• Judged by military spending the UK is a major military power, with a major programme of procuring new equipments to support its Defence aspirations.
• The headline performance (in terms of cost and time) of the UK MoD in managing its major projects appears to be neither particularly better, nor particularly worse than its peers.
• The underlying issues faced by the MoD's international peers are also broadly those the MoD faces - affordability of aspirations and delays to delivery / cost overrun of new equipment.
• Most of the UK's peers have launched reviews with the intention of addressing these issues. Recommendations resulting from these reviews have included:
- review balance of defence capabilities needed to fight the range of asymmetric to Cold War opponents (US);
- launch of major acquisition reform agenda (US);
- changes to defence procurement strategy to ensure exportability and increase international cooperation (France);
- default options for procurement being "off the shelf" (Australia);
- civilianisation of the procurement body (Australia); and
- increased financial / commercial skills (Australia).
• Elements of UK's Smart Procurement initiative, including the 'Purple' or joint capability management / requirements organisation and multi-disciplinary project output based teams have been replicated elsewhere.
• Current efforts to up-skill defence acquisition workforces, ongoing in the UK, are also evident elsewhere.
• No evidence yet of a 'magic formula' for acquisition reform that has been shown to deliver its intended benefits - only time will tell in all these cases.