Britain's Ministry of Defence accused of wasting £174M on 'external advice'

The UK government has been accused of blowing £174 million ($220 million) on "external advice" for a new radio system for the armed forces that has been beset by delays and cancelled contracts.

A new radio tactical communications system is being procured for the British Army under the program name Morpheus. It was planned to enter service in 2025 to replace the current Bowman radio technology, which is now more than 20 years old.

But Bowman has had to be upgraded and extended several times because of delays to Morpheus, and the project is now unlikely to be rolled out until early in the next decade. It was dealt a blow last December when the government ended a contract with General Dynamics for a large part of Morpheus, claiming it had not met expectations.

Now it has emerged that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has spent about £174 million on external assistance relating to the Morpheus project between April 2015 and the end of 2023, according to the Financial Times.

This was disclosed in a letter in March from James Cartlidge, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, in response to a query from John Healey, shadow defence secretary for the Labour Party.

The news raises further concerns regarding the MoD's poor record on procurement, the FT says, especially in light of the lack of progress on Morpheus for the amount of money spent on it, currently understood to be £766 million ($970 million) in total.

The MoD told us that the figure spent on external assistance is part of the overall spend on Morpheus, and that it covered technical support rather than consultancy work.

A major setback came in December when the MoD ended that contract with General Dynamics in December. The contract, said to be worth £395 million ($500 million), was for a proposed Evolve to Open (EvO) transition that would take the existing Bowman system as a starting point and move from a closed system to an open architecture.

According to a report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), this was envisioned to be modular and adaptable so new hardware and software could be added and upgraded while still existing in the same framework, theoretically eliminating sizeable integration costs.

But Cartlidge stated that delivery against the original timescale had not been met and that progress on the Morpheus project had fallen "short of what we expected," according to the FT, and consequently the contract had been concluded.

This doesn't seem to mean the entire project is dead as Cartlidge said in February that Bowman was a capable system that had already been upgraded several times, most recently between 2018 and 2020, and will be updated again under the Bowman 5.7 project commissioned last year as a result of the delay to Morpheus, Forces.net reported.

An MoD spokesperson told The Register: "Bowman continues to provide secure communications on the battlefield and is routinely updated to ensure that it remains a secure and capable system. We will transition to Morpheus after 2031."

However, the state of Morpheus will just add to the sense that MoD procurement programs inevitably turn out to be late or massively over budget, or both. Recently, it was revealed that the MoD has now spent over £4 billion on the Ajax armored vehicle program for the army, with little to show for it so far. The first vehicles were originally planned to be delivered in 2017. ®