The Minister for Defence Procurement, Lord Drayson, address to the Royal Aeronautical Society, 8 December 2005

Investing in our Defence future

Lord Drayson, Minister for Defence Procurement

I am delighted to be the Guest of Honour this evening, following Professor Southwood’s lecture which I was sorry to have missed and this excellent dinner. Professor Southwood focused on our solar system; and, from my perspective as a Defence Minister, space remains an essential environment, particularly for global communications. However, I would like tonight to concentrate on those who inspired these lectures, Frank and Orville Wright, and their continued relevance to us today.

With my background as an engineer and technology entrepreneur the Wright brothers hold particular appeal. They did not accidentally achieve the first powered flight. From humble beginnings in their bicycle shop they used their skills as engineers and applied science to develop their technology. They were the quintessential entrepreneurs building on technical and business expertise and exploiting the opportunity their first flight produced to build a successful company.

The Wright brothers were classic innovators with their breadth of their interests - their readiness to move where logic took them. They were first inspired by a child’s toy helicopter; enthused with kites; then move, deliberately, though gliders before successfully attempting powered flight - rewriting some of the accepted science along the way. Their concern with the system as a whole, even if they did not use that term, remains as important in today’s defence and aerospace industry as in their day. As equipment and the military context in which we operate becomes ever more complex, we have to maintain excellent systems engineering capabilities. The Defence Industrial Strategy which will be published shortly recognises this.

Another theme that clearly emerges is the enthusiasm of the Wright brothers who described themselves as ‘interested in flying as a sport, and not with any expectation of recovering the money’ spent.” I know that my love of cars was key to my decision to study engineering as a young man. Since becoming Minister for Defence Procurement I have been fortunate enough to visit a number of companies with a proud place in aviation history such as Martin Baker and BAES. At all of them I have been struck by the enthusiasm of the young graduates and apprentices I have met. We need to work hard to continue to encourage young people to study the sciences and engineering and to enter this industry which will continue to offer exciting and rewarding careers. I applaud the efforts of this society in this regard with its “Young Members” scheme.

In their time, the brothers had to deal with financial concerns, and media skepticism when things didn’t quite work as planned (as with the first failed media days at Huffman Springs). We today, who try to ensure our Armed Forces have the equipment they need, certainly recognize both these themes – and the modern media would, I believe, not have reacted like Dayton’s, who ‘had now, no doubt, lost confidence in the machine,’ but whose ‘reports, in kindness, concealed it’.

It always disappoints, though no longer surprises, me that people who would not dare criticize the Armed Forces do not hesitate to characterize as ‘bumbling bureaucrats’ or ‘merchants of death’ all those who work together in the challenging process of bringing cutting-edge capability to the frontline, whether in MOD or industry. Being a force for good in the world is a team effort, and I know many in the industry are as motivated by that as much as by the excellent prospects, training, and opportunity to develop cutting-edge technology which aerospace careers offer. We need to all work together to build the concept of “Team Defence” – a team which industry is an essential part of.

And the breadth of the Wrights’ thought ties in strongly here too. They kept on analysing, thinking and developing, and never fell foul of that other Wright – Frank Lloyd’s – dictum that ‘an expert is a man who has stopped thinking – he knows!’. Aerospace is an interdisciplinary business, as this Society recognizes. Invention has become in many cases more aptly innovation – building, as the Wrights did, on the work of many others. But we have to keep moving forward.

Unfortunately, increasing complexity makes each new generation of defence aircraft more time-consuming to develop, more difficult to keep effective, and more expensive. The number of companies that can deliver such systems has shrunk, as has the number of new designs under development worldwide. Once we have the Joint Strike Fighter and Typhoon in service, we correspondingly expect them to remain useful for a very long time. The next generation of manned aircraft may be decades away. But we need our aircraft to remain capable throughout their lives. They will require redevelopment over time, and there is therefore substantial business available for the companies at all levels involved in initial development. The challenge is to maintain the required skills, knowledge and innovation, in the likely absence of major production projects.

There is a potential solution here – and an exciting one. No-one, I hazard, really knows the true opportunities that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, including Combat versions, may offer. I am no technofreak for UAVs; they represent too broad a potential range of capabilities for simplistic enthusiasm, and we may be some years away from really knowing which aspects of the military problem they can revolutionise. But it seems clear that there will be some. By investigating UAVs now, we can not only keep together the expertise to keep our existing and planned aircraft effective, but inform our future choices about the balance between these and UAVs. We may also find UAVs can solve all sorts of other problems more effectively and efficiently. And – that commercial imperative again – investment now can give our domestic industry a comparative advantage in the global marketplace. I remain to be convinced that the civil and homeland security markets have really grasped the full potential of UAVs – if you were a news network, wouldn’t you want to mix your reporters with imagery from above, just as we mix human, signals, imagery and other sources in intelligence work? But in purely defence markets, for purely military applications, there are aspects we cannot or should not rely on others to develop, and I expect the Defence Industrial Strategy to have something to say about that.

So like the Wrights, let us build on the success of our predecessors, but continue to look forward. Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen.

Last Updated: 12 Dec 05