The documents I read about the practice of MOD spending echo what Easy Street / falcon900 say; it had become routine to get through ‘today’ by pushing more into ‘tomorrow’.
One parliamentary document pointed to the practice being done back in 1995.
Interesting to hear more detail on the inner workings.
My memory is vague now, but I think it was the legendary USAF fighter pilot, Robin Olds, who during ground duties in 1950s or 60s did a form of audit of the USAF bomber force and found that in fact at one point in time they had much less availability of aircraft/weapons than was being declared because some people were so reluctant to reveal missing their quotas that they ‘fiddled’ the figures to avoid revealing the true situation. I think it was stated that the prevailing culture at the time had contributed to this, i.e. it was repressive to anyone reporting otherwise, as well as due to individuals looking after their careers.
Regarding the QE carriers, initially the reason given for the delay was due to the delay of the JSF.
It appears that it was not clear about fundamental reason of the QE delay (i.e. to reduce spending in short term) and to put it as simply a result of the JSF delay.
What is important is that whoever was responsible for constraining borrowing for MOD projects, was aware of the consequences of that constraint in this case i.e. two major military assets delayed by up to two years and at £674m cost (£650m added to that initial estimate later). This could not be the case if it was not known what the cost implications were when the decision to delay was made. It implies that the decision was based solely on how much spend could be decreased now and not on how much spend would be increased later.
Last edited by Wingless Walrus; 20th Jul 2019 at 19:22.