DE & S

ROGER WEST LOGISTICS AND SUPPORT DIRECTOR , DEFENCE , EQUIPMENT & SUPPORT

West outlines the various teams and departments that account for the 13,000 talented civil servants , military personnel and private contractors under the DE & S umbrella , spread across more than 150 locations globally . Donnington is one of the key UK sites that provide some 1300 acres of storage facilities in the UK alone .

“ There ' s always an awful lot of interesting things going on ,” says West . “ We ' ve got the largest privately owned railway in the UK – if you went to Bicester , there are miles of sidings and track built as part of its crucial role in WW2 . It handled 292,000 wagons in one year as part of the D-Day preparations . “ And then we ' ve got a project that we are just in the process of rolling out , which is another new building for storage which is going to be in Longtown , near Carlisle . That ' s going to be about the size of 12 football pitches and will again help us provide storage for a lot of our big , lumpy things such as ship propeller shafts , engines and gun barrels . We call it block storage , and it will also help us de-risk some of our storage at other sites .”

Bringing defence logistics into the 21st century Remember the end scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark , when a wooden crate is wheeled into a seemingly endless warehouse ?