Engines :-
In my view, this isn't primarily about RAF VSOs - although they played their part in setting the conditions. It isn't about criminal cases - although I could see how that might possibly be an angle. The core of this thing is a systemic failure by the RAF to properly procure and maintain an airworthy fleet of aircraft. My view is as follows. The failure started in a rushed procurement, which was compounded by a failure to properly set up the basic building blocks of airworthiness. This was followed by the issue of what must have been, even at the time, an insufficiently supported CA Release and RTS. It was topped off by an extended failure to properly maintain the aircraft, and a failure to maintain the required airworthiness record. The result was that the RAF, for some years, was flying civilian children in non-airworthy aircraft.
It rather depends upon what you mean by 'primarily' and what 'it' is. If you mean what happened in the first place it very much was to do with RAF VSOs, who subverted the UK Air Safety System in the late 80s by diverting funds away from it (to shore up RAF VSO incompetence) and getting rid of trained experienced engineers to be replaced by pliable inexperienced non-engineers who would suborn the Regulations as ordered. Now that was a very long time ago, over thirty years for the main part, but the result has been like a canker in UK Military Aviation ever since (nb not just in the RAF!). If you mean by 'it' the scandal of the ACO gliders then we are playing the MOD's game. Stove-Piping! The canker keeps emerging in fleet after fleet, often in fatal air accidents, because the experience, knowledge, and skill sets are not there to detect, let alone cure, the lack of airworthiness. If the truth of what has happened is not openly confronted, no matter the individuals concerned, the Services, the Departments involved, then that old adversary of PO Prune, the Gremlin, will have the last word as it always does when left to run riot.
If you pulp the Regs, cut and cut again the Safety budgets, reorganise the system umpteen times so that a manufacturer's Safety Bulletin can never find its way to the appropriate office (even if it was not a contractual obligation in the first place), then you can scarcely be surprised if airworthiness goes to hell in a hand cart. And who is the 'you' in this case if not the VSOs? Was the guy that over torqued the drogue shackle bolt (that should never have been undone on the flight line in the first place) on the Red's seats primarily to blame, or the VSO that ordered that illegal RTI in the first place? Mull was blamed on the pilots, until a 14 year campaign run in this forum got that VSO finding overturned. The Nimrod Review named an SO and a junior VSO when others further up the food train were never mentioned at all. Mull still remains a known unknown despite unequivocal evidence that the Chinook Mk2's were grossly unairworthy, because having overturned that BoI another has never been convened. The unairworthiness of the Nimrod Mk2's were such as to have scrapped the upgraded MRA4s publicly on TV! Who oversaw all these doomed fleets if not VSOs? And while we are mentioning VSOs, yes the great bulk of them are/were RAF VSOs, but not entirely!
The scandal is not primarily (that word again!) about the ACO Gliders, but about UK Military Airworthiness (or rather the lack of it). That it blighted the ACO fleet, the most simple aircraft of all, is terrible. Along with many here, I benefited from the selfless dedicated volunteers that sent me solo as an air cadet. But the fleet was grounded because it was unairworthy. Whatever else has happened or not happened we should give thanks for that small mercy. It is unthinkable what the outcome would have been if the ACO fleet had suffered an airworthiness related fatal air accident along with all the others that pepper this forum.
So I must politely take issue with you Engines. It is primarily about RAF VSOs, and it is about potential criminality. Where I totally agree with you though is that it is also about systemic failure, not just within the RAF but primarily (again!) within the MOD.