Declassified recently exposed how the MoD splurged £1.5bn on the failed Watchkeeper drone project. The contract was awarded to Elbit Systems and Thales, who are now profiting from a multi-million dollar contract to export Watchkeeper X drones to Romania. Dozens of drone parts have been sent from Britain to Israel since 2023, but they have seemingly not been re-exported to Romania, potentially violating UK export law. Worse still, open-source evidence suggests Elbit has been testing the drones in the illegally occupied Golan Heights. In response to these revelations, arms trade professor Anna Stavrianakas penned an article in Declassified, Campaign Against Arms Trade wrote to business secretary Peter Kyle, and Steve Witherden MP demanded answers from trade committee chair Liam Byrne. Now, a former defence contractor writes exclusively about their experience in the industry :
Within the UK defence community, there is an open secret: everything is broken. The largest defence contractors take billions for projects they don’t intend to deliver, because delivery means the end of a revenue stream. Civil servants are overworked, underpaid, and ignored – so once a new hire becomes knowledgeable, they leave the government to become a private contractor. This leads to understaffing, forcing the government to spend more money on contracting to plug the gaps. That money comes from the defence budget, forcing those that remain in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to work harder and do more with less. Those that leave then use their connections with those still in government to circumvent the intended contractual bidding process, and the civil servants capitulate in the hope that there might be a job in it for them privately down the line. The people remaining in civil service are largely those just starting their careers, those close to retirement, or those who would leave if they could. The new staff have little knowledge, the experts struggle to share it, and the bridge between them is crumbling. All of these problems are terrible, but they are symptomatic of the largest issue of all: talking about these issues is career suicide. Throw money at it I had been told informally that everything was broken during my training, but I was first introduced to the concept in a professional context about three months into my hiring. The first project I was assigned to was an analysis project designed to figure out how to use a piece of equipment that billions had been spent on over many years, and was nowhere close to being deployable. My induction to this project was the project lead telling me: “Yeah, buying it before figuring out what we need is completely asinine”. As a young, naive grad, I was astounded by their candour. I had heard rumours about wastage, cronyism, and incompetence in various anecdotes – but to be confronted with it so directly was jarring. How could it get this bad? Why was no one doing anything? “But hey, at least we are here to figure it out now!” And there it was. That was the mindset that allowed things to become so terrible. It doesn’t matter what the government does or doesn’t do, or how late a project is, or how usable or unusable equipment is – if it doesn’t work, throw money at a contractor to fix it. Unironically, it is this exact mindset that has caused the MoD to become so neutered and reliant on private contractors. Underfund a project, let the project fail, pay a contractor to fix the project, the contractors hire people from government to man the project, the government has less people and funds for the next project, rinse and repeat. RELATED How a failed British drone project won millions for Israeli... Putting aside the purely fiscal considerations (where the day rate charged for a junior analyst is £450 per day, with experts charging the taxpayer four figures for eight hours of work easily), and putting aside the degradation of the UK government’s ability to operate independently, and putting aside the crisis of morale of those in the civil service watching their projects fail only for contractors making triple their wage to swoop in and take credit, the separation of government from capability creates an insurmountable communication embargo. In a sector where secrecy is paramount, it is already difficult enough to develop interoperability, diversity of thought, resource sharing, and reliable information channels. When adding the complexities of non-state actors being given access to state secrets, companies collaborating on projects while refusing to share information in fear of giving their competitors an edge, and contractors who see these systemic issues unable to raise them to the MoD client for fear of losing work, it creates an environment where to speak openly about issues is impossible to do while maintaining self-preservation. Any contractor who alienates the client or helps the competition will lose contracts, anyone who loses contracts is a fiscal liability, and fiscal liabilities cannot be tolerated in a privatised framework. Keep calm, carry on So, if the contractors on which the modern MoD is built have neither the ability nor incentive to address these issues, why has the civil service not done so internally? I want to reiterate that I have never worked for the government directly, but I know many people who have, and I have worked closely with those who still do. When speaking with these people privately about my concerns, trying to find an answer as to why no one was fixing anything, the answer to that is exactly the same as in the case of the privateers: ostracisation. The picture they painted looks something like this: if a group is working long hours, for bad pay, where everyone around them is miserable as a result of the conditions in which they subsist, a tacit agreement forms – We know it’s awful, but we can’t spend time and energy thinking about that, we have too much work to do. This repression calcifies, and anyone who challenges that repression by drawing attention to the issues is seen to be ‘rocking the boat’. It’s a relic of blitz mentality, ‘keep calm and carry on’. The collective belief that everything is fine means that everything is fine. For one to challenge that and dissent, they must express discontent. This, in turn, awakens the repressed negativity in those around them. Suddenly, the issue stops being the conditions themselves, and becomes the dissenter making you think about them. The dissenter becomes socially isolated, their career stagnates, and they either leave or fall in line. The malcontent becomes the mechanism by which the conditions are maintained, the dissenter either capitulating or being forced out. In the case of someone leaving who is working in defence, they have no choice but to then become a contractor or leave the sector. Yet again, the system continues to enfranchise privateers while degrading governmental capability and agency. RELATED UK ignores corruption scandals when awarding major military contracts However, all of these issues are entirely secondary to the place from which all these issues stem – privatisation. The privatising of Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the agency within the MoD responsible for cutting-edge science and technology to aid military and national security, and British assets more broadly has been an unmitigated disaster within defence, and the only people who disagree are the contractors who profit from it. In a system where those incentivised to make it better are disenfranchised, and the enfranchised have no vested interest in the system’s improvement, there is only one conclusion to draw: wastefulness is not an abnormality in defence, but is instead government policy.
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