Supply chain assurance · Governance, risk and compliance
I have spent seventeen years operating controls in Defence logistics. Nobody ever called them controls.
I work on the seam between physical supply chains and the governance functions that are supposed to assure them: asset accountability, supplier due diligence, trade compliance and the growing problem of AI-enabled decisions nobody can trace. I write about where that seam fails, and I build the tools I wish I had been handed.
Reference material I have built and put in the open. Both are generalised from my own academic and professional work, and neither contains client, supplier or organisational detail.
A seven-stage open-source verification sequence for the case where a supplier's paperwork is complete, its certifications are valid, and something has stopped adding up. Runs from corporate structure through to synthesis, with a confidence grading key and the legal constraints it operates under.
Open the framework →Nine things military logisticians do every week, described in the language a civilian assurance function would use, mapped against ISO 27001, ISO 19011, COSO and the Three Lines Model. Built for service leavers who cannot name what they have already been doing.
Open the table →Accreditation is not assurance.
A certificate establishes evidence within a defined scope. It does not establish that the control worked, that the record matches the asset, or that the supplier can do the thing it has promised. Most of my work sits in the distance between those two positions.
Asset accountability, reconciliation, custody transfer and the discipline of testing the ledger rather than reproducing it.
Intelligence-led supplier due diligence, sub-tier visibility and the limits of what a completed questionnaire can tell you.
Trade compliance and export control, where the evidence is created by logistics people who do not think of themselves as running controls.
Three arguments, all of them versions of the same one. Links go live as each piece publishes.
Just over half of UK veterans have taken a job below the level of their last military role, and one of the two most cited reasons is employers failing to recognise transferable skills. Defence has now built the instrument that could fix that, and is using it only for internal workforce planning.
The Defence Industrial Strategy commits to a Skills Passport. The MOD is already running a pilot that hires on industry experience rather than previous rank. The strategy does not mention the pilot, and the pilot does not mention the strategy.
A regulator recently found that a defence prime's export control exposure ran through the gap between a supply chain team that did not hold the regulatory knowledge and a file transfer system that did not carry the warning. Each function could have reported itself compliant.
I started as a meter reader for the national electricity utility in St Vincent and spent twelve years there, finishing in planning and GIS. I led the GPS geo-tagging of the island's grid infrastructure, and that dataset went on to underpin an enterprise mapping system that won an Esri Special Achievement in GIS award.
I joined the Royal Navy and have spent more than seventeen years in Defence logistics: supply accounts, stocktaking, supersession and handover, fleet logistics inspection, transport safety and remedial action. It was presented to me as logistics. It took a postgraduate degree and a set of audit qualifications before I recognised it as governance, risk and compliance, which is a large part of why I now write about the translation problem.
I also founded a development programme for junior rates that was adopted as a standing programme by Engineering Support Group 1 and recognised with a Royal Navy Inclusivity Award.