THE BRITISH ministry of defence, which has been criticised for failing to control its multimillion-pound budget, is to reformed, while the number of senior officers in the military is to be cut significantly, defence secretary Liam Fox has announced.
In what has been described as one of the biggest reforms in decades, Dr Fox said he wanted to give senior military officers more control over their own budgets, while the tradition of ministry of defence “micro-management will be consigned to the past”.
In future, the British army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force will be run by one senior officer, rather than two as at present – where one is in charge of day-to-day operations and the other handles longer-term strategy.
Paying tribute to the British military serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere, including in the United Nations-mandated operation in Libya, Dr Fox said in the House of Commons yesterday that they were “often frustrated by a system that lets them down”.
Accepting the recommendations made in a report written by Lord Levene, Dr Fox said: “The ministry of defence is a department with overly bureaucratic management structures, dominated by committees that led to indecisiveness and a lack of responsibility.”
Under cost-cutting plans already agreed, the ministry is to lose 8,000 civil servants in the next 12 months, although some argue that the scale of the redundancies will make it harder, not easier, to impose the Levene recommendations.
Earlier, Dr Fox said management at the ministry must be streamlined urgently “because we’ve allowed costs to escalate and projects to run over in the most appalling way. We need to bring that under control.”
Under the reforms, however, two of the three service chiefs will no longer sit on the defence board, chaired by Dr Fox.
In future, the chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir David Richards, will be the only military officer present.
Meanwhile, the number of senior officers will be reduced.
At the moment the army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force have five times more senior officers than the United States marines – even though the marines are significantly larger than all three put together.
Saying that there was “a very strong case” for reducing the “star count”, Dr Fox said doing this would create space for younger officers to be promoted to positions of greater authority – although they would no longer carry the rank of the past.
Given, however, that 17,000 posts are to be lost in the army, navy and air force over the next four years, the number of senior officers will remain disproportionate – even if yesterday’s reforms are implemented in full.