Cummings has it right over Armed Forces spending, says MOD expert

Support for chief adviser who has branded military procurement ‘a farce that enriches corporate looters’

DOMINIC CUMMINGS “is asking the right questions” on military procurement, a defence expert has told MPS.

Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general at the Royal United Services Institute, told a defence committee inquiry into the Government’s forthcoming integrated review that Boris Johnson’s chief adviser had “obviously got a lot of interest in defence procurement”.

When asked by Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the defence select committee, what he thought Mr Cummings’s role was “in all of this”, Mr Chalmers said: “Like others, I read what Dominic Cummings says in his blog and he’s obviously got a lot of interest in defence procurement – and I think he’s asking a lot of the right questions, actually.”

Mr Chalmers, who was on the consultative panel for the 2010 and 2015 strategic defence and security reviews, said he thought it would be an “excellent idea” to bring Mr Cummings – a critic of the Armed Forces’ spending of public money – before the committee.

The review, the biggest assessment of Britain’s place in the world since the end of the Cold War, will cover “priorities and objectives” for the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Department for International Development.

It will also look at how the UK can “better use technology and data to adjust to the changing nature of threats we face – from countering hostile state activity to strengthening our Armed Forces”.

In a blog post in March last year Mr Cummings described the military procurement process as a “farce”. He accused it of having “continued to squander billions of pounds, enriching some of the worst corporate looters and corrupting public life via the revolving door of officials/lobbyists”.

Responding to the comments, Ben Wallace, the Defence Minister, said he was “incredibly supportive” of the ideas the PM’S chief aide had about the Armed Forces. He said: “Dom is full of amazing ideas where he has spotted improvements in things like infrastructure and technology procurement.”

Mr Cummings has made no secret of his admiration for America’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – ARPA – a body created in the late Fifties, which later had defence added to its remit, thus becoming DARPA in the early Seventies, designed to make crucial investments in exciting new technologies for national security.

He has discussed the body numerous times on his blog, describing ARPA as “the best place in the world to invent the future”.

ARPA UK would “create real longterm value for humanity,” Mr Cummings has previously said. The goal would be that the research funded by the body would ultimately result in improved defences.

Mr Chalmers previously told The Daily Telegraph that the strategic significance of Mr Cummings’s intervention was a signal to the MOD which said: “We don’t think you’re very efficient, so if you ask for more money you’ll have to find more savings yourself ”.