The clot at the heart of the MoD
Gibbon wrote that the Roman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own stupendous fabric. So too is the Ministry of Defence. An investigation by the Times (£) has revealed that bureaucratic intransigence has cost the taxpayer £6bn and several servicemen their lives. We have been here before with the Nimrod disaster and the subsequent Gray and Haddon-Cave reports. ‘A culture of optimism’ in procurement and maintenance leads to unsustainable costs, expensive delays, and, occasionally, the indefensible loss of life. At last, the Commons Public Accounts Committee is volubly shocked and has called for urgent reform. The Times and the Committee blame the labyrinthine complexity of Whitehall’s last great monolith,