The WOME Competence Gap: A Procurement Risk Most Defence Organisations Cannot Audit

The question senior procurement leaders cannot answer

Most defence procurement organisations assume they are competent in Weapons, Ordnance, Munitions and Explosives (WOME) procurement because the contracts cite the right publications, the suppliers are certified, and the staff have job descriptions that mention ammunition. Until something goes wrong.

When something does go wrong — a defective batch, a supplier insolvency, a serious accident, a corruption allegation, an inquest, or a National Audit Office (NAO) inquiry — the question that determines whether a procurement leader's career survives is not whether the process was followed. It is whether competence can be evidenced. Show me, the auditor or coroner or investigator asks, the documented basis on which you concluded that the individuals making this decision were competent to make it.

For most NATO member states, that evidence does not exist in a form an external investigator will accept. It exists in training certificates, in years of service, in implicit trust between long-standing colleagues. None of which is what regulators, courts and parliamentary committees actually require. The WOME competence gap is the distance between what the frameworks demand of senior procurement leaders and what their organisations can actually demonstrate.

Three frameworks, one procurement desk

The procurement officer responsible for buying explosive substances and articles (ESA) operates under three concurrent regimes. Each is mandatory in its own jurisdiction. Each demands competence. None defines what competence means in the way the other two need it defined.

Allied Quality Assurance Publication 2110, Edition D (AQAP-2110) is the NATO quality assurance requirement cited on the great majority of allied defence procurement contracts. Clause 7.2 — inherited from ISO 9001:2015 — requires that competence be defined, evidenced and managed for personnel performing work that affects conformity. AQAP-2110 does not specify what those competences are for explosives procurement.

Defence Safety Authority Regulation 02.OME (DSA 02.OME), Version 3.0, July 2024 is the mandatory UK Ministry of Defence framework governing all Ordnance, Munitions and Explosives activities. Issued by the Defence Ordnance Safety Regulator (DOSR), it supersedes the legacy publications JSP 390, JSP 403, JSP 482, JSP 498 and JSP 520 — all now withdrawn. DSA 02.OME requires that all OME personnel be demonstrably competent, and points downstream to the ESA National Occupational Standards (NOS) for what that means.

The ESA National Occupational Standards, assessed under the WOME Functional Skills Framework Version 3.1, define competence in nine units within Key Role 6 covering the explosives procurement lifecycle from requirement definition through contract close-out. Each unit prescribes Performance Criteria — demonstrable behaviours — and Knowledge Requirements. Key Role 6 is the only one of the three frameworks that says, in operational terms, what a competent explosives procurement officer must be able to do.

The problem is that AQAP-2110 is binding across the Alliance but silent on what competence looks like. DSA 02.OME defines the requirement but applies only to UK MoD personnel. The ESA NOS define the substance but apply, with full assessment rigour, to a fraction of the NATO procurement workforce. The seams between these three frameworks are where the competence gap lives.

Quality and safety are owned separately, and no bridge crosses them

NATO compounds the framework problem with a governance one. The Alliance separates ownership of quality and ammunition safety into two committees that operate independently and rarely meet.

Allied Committee 327, the Life Cycle Management Group (AC/327 LCMG), owns Standardization Agreement 4107 (STANAG 4107, Edition 11, 15 January 2019) and the entire AQAP suite. AC/327 sets the rules for how a supplier's quality management system is judged and how Government Quality Assurance (GQA) is exchanged between nations.

Allied Committee 326, the Conference of National Armaments Directors' Ammunition Safety Group (AC/326 CASG), owns the ammunition-safety publications: STANAG 4440 on Insensitive Munitions, STANAG 4442 on principles for the assessment of safety, STANAG 4657 on data for hazard classification, and the Allied Ammunition Storage and Transport Publications (AASTP-1 through AASTP-5). AC/326 defines what technical knowledge is required to handle a munition.

Neither committee owns the people who buy the munitions. There is no STANAG, and no AQAP, that says a procurement officer must demonstrate ammunition-safety knowledge before signing an explosives contract. AC/327 demands competence in suppliers without defining it. AC/326 defines technical knowledge without authority over the people who place the orders. The result is a structural boundary in NATO's own governance — a boundary across which procurement decisions are made every day, by people who may or may not have been assessed against the knowledge AC/326 takes for granted.

For senior procurement leaders, this is not an academic governance point. It is the reason an external auditor, looking for evidence that a recent explosives contract was technically defensible, will be unable to find what they are looking for in the contract file.

Three failure modes that emerge in audit

When organisations engage Sawyers Global Solutions to remediate competence-evidence problems after an incident, an audit finding or a contract challenge, three patterns recur.

Mutual GQA accepted without translation

Under AQAP-2070 Edition C, one NATO nation's GQA Representative (GQAR) can audit a supplier on behalf of another nation. The buying nation's procurement organisation then relies on that audit when accepting deliveries. The audit, however, is on the supplier's quality management system — not on whether the supplier's operators demonstrate the competences DSA 02.OME would require of equivalent UK personnel handling the same materiel. The risk transfers across borders. The competence evidence does not.

