Speaking Digital Truth Unto Power - Is the MOD Able to Embrace Digital Disruption?

The one constant about military capability is that it is always changing. There is always a new ‘new shiney’ that is the next big threat. There is always a game changing innovation around the corner and technological change shapes in a huge way how the armed forces evolve and defend the nation.

You only need look at the variety of ways that the British Armed Forces have been equipped within the last 30 years to realise an enormous swathe of technology has come into service, changed the way we do business and then been replaced as obsolescent – often in a few short years. In many ways the military of today is unrecognisable to the military of 1980 or 1990.

The current perceived threat is about the challenges posed by information dominance and the way that the current ‘next generation’ of technology can be exploited by opponents to threaten the UK. Exploring how to respond to this was the subject of a lecture last week at the RUSI by Maj Gen Copinger Symes, at the innaguaral Strategic Command conference. A full transcript can be found at the Wavell Room.

Digital disruption?- Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

In the speech the General explores the threat, how it can be used against us and how the UK is suffering from too much innovation, but too little actual change and faces being outfought on the information front. It is a powerful speech, and notable for the raw honesty with which it is being delivered.

In particular the General noted about how the threats can in fact pose opportunities – information and data is neutral and if properly exploited, provides an opportunity for the UK and its allies too. He also noted that the UK is good at incremental change (indeed, just look at the incremental changes made to the FV432 platform over the last nearly 60 years!), but is much worse at imagining ways of doing things better in a different way.

This is fair challenge – one of the great problems the MOD has to wrestle with when looking to acquire capabilities or platforms is the vast range of areas in which it operates. A platform bought now may have to credibly be employed across the entire planet – for example the Type 42 destroyer, envisaged to fight the Soviet Naval Air Force in the late 1960s in the north Atlantic ended up being deployed in combat operations in both desert conditions and the depths of the South Atlantic, as well as being deployed in practically every other climate imaginable.

Kit has to be purchased that can make this jump to be usable in a vast range of states, often with little warning. By contrast many of our adversaries have niche operating areas with clearly defined threats, climate and conditions and the area they plan to fight in may have limited characteristics – for instance most Middle Eastern militaries have little need of vehicles optimised for arctic warfare.

This ‘able to do everything’ approach is a great strength in some ways – it means the UK can credibly deploy globally with kit that, by and large, proves flexible and adaptable. But it does slow down deployment times. It was notable by contrast that when the UOR process, which epitomised flexibility and agility to get equipment into service for Iraq and Afghanistan was in full flow, it provided capability very quickly indeed.

The big change though is that with UORs if you know the threat, the specific environment you want to use the equipment in and the very precise characteristics and challenges of the area for a few months - years, it is much easier to quickly find a solution that meets your needs than for buying equipment that may need to be in service globally for 20-30 years.

The General spotted three big areas for future opportunities to suceed in future which are potentially huge. Firstly the opportunity for collaboration, whereby people work together to succeed. He used the dreaded phrase ‘stay in lane’ to summarise a culture which all too often can at its worst be actively off putting for real change.

How often have good ideas been stymied by junior soldiers or officers thinking innovatively outside their box because it wasn’t their area to own or solve? The system in many ways actively discourages active innovation in some senses – why collaborate on projects which threaten capbadge structures or long term project funding?

Driving a culture of real collaboration is going to be challenging because it requires behaviours to fundamentally alter. It needs military officers to work with peers, juniors and seniors to identify ways to do things differently and not be afraid to challenge and push for real change. The risk at the moment is that while there is a good talk, and at junior levels collaboration can and does exist, real change seems to get stuck somewhere in the middle where it hits the wall of JSP Process where everything becomes far too difficult – in other words, too many situations occur where lots of people do the right thing by the book in saying no, rather than take a risk by saying yes.

Second to this is the problem of risk. Put bluntly in the last few years in particular Defence has become an astonishingly risk averse organisation culturally and this drives behaviours which are not always helpful. The General rightly notes the worry in some quarters that things may not be policy compliant or we may even make fools of ourselves – but this isn’t a bad thing necessarily.

To drive collaboration means creating a risk taking culture. Great to say, easy to proclaim, almost impossible to deliver in real life. Why? Because the organisation is structured in a way that your career success depends on you not screwing up. Taking a risk which fails is tantamount to career death in the current career model – why take a risk with an idea when you’re in zone for promotion if it fails and causes problems for your CO? Those who don’t take risks but succeed their objectives get promoted – even if it stymies innovation.

This really requires major change in a raft of ways, driving a culture where taking a risk is rewarded, and where people going ‘Boss, I want to try this, it may not work, and it may cost money, but I think we can get more benefits than costs from it’ is seen as SOP for all staff.

The problem is that risk taking is actively disincentivised in Defence because it is seen as too risky. That’s fine until you realise that without taking risk, the opposition may well end up getting the edge and killing you – an even riskier prospect.

