Andrew Fox
Andrew Fox did not set out to become a procurement theorist. A former army officer and now academic, his recent paper for the Henry Jackson Society on the future of defence acquisition began, as he tells it, almost by accident.
“It actually stumbled out of my PhD,” he says. “You go down little branches you can’t use in the main thesis, but they’re still useful and good. This was one of those. I couldn’t use it in the dissertation, but I thought: the Henry Jackson Society – this is right up their street.”
The other catalyst was Ukraine. Fox has travelled to the front, persuading a brigade to take him “quite a bit further forward than they’re supposed to” he says with a wry smile.
“You get to see really up close what that drone warfare looks like,” he says. “You can read about it, but until you actually see it and say, ‘OK, this is what I did, this is what we do now, this is what they’re doing,’ you can’t really start to synthesise the ideas.”
What emerges in his paper is not another “fashionable reading of Ukraine”, as he puts it, but a wider indictment of how Britain still procures equipment for wars it no longer fights, at a tempo the system cannot match.
“The army never seems to say: That’s a good idea, let’s do that”
Fox is blunt about a recurring failure in British military thinking: the instinct to reach for old campaigns as templates.
“I’ve noticed this time and time again, going back to Afghanistan. The army is terrible at going, ‘That’s a good idea, let’s do that,’ and then adapting it. Instead, you get people lifting and dropping conflicts onto what we’re doing now, without adapting it for the unique circumstances.”
The same reflex surfaces in commentary on current crises. “You’ve got people trying to claim that a Northern Ireland solution will work in Gaza,” he adds. “You need to be more adaptive in your thinking than this.”
For Fox, Ukraine should be a corrective. The conflict is not a neat template to copy, but a live laboratory of adaptation: FPV drones, 3D-printed components, battlefield innovation cycles in weeks, days, even hours. The question is not “how do we become Ukraine?” but “how do we absorb the lessons and build a system that can respond at that pace?”
Procurement as a human, not just fiscal, problem
Fox is clear that he came to procurement “cold”. It was never his specialism in uniform. The intimidation he felt wasn’t about trespassing on a bureaucratic turf war, but about what sits behind the abstractions.
“I was interested in trying to come up with a solution for what I saw as a big problem: we’re not very good at procurement, and it’s about to change rapidly,” he says. “AI is going to take over that iteration process. I’ve talked about adaptation clocks in weeks and months – frankly, it could be days and hours.”
What really unsettles him isn’t the institutional inertia; it’s the people at the sharp end.
“Procurement can be seen in very dry terms – how do we spend 3% of GDP?” he says. “But the real cost isn’t GDP; it’s human lives.”
In Ukraine, he walked the streets of Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, saw the aftermath of drone strikes on bus shelters, and delivered aid to civilians whose home was destroyed the following day. “We ended up coming back and raising money for the family because the dad and his son were killed the day after we’d met them,” he recalls. “When you’ve seen that human cost firsthand, procurement stops being abstract.”
Stockpiles, obsolescence and dual-use capacity
Behind the human story lies an unglamorous structural problem: Western governments and treasuries have an uneasy relationship with stockpiles and sunk cost.
“The Treasury really don’t want stockpiles,” Fox notes. “That’s literally money sitting there that you’re not using.” Yet in a world of accelerating technological change, the problem is worse than idle inventory: it’s the risk of fast obsolescence.
“At the speed this developmental process is happening, you could be sat on a tonne of stuff you can’t use”.
His answer is not a nostalgic return to Cold War warehouses, but a shift towards dynamic capacity. The paper advocates for dual-use factories in sectors like drones, where civilian and military demand already blur.
“Drones are going to be a big part of everyday life,” he says. “Amazon is using them to deliver packages. The first FPV drones we saw in Ukraine were civilian. You can think bigger than traditional grants or purchase contracts – government equity, revenue-sharing agreements, where the state carries some of the risk on condition that, when the balloon goes up, everything on that supply line flicks over to military use.”
Rather than a few vast, rigid programmes, Fox argues for a “multiplicity of much smaller contracts with smaller companies”, tying agility in industry to national resilience.
Learning from Ukraine’s production urgency
What impressed Fox in Ukraine was not just ingenuity, but sheer output and proximity to the front.
“I did some visits to little cottage industries just behind the front line – about 10 miles back,” he says. “They’re making the drones that are being fired that night, turning out 10,000 a month across the locations I visited.”
The contrast with British announcements where 130,000 drones are set as a production target is stark. President Zelenskyy has spoken of a 10 million–drone target for 2026 alone.
“In Ukraine, you feel the urgency and dynamism of a country at war,” Fox says. “In the UK we’re sleepwalking a bit. The private sector is stumbling in the right direction, but we could easily supercharge it with decent government policy, and that’s what’s lacking.”
In his vision, government becomes “almost a silent partner”, shaping incentives and risk, while industry drives pace and innovation.
Strategy, Ukraine and the missing “End State”
Fox’s critique extends beyond procurement mechanics to the way Western capitals have approached Ukraine strategically.
“The biggest flaw in everything we’ve done is that we’ve given them enough to stay in the fight, but not enough to win,” he argues. “We’ve kept them bleeding without any sort of clear future end state for that bleeding to stop.”. This is a view expressed by many commentators since the war began.
He returns to Field Marshal Alan Brooke’s classic definition of strategy: define a political end state, design lines of operation, then resource them accordingly.
“Everyone always forgets about the resourcing accordingly bit,” Fox says. “It’s all very well to say, ‘We’ll stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.’ What’s ‘it’? Define it, and then we can see if we are conducting a good workable strategy – or are we just feeding the meat grinder?”
Fox is explicit that his position is not cynicism. “I’m fully supportive of Ukraine,” he says. “I’ve been there, I like them very much, and I hope they win. But we also have to be realistic about what can be achieved and tailor our approach accordingly. That’s just good strategy.”
Gamification, motivation and fighting for each other
One of the more controversial strands in current debate is the “gamification” of war – point systems and rewards for successful drone operators and units. Fox sees much of the outrage as misplaced.
“For that generation, they think in those terms already,” he says. “If it works, it works.”
He links this to an older truth about combat motivation. “In Afghanistan, you’re not thinking of Queen and country when you’re getting shot at,” he recalls. “For me it was my 25 soldiers; for them it was the lads left and right. That’s as old as time.”
In a war for national survival, he suggests, the moral calculus inevitably loosens. “Perhaps you can afford to be on a moral high horse about killing when you’re in expeditionary wars of choice,” he says. “But when someone has invaded your country and is trying to wipe you off the map, it comes down to whatever works.”
A starter for ten – and a challenge to Westminster
Fox is under no illusions about the limits of a think-tank paper, but he is clear about what success would look like.
“I’d like people who are serving to read it and go, ‘Yes, that makes sense,’” he says. “One of my REME friends who peer-reviewed it said it’s better than anything we’re doing right now. That was a good confidence boost.”
Beyond the services, he wants it to inform defence planning and party policy. “Ideally, I’d like it to influence thinking on future procurement models,”.
He is candid about what’s missing. “If I were to write a follow-on, it would be: how do you get from where we are now to the model I’ve described? I’ve given a picture of what it should look like, and the problems with the current model. What I haven’t done is bridge that. That’s a political answer that probably sits far above my level, but I’d quite like to have a go at it.”
For now, the paper stands as a challenge: to match rhetoric on Ukraine and future conflict with procurement systems fast and flexible enough to matter when lives, not just budgets, are on the line.
‘Procurement in the Twenty-First Century: Defence Acquisition, Industrial Mobilisation and Sovereign Defence Capability’ is published by the Henry Jackson Society
