being sued will do two things reliably:
Be sued more
Buy the wrong thing (slowly).
Then I will retreat to familiar ground and hit some key topics like IP and engineering culture. The NAD said in March that the Department is ‘trying to avoid development, so we just go shopping instead’. If that is the direction, then IP is going to be a big deal and it needs discussion.
More to follow. As per 2021: gripes to my inbox, please.
Why The UK MOD Should Establish A Non-Profit Engineering Organisation
The UK thinks it has a process problem in defence procurement. It(mostly) doesn’t. The actual problem is that no one knows who is telling the truth, and too few people care to find out.
It should be obvious that industry is incentivised to fib, 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 we call knowledge asymmetry. Example: Buyer asks to get a tank to the moon. Seller can’t get a tank to the moon but needs the work, and draws a picture of a tank parachuting onto the moon. Seller: ‘looks pretty legit, they’ve shown how it will get onto the moon - 10/10’
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.
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/guard dog. After the 2001 split, Dstl focused on early stage research whilst QinetiQ went from gamekeeper to poacher. No one in the public sector specialised in exploitation, production and supply chain at scale.
The timing was also an issue, as the technology environment was about to become much more complex. Since the break up of DERA, we’ve had cloud, smartphones, cheap sensors, modern software tooling and now AI, which 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 buyers simply creates an ongoing opportunity for those who can play the system rather than deliver what is needed.
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 largely irrelvant. 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, rude or upsetting. 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.
It 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. 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 about how bad it is. 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 plan and a deliverable one.
New companies have spent a lot of money building 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.
