As everyone knows, a lot of people in West Dorset are employed at AgustaWestland – one of the world’s leading manufacturers of helicopters. And helicopters have been much in the news lately.
It has become clear that what the experts have been saying all along was right: you can’t fight a modern war in a place like Afghanistan without enough of the right kind of helicopter.
The emphasis here needs to be on the phrase “the right kind of helicopter”. Looking at the figures, you would have thought that British armed services had plenty of helicopters. There are more than 400 of them.
But, when one digs a bit deeper, one discovers that many of them are designed for purposes other than carrying troops into battle or lifting troops out of danger; many of the helicopters are no longer functioning or are being repaired; others do not work in great heat; and so on.
By the time you have allowed for all of these problems, you discover that there are only a handful of the right kind of thing available now for use in the right place.
In this particular case, it seems clear that the right actions taken a few years ago when many of us were pressing for them, would have solved the problem.
And there must surely be ways of addressing the present crisis rapidly so that we do not face another set of dreadful stories in coming months.
No doubt AgustaWestland has a role to play in all of this, and I am currently pursuing one particular suggestion that has been raised by a former senior employee of the firm.
But there is a wider moral to this tale.
It tells us an enormous amount about prediction and planning by governments.
This is not a partisan point. All governments of all persuasions at all times have terrible difficulties predicting and planning. The extreme example, of course, was the effort by Iron Curtain countries to predict and plan every aspect of their economies: Russia’s Gosplan came totally unstuck, with all sorts of wrong things being produced in wrong places at wrong times, and not enough other things being produced in the right places at the right times. But you only have to look at efforts to plan the number of doctors or nurses to see that, even in a country where no-one is trying to predict supply across the economy as a whole, government just is not very good at calculating what is going to be needed, where and when.
I doubt that the remedy lies in trying to predict and plan better.
Isn’t it more likely that we will find a sensible solution if we accept that governments just aren’t very good at this – and then set up systems which enable us to adjust quickly when it becomes evident that we haven’t got the right sorts of things in the right places at the right time?