Its hard to see how this can be unlocked though as it requires a DNA change in the system itself, with Officers whose careers don’t depend on success leading the charge. The problem though is that only successful officers get promoted, and they rarely succeed by failing. Trying to explain to an entire cohort of senior leadership that they should change the habit of a lifetime and take a risk and accept failing in order to do things differently is a big ask.

For those open to reasonable challenge, and those open to questioning seniors, perhaps a good question to ask them is ‘when did you last decide on an option where there was a real risk of project or operational failure but the benefits were potentially huge’?

More widely the General stated that ‘risk aversion is exhausting us’ – he’s absolutely right. How much time has been lost to doing the right thing by following process to the letter to test for every conceivable outcome and sign off? How much time is lost waiting for minor issues to be fixed, rather than pressing on?

This is perhaps borne out by the love of staffwork and JSP101ing something  to death to smother it rather than just doing something. At times it can feel like many senior officers, scared of a paper that poses risk and challenge, will red pen words and grammar corrections rather than engage with the questions at stake and look to take genuine risky decisions based on what needs to be done.

This retreat to the safe space of staff college practise may appeal, but when you’ve created a culture where rather than doing something, you insist on oversight, briefing and scrutiny to the nth degree, opportunities are quickly lost.

Again, a good question could be asked of very senior officers about how many papers do they want to approve or sign off, rather than just issue? A good officer in a command chain should be able to issue direction for their staff to interpret and crack on with delivering – yet all to often briefings get sent from the SO2 to the OF5 to the 1* to the 2* and possibly the 3* then to the Ministers Office, then back for comment. At every stage process is injected, but what value and strategic thinking is added?

We talk of trust, of risk taking and of wanting to get stuff done, yet all too often this falls at the first hurdle of a slightly misfiring brief or piece of advice going up, which culminates in seniors wanting to take ever greater control of the advice they issue. The problem is where a community of senior officers exist who are tactical 2*s, obessing over single lines in notes to their own bosses, yet not giving their staff time to take risk or own problems and fix them.

This all encompassing and at times smothering approach may minimise risk, but its also creating a culture of officers unable to fail, and at times unable to take a decision because they feel the constant desire to look upwards for approval and spell checking.  Delivering the Generals vision of taking risk is potentially huge in gains, but until the processes and culture change, are the wins going to be there?

The final potential opportunity is the issue of data  as a strategic asset. If Defence can really harness the opportunities here, and make the best use of data then it can potentially realise huge benefits. But this requires a very different cadre of people to what it has at present – it needs people who have access to good IT, and a means to share data effectively – something stymied at the moment by an IT system which is terribly resilient at protecting secrets, mainly because cynics would note its almost impossible to log into in less than the average working day…

How Defence makes better use of data remains to be seen, but the worry must be that data becomes the next mantra after network centric warfare, or cyber warfare or revolution in military affairs or any of the altars upon which good money has been thrown for years now.

Fundamentally getting data right in defence means adopting entirely new career structures to enable people to work differently, to own and shape the data they have access to, and see the impact of it changing over time and benefits being realised as a result.

The current career system of posting people just as they get competent, then ideally never posting them anywhere near the subject matter again hurts because it prevents a culture of genuine specialists emerging.  

It’s a near certainty to say that not one military officer in Defence today will be in the same job in 4 years time – everyone will have moved once, if not twice during that time. This means that we never get the chance to spot where to make best use of data, or how to bring people together into genuinely high functioning teams to exploit it. Instead people are given catchy sounding titles like SO1 Information Exploitation Data Head and then spend two years tinkering just in time for their replacement to come in and do it all over again.

This may sound cynical but fundamentally the continued use of a 19^th century career model to promote a small cadre of officers to 4* is potentially causing real harm to our ability to harness data properly. A really brave idea would be to create a truly empowered team to go and spend 5-6 years really looking at this in detail and seeing what can be done, without constant staff churn, and then start seeing the results coming through.

The general also notes the challenge of valuing technical knowledge. Arguably the military career management for officers is actively discriminating against technical specialists over the good old generalist. The worry has to be that Defence may not find itself in the right spot to really do well in the next series of challenges. A career structure that essentially penalises your career prospects from the outset, and where wanting to become a specialist is seen as less important than recruiting the next CGS is not helpful.

A very cynical person would suggest that where people do get good in a niche field, they quickly find themselves with reduced promotion prospects, leading to cadres of increasingly sidelined and bitter SO2s with little prospect, reason or reward for showing loyalty and experience to their Service, who quickly leave and return as consultants where they are suddenly listened to for the first time in years.

The hope must be that as we face generational change, and the new team of senior officers step up, they will arrive with far more experience of jointery, agile deployment of kit and a willingness to embrace and not shun technology. Ideally the future will be far more about looking to take risks, see better ways of doing things and letting people challenge properly and not hide behind ranks and posts as a reason to say no.

The Generals speech was a strong one, it was powerful because it was honest – it admitted that in some areas Defence is culturally not as strong as it needs to be. Lets hope it is listened to and acted on, and not filed away under the file marked ‘courageous career ending speeches’.