Defence acquisition reform takes many forms. All of them involve complex equations between the procurement of effects-oriented equipment and services efficiently, in a timescale acceptable to all stakeholders and at a price that is affordable for the user and profitable for the supplier. Overlaid on this matrix, in many countries, are considerations of sovereign capability, security of supply and economic impact.

It is this last that leaps from the pages of the recently published report “Canada First: Leveraging defence procurement through key industrial capabilities.” The government seeks to bolster its indigenous industry and derive maximum potential benefit from the investment of public money in defence equipment and services by requiring bidders to provide offsets in specific areas of technology or service (such as cyber or training systems, for example) at increasingly high levels. In its bid to sell the F/A-18 Super Hornet to Canada, Boeing is already promising offsets amounting to 100% of contract value.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed, on first glance, the 88-page report seems to promise some interesting and rewarding benefits stemming from the proposed reforms, which reach much further than the comments above might suggest. But there is a sting in the tail, as far as this writer is concerned, which threatens to negate all the good the proposed policy might bring.

One of the perennial challenges faced by small companies trying to obtain defence work is the gestation period of the acquisition process and the spiralling bid costs associated with it. A small company can often not afford the impact on cash flow that a sales decision cycle of two or three years will entail. So the process needs to be streamlined and shrunk.

Why, of why, therefore, has the government effectively done just the opposite. In order to implement and monitor the proposed new defence procurement strategy, a Defence Procurement Secretariat will be established within the Department of Public Works and an independent, third-party Defence Analytics Institute established to provide analysis and support. Long and somewhat bitter experience indicates this will add layers of bureaucracy, significant additional cost and potential aeons of time to an already cumbersome process.

Spending public money efficiently is a laudable ambition. So is making the process easy for one’s supply chain to be able to benefit from.

A report issued by the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) sees the growth of the Chinese submarine fleet as a serious threat.

Currently standing at some 62 boats, the Chinese submarine fleet includes four nuclear ballistic missile boats, five nuclear attack boats and 53 diesel attack submarines. The emergence of the Jin class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, which will begin fulfilling their role on deterrent patrols this year, gives China what ONI identifies as a “first credible at-sea-second-strike nuclear capability.”

The report, which was created as part of ONI’s testimony on Chinese naval developments to the US China Economic and Security Review, points to substantive changes in ‘blue-water’ naval capabilities over the last ten years. Compared with the situation a decade ago, when only a small number of Chinese submarines were capable of launching cruise missiles, over half the fleet now has such a capability. The JL-2 ballistic missile carried by the Jin class boats has a range of over 4,000 miles, meaning that the western seabord of the United States, as well as Hawaii and Alaska, could be hit from Chinese waters.

“Over the next decade, China will complete its transition from a coastal navy to a navy capable of missions around the world,” the report concluded.

Demonstrations at Fort Hood, Texas last month showed the efficacy of Lockheed Martin’s Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS) – or, in simpler language – driverless trucks.

Previous work in unmanned ground vehicles has concentrated either on small, tactical units for the ISR role or on unmanned trucks in a rural/battlefield environment. AMAS, however, is aimed at enabling autonomous operations in an urban environment. The trial successfully demonstrated the ability to ‘sense and avoid’ hazards or obstacles that included road features and intersections, oncoming traffic and – perhaps most fortunately – pedestrians.

The AMAS programme is a concrete proof of the US military’s desire to get robotic systems – whether truly autonomous or tele-operated – into the hands of the warfighter. And that meets the cultural expectations and aspirations of a society that has developed a distaste bordering on zero tolerance for bodybags returning soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen from corners of foreign fields.

This does not necessarily hold true, however, for other nations and companies espousing the unmanned systems route as a panacea for all defence needs of the future need to be aware of this. Nobody is arguing that when it comes to a moral choice, any government is likely to prefer casualties to spending money on ‘peripheral’ systems. In a pragmatic sense, however, that is just what happens when budget restrictions mean that a nation with limited resources for procurement will continue to find methods of making its soldiers more effective, rather than developing an entirely new concept of operations revolving around expensive and currently uncertain unmanned systems.

Unmanned systems – even those as apparently anodyne as trucks – carry a sting in the tail in that they are disruptive in their effect. Disruptive, that is, to established doctrine and procedure. Some – including me from time to time – would argue that is a good thing. But let us be certain of the price we will all have to pay in terms of wholesale change before we embrace ‘unmanned’ as the ultimate solution.