Professionalism in Defence Acquisition

This chapter discusses the nature of professionalism generally and then in the contextual setting of defence acquisition. Changing socio-political and economic pressures have resulted in a paradigm shift in the way that the public sector based business of defence acquisition is undertaken. There is policy movement towards greater commercialism but the rhetoric has not necessarily led to improvement in performance. Indeed, criticism of acquisition performance has been constant for some time. With improved professionalism, and the legitimisation of the professional prerogative and practice of personnel within the acquisition community, a move away from reliance upon process led decision making, could result in enhanced acquisition performance. This requires the development of relevant knowledge, in a suitable format, such that acquisition professionalism can enable an ‘Intelligent Customer' perspective. It recognises the need for education and training, balanced with relevant experience as the basis of professional knowledge and the concept of an ‘Intelligent Customer'.

Innovation, Technology, and Defence Procurement

In the main arms-producing countries, Ministries of Defence are looking for alternative ways to acquire defence capabilities. Over the past two decades, several reform projects have been experimented to go beyond the model inherited from the Cold War, but they did not succeed in delivering expected results. One may wonder whether such defence acquisition systems correspond to their core mission: supplying boots on the ground with adequate capacities. The research agenda and reforms programmes are biased since they focus mainly on “how” to procure. While reforming existing mechanisms seems to fail or to deliver well below expectations, one may wonder in fact whether the true question should concern “why” and “what” to buy with regard to military needs but also the place that technology takes in conceiving defence capabilities.

Collaborative Defence Procurement

In collaborative defence procurement, a number of states agree to acquire a weapon system and/or its support in cooperation. Such programs have over the last decades become a prominent feature of defence procurement in Europe, but are often considered inefficient because of large cost overruns and delays in capability delivery. After introducing the reader to the concept of collaborative procurement from a European perspective, this chapter analyses the management structure and procurement process of those programs and makes proposals to increase their efficiency, essentially by ensuring a more efficient preparation phase, adopting more inventive financing principles, setting-up more integrated management structures, streamlining their decision-making process, avoiding monopoly creation on the side of industry, and moving away from the ‘juste retour' work allocation principle used in most of those programs.

Building a Conceptual Framework for Defense Acquisition Management Based on Service Dominant Logic Theory

Defense acquisition is an under-researched topic of high economic, political and practical relevance, as defense acquisition typically faces recurring problems of time and cost overruns as well as performance shortfalls over the life-cycle of major weapon systems. These challenges are analyzed using the case of the German Bundeswehr. An abductive research process is applied and findings are merged with Service-Dominant-Logic (SDL) theory. The findings are used to develop a service-based understanding of defense acquisition management, what might support the further empirical analysis of influence factors and constructs. While a product-centric focus on defense acquisition fades out important relations and interdependencies between industry and the military /defense acquisition, the developed nine premises may provide a more integrative view on the military-industrial co-creation of superior military capabilities.

Institutional Entrepreneurship in Defence Acquisition

One of the most common arguments used to justify the outsourcing of defence activities is that the private sector is more innovative than the public sector. New Public Management has been widely promoted as the most effective means by which the public sector can engage with markets and gain access to the greater entrepreneurial capabilities offered by the private sector. However, a major obstacle to generating the improvements sought by having greater access to entrepreneurial businesses is bound up in the inherent tensions generated by divergent institutional logics. Government departments are motivated to move towards stasis while the entrepreneurial market spirit ideally embraces institutional change. This chapter examines the challenges faced by defence acquisition in changing these potentially opposing institutional logics before concluding with suggestions on how to progress an applied research agenda for defence acquisition in order to make better use of entrepreneurial capabilities.

Acquisition and Its Theoretical Foundations

Armament issues are hardly dealt with by the French academics, there is thus no specific theoretical framework available. Existing theories to study technical objects have been designed for civilian artefacts and the specific features of the military market challenge their full applicability to a military research object. As for existing approaches to armament, they are either insufficient or have become obsolete. This questions the need of specific theories to fit with military specificities. Given how complex defence acquisition is there is a case to be made for introducing more disciplines and practising mix-theories in order to gain richer insights.

Competition in Defence Practice

This chapter compares theory about the consequences of competition with market structures and procurement experiences in the defence sector. The arguments are largely theoretical, reflecting commercial logic and propositions about behaviour in highly imperfect market structures. They are meant to illuminate what can happen, and sometimes does occur, rather than what must result. A crucial theoretical question is how competition is likely to work when there is only one immediate customer (and only a few possible customers in the longer run) and only a small number of potential suppliers (for each of whom an order may be of strategic significance). However, the US and the UK have published empirical data on the use of competition in defence, and appropriate reference is made to this.

Thinking Makes It So

This chapter explores the literature associated with business ethics and acquisition, applying a philosophical perspective to the literature on business ethics and on procurement ethics in particular. After discussing the standard ethical theories of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics, these normative approaches are then contrasted with descriptive, empirical studies. Both are applied to the context of Defence acquisition. It is argued that the employment of normative approaches as a default in Defence is flawed and is unlikely to provide any foundation for a theory of business ethics in acquisition. Instead, more attention needs to be paid to how ethics actually function in organisations, particularly in supporting relations and narratives of power. As a conceptual paper, based on only literature review and philosophical argument, the conclusions need to be subjected to further scrutiny and, if possible, empirical investigation.

Defence Acquisition

Through the lenses of Strategy and Change management academic theory this chapter presents a view of the evolution of defence acquisition using the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) as the vehicle and assesses the impact of disruptive technologies. The chapter proposes a number of changes that need to be embraced by the defence acquisition community if it is to be able to meet the needs of the nation now and in the future. The chapter concludes that the UK MOD must accept that the old model is now flawed and that in order to bring about the necessary changes a shift in mind-set is a sine qua non and that this change will take time. The envisaged way forward with a fundamental change in the way defence capability is acquired will result in a smaller, more agile and more professional organisation if, and only if, the required transformational change can be implemented effectively.

Sectoral Polyarchy

In 1956 Dahl proposed that modern westernised democratic capitalist societies would ultimately evolve into a state of polyarchy, wherein interest groups, compensating for a lack of effective representation would ultimately subsume Government. Whilst Dahl postulated that this would happen at a state level, he was considering the phenomena from the perspective of social groups rather than from Government. Different sectors within a state are subject to different pressures, and consequently it is contended that some are closer to a transition to polyarchy than others. The defence sector is a case in point, and already exhibits many of the characteristics of polyarchy. This chapter will consider the reasons for this, its implications, and potential solution, focussing on issues of competition and risk. Given the UK defence sector unique position in relation to the United States and The European Union it will serve as the barometer for the polyarchic state in this discussion.