electronic in the way we communicate and no longer tucked away with tons of other meaningless stuff in filing cabinets. The world has changed and probably for the better.

Inside Armed Forces however, these changes have presented a new scale of challenge. A laptop on the battlefield really isn’t that useful. For the first time since Sun Tzu’s Art of War the management discipline on and off the battlefield are not really connected anymore. Put simply, the MOD does not want
entirely IT based solutions.
It clearly has an inherent
distrust of computers.
This goes back much further.
My observations over the
last 3 years asChairman
of International Conferences on armaments,

tanks and jets have yielded a few interesting observations. The company-wide computer system does not have an equivalent in the military. There is no military version of Microsoft and non-MS platforms which only really have their applications in intelligence, like secure Linux.

I’m not talking about any individual system, which of course do exist, but instead of the mindset. At the heart of the military’s thinking is the pilot, the sailor and the soldier. All thin seems to be based, rightly so, around the individual battle unit – the soldier. As machines go, in battle you really only have one essential component, the soldier. The soldier can make split second decisions, scale any terrain, defend, attack, repel, repair, replenish, and the hardware, the human brain, is as far as we know, the most advanced machine in the Universe.
   

You can more or less throw a man into a trench or a hostile scenario for weeks with only the barest provisions and he can still execute the objective. It is this simple, reliable approach which seems to be at the core particularly of the British elite forces modus operandi. There is a real deficit in terms of the equipment carried by the SAS/ SBS compared with the kit of a Navy Seal. Brute force and a man on the ground still seems to be a successful approach. As for the French foreign legion, my advice is simply run, that is the widely perceived wisdom.

It seems correct therefore to put the battle unit at the centre of the plan and they do.

This is quite at odds with the way business conducts itself. The consequence of this subtle difference is huge. The MOD simply will not buy non-person centred solutions. They call it the whizz-bang solution and the solution they really want is referred to as‘phone and a stubby pencil solution’. It has oft struck me that the most successful supplier of services to the MoD puts a people faced front end on top of their shiny ‘whizz bang’ solution. A system that works but is actually adequately staffed and nothing less will satisfy the senior military staff.