and to my mind only achievement of the European Department of Defence is to force Member states to issue online their contracting opportunities both for civilian contractors and supply contracts. Gone are the days of cosy relationships between big business and decision makers of Government. In many ways the old MoD good and bad is finally departed. The well maintained group of knowledge experts who held the overall view of technology change in the MoD have been dissolved and few if any remain and their community for all of
its introspective qualities has been scattered, much to the lamentation of the real Procurement teams who used to rely on its advice. This is the view internally at the MoD. When I write 'real Procurement Teams' I mean the London based DEC offices and not the more publically visible IPTs who will reign supremo at the forthcoming DVD. Now I'm not having a pop at IPTs, since my Chairmanship of my first Defence Conference five years ago (ww.defenceintegration.org/DI_Winter/13.html) I have been impressed both with their real-theatre based experience and focus as well as with the their grasp of how we got here today. IPTs are a good thing, no-ones arguing that, but if we study the nomenclature more closely we find that they are ultimately Project Teams. IPTs are not, as much as they might protest, they are not the ultimate decision maker on where the MoD's money should go. That falls back as mentioned to the London-based DEC offices. For a thousand years it was always thus, that financial decision making fell back to the white towers of the London powers (defenceintegration.org/di-summer-2008/28.html).

IPT vs. DEC but who decides your bid's fate
The real decision making power within MoD procurement lies at the heart of the DEC. There are two ways to procure Defence Contracts in the UK if we discount members of the Saudi Royal family. Either go online and check out the UK's current contracting opportunities or if you think your technology is that good, make your petition and try to sit down, round table and define the parameters of a contract and hope your offering is good enough to overwhelm the inevitable competition that it will face in open tender process. Whilst we may yet still remain to see the scale of the changes, European Union Membership has transformed the way we buy our national security. In a more transparent market with obvious competition at every stage, a more level playing field has emerged. On this more level playing field Contracting as an option will inevitably fare well against the bureaucratic process of generating an internal solution to the MoD via IPTs. Presumably this was the intention of the European Parliament to