Preparing for War: Mobilising UK Defence Procurement

Since February 2022 Europe has watched a war of artillery, drones and factories in which the capacity to produce more, faster and for longer has become an important source of military advantage. Russia has increasingly placed its economy on a war footing. Poland, the Baltic states, Germany and the Nordic countries have substantially increased defence spending, industrial capacity and preparations for national defence. The United Kingdom has published a Strategic Defence Review, a Defence Industrial Strategy and a Defence Investment Plan, each emphasising greater pace. Whether the British state can mobilise its industry, procurement system and alliances quickly enough is the question this book addresses.

The book therefore begins somewhere unusual for a work on procurement law: in the 1930s and 1940s. Germany and Britain both had to turn peacetime economies into war economies, deciding how to pay for mobilisation, who would build what, who would own the designs, and what would happen when the fighting stopped. Their answers were very different, and the consequences are instructive.

It then turns to Russia, Ukraine, Britain and its allies, and to the competing demands now being placed on Western industrial capacity, including the war with Iran and the resulting pressure on scarce air-defence interceptors across multiple theatres. It examines what the Procurement Act 2023 can – and cannot – do in a crisis, noting that requirements, approvals, assurance and manufacturing often take longer than the law itself and that the Act already contains important defence and crisis flexibilities. The book then proposes three reforms: defence mobilisation markets allowing assured and price-tested suppliers to be called off rapidly under pre-agreed rules; royalties that reward firms for sharing designs, technical data and know-how for second-source production; and collaborative procurement built around common equipment, qualification and intellectual-property rights so that allied factories can supply allied forces.