Training certificates submitted as competence evidence

ISO 9001 Clause 7.2 is satisfied with training records in many organisations because no inspector has pushed beyond the documentary minimum. ESA NOS Key Role 6 is constructed differently. Unit 6.6, for example, requires the procurement officer to devise weighting systems for technical evaluation, ensure that safety is not compromised by technical performance considerations, and evaluate proposals and make award recommendations. These are demonstrable behaviours. A training certificate proves attendance. It does not prove that the person in front of the auditor can do the thing the unit describes.

Technical evaluation panels without ammunition-safety competence in the room

A procurement organisation assembling a tender evaluation panel for an explosives contract often staffs it with experienced procurement professionals. None of them may be formally assessed against the ammunition-safety competences that AC/326's standards assume. Quality is assured. Safety is assumed. Where the gap is filled, it is usually filled by a single trusted technical expert whose competence is itself undocumented and whose departure leaves the organisation exposed.

These patterns are not failures of individual judgement. They are predictable outputs of a framework architecture that requires demonstrable competence but provides no integrated route to evidence it.

The defensibility question is not “did we follow process?” It is “can you demonstrate that the people in your organisation were competent to make the decisions they made?” Without a documented competence framework — role profiles, assessments, evidence, traceability — that question has no answer. Sawyers Global Solutions — Editorial

A personal-accountability problem, not a programme risk

Senior procurement leaders sometimes treat the competence gap as a programme assurance issue — something the safety case authors, the quality team or the auditors deal with. Under the current UK regime, that framing is no longer tenable.

DSA 02.OME names individuals. Safety cases identify duty-holders. The Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) Director responsible for an explosives acquisition, the Project Team Leader signing a contract, and the procurement officer running the technical evaluation are all individually identifiable in the records an external investigator will examine. The Defence Crime Board, the Defence Fraud Analysis Unit (DFAU), an inquest under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, the NAO, and the Defence Select Committee can each, in their own jurisdiction, ask for the same thing: evidence that the named individuals were competent.

This is what gives the competence gap its weight at board and executive level. The defensibility question has no satisfactory answer in most procurement organisations today. The risk does not sit primarily with the institution. It sits with the named individuals whose signatures appear on the contracts, the safety cases, the technical evaluations and the supplier qualifications.

What closing the gap looks like in practice

Closing the WOME competence gap is institutional translation work, not framework production. The frameworks already exist. What is missing in most procurement organisations is the documented architecture that maps the framework requirements onto specific posts, generates the assessment evidence those frameworks demand, and produces an audit trail that survives external scrutiny.

A defensible competence programme contains five components.

1. Gap analysis against the three frameworks

Each post involved in WOME procurement is mapped against AQAP-2110 Clause 7.2 obligations, DSA 02.OME duty-holder requirements where the post falls within the UK MoD regime, and the ESA NOS Key Role 6 units that describe what that post must be able to do. The output is a documented role-by-role accountability picture that aligns the three frameworks on a single page.

2. Role profile development

Where the post sits inside the UK MoD framework, the ESA NOS provides the structure directly. Where the post sits in a NATO partner, an industrial supplier or a multinational programme office, IATG 01.90 — the UN International Ammunition Technical Guidelines Module on Personnel Competences, Version 3, 2021 — provides a defensible international reference. Either route produces role profiles that an external inspector will recognise.

3. Competence assessment framework

Performance Criteria evidence — observed behaviour, supervised practice, scenario-based assessment, documented decisions — replaces training-certificate documentation as the primary evidence base. Assessors are themselves competence-assessed. Records are versioned and retained.

4. Customer-assurance protocol for Mutual GQA outputs

Where the procurement organisation relies on GQA performed by another nation, the protocol specifies what additional competence evidence the buying nation requires from its own people before accepting the GQA conclusions, and how those judgements are documented.

5. Continuous assurance

Competence is a maintained state. The framework defines reassessment cadences, change triggers (new materiel type, new regulatory regime, new supplier) and the assessor-calibration regime that keeps assessment judgements consistent.

The output is a procurement organisation that can produce, on demand, the evidence a regulator, auditor or investigator is entitled to see.

How Sawyers Global Solutions works on this

Closing the competence gap requires three things in combination that are rare individually and rarer together: technical fluency in the substances and articles being procured, regulatory literacy across the UK, NATO and UN frameworks that govern their handling, and the consulting discipline to translate framework requirements into documented, audit-defensible evidence. Sawyers Global Solutions provides this work specifically for defence procurement organisations and industrial suppliers operating in the WOME space.

Engagements are normally phased: a diagnostic gap analysis against the three frameworks; role profile development for the posts identified as carrying the highest exposure; competence assessment framework deployment with assessor calibration; and ongoing assurance, including a documented basis for any reliance on Mutual GQA. The outcome is procurement leadership that can answer the defensibility question — with files, dates, evidence and named assessors — when an external party asks.

If your organisation has named individuals signing WOME procurement contracts and cannot produce, today, the competence evidence on which those signatures rely, the gap is open.