Paul Davis

I sat at that committee and it was interesting because the two parties that they brought in was myself and they brought in the Office of Government Procurement.

And as I pointed out, the thinking was the Office of Government Procurement procures everything.

They don't.

They buy the staplers.

They put in large contracts, but they don't procure everything.

So the mindset of people is that this office, which is about efficiency, and it is very efficient and effective, would be able to procure equipment that was going to actually suffice as defense equipment.

It is not.

No, and we need to build to do that.

To build to do that, though, requires building.

And I keep going back to this word that I came up with, intelligent client.

We need to be thinking of ourselves as more than just a contract, but actually why we're buying it and what we're going to do with it.

And the point of the article was to raise the debate, to try to get us into this frame of mind, rather than getting trapped into the neutrality debate, but actually talk about what it is we need to be a resilient society.