Gary Brooks retweetledi
A British company called Skycutter, based in the East Midlands, just finished first out of the entire field in the Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program. Score of 99.3 out of 100. The largest order goes to them: two and a half thousand units, an initial Pentagon contract of twenty million dollars, with an option to scale up to two hundred million.
Read that and really soak it in. It's something that rarely happens anymore. A small British startup beat the entire American defence-tech industrial complex on its own home turf, in a competition the Pentagon designed itself, against companies that get whatever they ask for from Washington on a Tuesday morning.
It looks likely to be followed by something that always happens - Skycutter are, by the looks of things, going to pack up their talent and their operations and move all of it to America.
Why? The MoD, they say, is too slow. The procurement cycle is too long. There is no clear pathway from "British company that builds something the world wants" to "British company that the British state buys from in serious quantity at serious speed." No byway through which you move from "A potentially world-toppling IP advantage" to "Complete and deserved domination of the global market."
So we are about to lose them. Not because they want to leave, but because the country that produced them cannot organise itself fast enough to keep them. The MoD's response, by the way, was to issue a statement saying it wants the UK to be "the best place in the world to start and grow a defence business."
It does not want to do this. Indeed it is difficult to convey, in polite English, how galling that sentence is when read alongside the news it is responding to.
You're a serious country? You'd fight for a company like Skycutter. You'd fight to take them if they weren't yours, and you'd fight like mad to keep them if they were.
A serious country has someone in Whitehall whose entire fucking job is making sure the next Skycutter doesn't end up in Virginia.
We have, instead, a Defence Office for Small Business Growth. Which is the kind of name you give a thing that you created for no purpose other than taking the piss out of it.
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