Broadly speaking, people here are disappointed over its lack of scope and ambition.
This is unfair, for the West is in decline and in economic terms ~ with Mrs Thatcher ever prone to comparing it to a domestic economy ~ countries like the UK could be compared to a film-star past their best, with a maxed-out credit card. In my time I have marvelled in the past at how cheap the living was and how slow the trains; in Poland I've lived and worked and seen why the best part of a million Poles moved here to work and earn from the 1990s on... until now, with both economies striding ahead in comparison to ours.
In either case, those considered to be among the architects of each turnaround do agree that ~ absent a crisis ~ such developments are impossible, principally when it comes to selling them to the electorate. Accordingly in bloated economies like those of the US and UK, instead what transpires is an expansion of regulated complexity of the sort all civilisations tend to suffer prior to their collapse.
The US is shielded by dint of manufacture and export, which invariably is a way out of crisis; people rarely realising that software that we use provided invariably by the 'tech bros' we are all asked to loathe is itself a form of manufacture. What it mainly benefits from is the ease of distribution.
Accordingly the UK is in hoc like the alco with the credit card bill: to the banks in the form of the bond markets, which determine those economies appearing to be those with the least credit risk. Accordingly politicians are unable to do anything but tinker and regulate in an effort to appear more relevant among a public no longer seeing them as such.
Dominic Cummings, one of the best politicians who never was, puts this down to the fact that two things which affect public service as such are firstly the fact that those with talent now go elsewhere ~ where they can make more of a difference ~ beside the fact that ministers used to bear responsibility for their actions whereas now they don't... generally they are shuffled on to another post.
Poland itself was privatised on a scale that would have delighted Mrs Thatcher, and it has clearly worked, although as the current PM proved close by in Manchester it generally requires talent in both private and public spheres. Outright capitalism will not work absent that public service interest ~ as the trust cases in the US itself has so often proven ~ but then neither does an outright public sector.
Probably the foremost reason in the case of the latter is that throughout the world people in national or local government service are effectively unable to be fired no matter how piss-poor their performance ~ and I'm thinking of the property manager in West Lancs local council here, to take it from the general to the particular. It's for this reason that even in China the most difficult academic tests (in truth, mostly of rote-learning) are accrued to entry into the civil service: a role popularly called the 'iron rice-bowl' to reflect how it is viewed as a job for life.
But how does any of this relate to drones? Well as Cummings puts it to that same parliamentary committee, the reason defence procurement here isn't all it could be is that information from Ukraine on how wars are won nowadays is suppressed by a Civil Service largely devoid of talent so as to protect ingrained interests in what little remains of the UK's defence capability ~ principally BAE Systems for the occasions we don't buy off-the-shelf from the US.
Here's an interesting thing though. I've been ghosted by the NWAA (as by most, in fairness) or the NorthWest Aerospace Alliance... although I was largely there in the first place for the Christmas ball. You have to wonder whether this would be down to its principal source of funding and credibility. Which would probably be the local employer, BAE Systems.
Ed. Well he's got that off his chest, hasn't he?
