This data omnishambles is merely the high water mark of MoD ineptitude

Telegraph

17-07-2025

If Britain retains one superpower, it is its talent for building useless bureaucracies. No government department epitomises this quite like the Ministry of Defence.
Once among the nation's most reputed institutions, inheriting the prestige of the victorious British Armed Forces when it was formed after the Second World War, the MoD has grown bloated and unaccountable. What senior politicians now regard as the most opaque of all departments seemingly holds public accountability in contempt. The UK defence 'blob' has reached a point where it is imperiling national security. There must be a reckoning.
The MoD's omnishambles embodies everything wrong with the British state. It has abused both the legal system and its position as the guardian of national security to conceal an extraordinary error.
The marine who leaked the list in question was working out of the headquarters of the elaborately covert Directorate of Special Forces.
And yet its protocols for email security apparently fall short of those enforced at British blue-chip firms.
One insider tells me it would be 'shockingly easy to be a Snowden in the Ministry of Defence'. The blunder is not a freak occurrence, but rather the high water mark of the MoD's institutional failure.
This is not the first major Afghan-related data leak. From laptop thefts to unclassified documents being left at bus stops, breaches have been all too common.
The MoD's dysfunction extends beyond the cybersphere. It is grotesquely overstaffed: Finland, which commands a larger wartime force than Britain, has just 150 defence civil servants, yet the MoD has almost 38,000 on its payroll.
Bureaucratic judgment has become pathological, swinging between 'indecision, decision by default, and terrible decisions'.
It is not just in the realm of cyber technology that the MoD excels at building elaborate but inept administrative units.
The department is a Frankenstein's monster, possessing the worst attributes of both the military and civil service. The British Armed Forces seldom punish failure, in contrast with American forces, which routinely remove commanding officers who fall short.
'In Britain you are more likely to be removed from post for having romantic relations with a subordinate than presiding over a blunder that endangers lives,' one former Navy officer tells me.
The MoD is equally imbued with the patrician impulses of the civil service. As the historian David Vincent tells me, the civil service's ethos of 'honourable secrecy' goes back to the 19th century, summed up by the mantra: 'A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being secret.'
It won't be easy to bring an end to the chaos at the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps more than any other department, it has proved impervious to reform. The Tories failed miserably at the task – and may have made things more toxic.
Insiders wonder whether a tacit arrangement set in, whereby politicians went along with officialdom's strategy for dealing with administrative blunders, while civil servants and senior military officers became 'spinmeisters' for a cash-strapped government in crisis, 'bigging up' its achievements, even as it allowed military capacity to be dangerously run down.
The chilling culture shift under the Conservatives is even said to be reflected in the changes to the design of the MoD's headquarters, which used to be open-plan but has, over the last few years, morphed into a 'kind of souk, with certain floors hived off for niche things and enclaves locked off'.
Labour came to office vowing to get a grip on the MoD behemoth – but it has achieved little. Much of the dead-weight that Defence Minister John Healey tried to get rid of when he first got the brief were placed in lucrative holding posts – and are now being brought back in.
The 'blob' has allegedly already neutered the consultants Healey has hired to drive reform; officials have manoeuvred to ensure that these disruptors will now merely 'manage' the reform process.
Top military brass nonetheless hope that Healey can get a grip. One adviser told me that they are encouraged by the contents of his reform strategy and the leadership team that he is bedding in. The incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Rich Knighton, is held in high esteem.
Labour needs to get its act together and drive root-and-branch reform. Nobody has yet been held accountable for the Afghan blunder.
All those implicated in a cover up must answer for their conduct. Super-injunctions need to be abolished so that it is no longer possible for officials to use them to shield themselves from basic levels of scrutiny.
Healey must reverse the incredible disintegration of professional standards within the MoD. One former employee recalls that even 20 years ago, sending an intelligence document with a single wrong digit was a sackable offence. Apparently today, a mistake that costs taxpayers billions of pounds and puts national security and fragile social cohesion at risk only warrants a shift in posts. It's bad enough that intelligence services of hostile countries are dedicating ever-greater resources to penetrate this country's security, without our inept bureaucracy giving our secrets away for free.
It is bad enough that public trust in the political class is at an all-time low, without officialdom resorting to celebrity-style gagging orders to cover up its errors.
Put simply, it is fundamentally unacceptable that those who are charged with minimising the dangers facing the realm should show such an impressive capacity to simultaneously aggravate all of the country's pressing problems. Keir Starmer is being sucked into a civil war with his party's far-Left as he seeks to re-establish discipline after the welfare reform fiasco. But he needs to turn his attention to the insubordination and chaos at the MoD. It is time for the Prime Minister to show some mettle and take drastic action.