As Chair of the recent Defence IQ Air Weapons Integration Conference I had an overview of many of the issues regarding Integration projects with national militaries and their suppliers. This publication is my best opportunity to collate and make public my own conclusions and those reported to me by attendees who might otherwise not wish to associate their professions with potentially contentious points. Unfortunately, those points of contention can sometimes feature amongst the most salient. A fine line has to be tread between causing unintended embarrassment and promoting the cause of progress by addressing the contentious points directly. For example, during the interactive panel session of the Conference on the second day, the speakers gathered together and in discussion with the floor concluded that the main obstacles to progression in Air Weapons Integration were;

1. Regimented processes.
2. Duplication of processes by competing bodies within a single organisation.
3. Confusion over ownership of the integration process.
4. The question of whether to appoint an overriding, independent Integration body.

Perhaps the most serious point was that of regimented processes. The repetition of risk analyses to find remote possibilities and assigning them a probability of one - thus delaying projects at the taxpayer’s expense. Nobody really addressed the reason of why this happens but it could easily be explained by risk analysis falling under the auspices of management rather than experienced engineers. As an example of this a risk analysis was divulged that was a series of conditions so unlikely it seemed massively improbable but was afforded a probability of 1 because the outcome was the potential loss of a plane – irrespective of the massive improbability. A qualified, certified and experienced Engineer in that kind of bureaucracy would have known that any unlikely event followed by another which depends on the first is the product of those two improbabilities and therefore highly unlikely indeed. It seems odd that such large value projects can be beset by problems covered as a matter of course in all accredited engineering degree schemes. Such cases favour an independent body overseeing the process that could at least throw light in such dark recesses and provide visibility to external auditing bodies. An integration body would be well advised to check the basic maths and engineering assumptions in the processes which would stand out to an experienced Engineer – whose daily working life is a constant training in the rational balancing of probabilities versus consequences.

review process – one that had processes which were actually planned like any corporate project with a value approaching or exceeding $100m - the typical cost of any single integration project.

The four points given above were reportedly not minor and probably constitute the major part of the problem of the substantial cost of integration. As a supporting case one attendee reported to me that in some of their recent armament projects the cost of the armaments was 20% with the balance being the cost of integration. The very scale of the problem highlights the importance of holding a Conference on Air Weapons Integration in the first place and makes for an interesting plot to determine which pressure wins out in the market during the intervening period before the next such Conference. Will we see the beginnings of long overdue reforms to the process of Air Weapons Integration or might we see the emergence of a ‘wildcard work-around’ such as an independent integration body based on sound and established corporate style project planning?

See you there and we’ll find out.

Dr. Anthony Mc Donagh-Smith M.S.A.E.
Executive Director & General Secretary, SAE-UK.org