Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios

[Owen Lewis]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Gladman" <brg@gladman.plus.com>
To: <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk>
Sent: 11 September 2000 12:57
Subject: Re: Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios


> 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.

Let me declare now that my wife was the project officer for bringing the SA
80 into service.

The evidence is as follows:

1. The design essentials are Polish in origin, arriving here in 39/40.

2. The design was worked up at Enfield to become the EM2, the UK competitor
for the NATO rifle in the '49/'50 competition. This was offered in then
revolutionary calibres of 4.5 mm and 5.56 mm. At that time the US would not
entertain a service rifle calibre smaller that 7.62 mm and that, accordingly
became the NATO standard calibre at that time. The EM2 could not be
re-worked to fire 7.62 and the Attlee govt decided - for reason of national
whatever - that the the UK would do its own thing and have the EM2. On his
return to power in '51, one of Churchill's first acts was to countermand
that nonsense and direct that the UK would also use 7.62 and acquire a rifle
that could use it. This lead immediately to the off-the-shelf purchase of
Belgian design which, with the full-auto switch blocked off promptly entered
service as the SLR, which served the Army well if without distinction for
some 35 years.

3. By the next NATO rifle competition, the US was converted to idea that
5.56 mm was the calibre of the future. So, the UK blew the dust off the EM2
design, re-vamped the design for manufacture from 'throw away' parts in
plastics and metal stampings and submitted it again in the same two calibres
as in '49 (the German also entered a candidate with a 4.5mm option ISTR.
NATO decided to go with 5.56, this allowing this country to have a rifle of
allegedly  UK design for the first time since before WW1 (and the design of
that - the Lee Enfield - was the better part US out of German origin).

The rest, as they say is history. Possibly the worst designed rifle of this
century. No third or fourth world nation could be persuaded to accept it as
a present (giving Wee Robin's ethical foreign policy a rag of credibility in
the process).

As to value for money....

The retail price of a SA80 is £800.00. A decent rifle can be had for half of
that.

> 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.

Well, if you think about it, supporting the UK, is not consonant with buying
cheapest - let alone buying best. And so it has proved with the SA80,
redoubled in spades. What it did was to keep alive a moribund industry that
should have been allowed to die.

I really can't tell you the tale sage of the Army's *sniper* rifle. Some one
will either sue me or assassinate me. If the latter, the one thing I am
certain of is that the bullet  would not come from the current service
sniper rifle or else it would kill my neighbour..

Owen