Independent security advisory
Understand the problem before you buy the answer.
Marchward Services advises governments and institutions on security capability. We assess what exists, establish what is missing, and set out the options including the option of doing nothing. Where we are asked to, we then build the capability and run the teams that deliver it. We are small, senior and deployable, and we work through your people rather than around them.
Three things we are for
Assessment before acquisition
Most security spending fails because the requirement was never established. We assess capability against a consistent standard and produce a scored baseline, a prioritised gap register and costed options with a recommended sequence.
Capability that outlasts us
Advice that depends on the adviser is not advice, it is a subscription. Every recommendation we make names the person or institution that owns it after we leave, and anything without an owner is flagged as something you should not accept.
Judgement, not headcount
Small teams of senior people, with recent operational experience in the discipline concerned. A larger team costs more, learns less per head, and imposes a greater burden on the organisation it is supposed to be helping.
A diagnostic that only ever finds problems its author can solve is not a diagnostic.
Where we have operated
Between them the principals have served or advised in nineteen countries. The map shows where. We do not identify the institutions we worked for, but the geography is our own record and it is checkable against our service.
Operational service and advisory work across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.
Twenty-one in the Royal Marines and sixteen in the British Army, between the two principals.
Public order and pre-election security training organised and delivered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
United Kingdom and Northern Ireland · Bosnia and Herzegovina · Macedonia · Kosovo · Turkey · Lebanon · Jordan · Iraq · Afghanistan · Sierra Leone · Ghana · Togo · Nigeria · Cameroon · Chad · Sudan · Democratic Republic of the Congo · South Africa · Haiti
Where we stand
- We tell you what not to buy.
- The most valuable finding in an assessment is often that a proposed purchase is unnecessary, unlawful or unsustainable. We would rather lose the follow-on work than write a report that flatters a decision already taken.
- Every option includes doing nothing.
- The null case is always on the table with its consequence stated. It is sometimes the right answer, and it is always the benchmark the others have to beat.
- The work belongs to you.
- Reports, underlying data and working notes are the client’s property in full, publishable without reference to us.
- We declare our interests.
- Where a finding would favour a service we could supply, we say so in the text so that the reader can discount it.
- We do not name our clients.
- Confidentiality matters to the institutions we work for, so we do not identify them, publish their findings, or use their names to win the next piece of work. If you want a reference, ask and we will seek permission from the client concerned.
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Who you would actually get
Marchward is deliberately small. The people named on this site are the people who do the work.