Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios

[Brian Gladman]

From: "Owen Lewis" <oml@eloka.demon.co.uk>
To: <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk>
Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2000 12:26 AM
Subject: Re: Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios

[snip]
> > Cryptography is still the last bastion of nationalism within the
> > government/defence sphere
>
> Would that were so. How do you suppose our armed forces ended up with a
> rifle foisted on them that is world-class only in the derision heaped on
it?

This was almost certainly the result of a defence imperative to take the
lowest cost bid with very little weight being given to the quality of the
product.  I suspect that there was also a strange willingness to allow
something on the drawing board (or in prototype form) to compete with
something that actually existed and had a track record.

I am confident that if an overseas bid for the product had been
significantly lower in cost terms than a UK one it would have succeeded.  In
my time (late 1980s to mid 1990s) we had a 'three line whip' in MOD
procurement to leave support for UK industry entirely to the DTI.

     Brian