Originally Posted by
meleagertoo
A Navy perhaps three times the size in terms of major units and infinitely larger if coastal vessels abd conventional subs are counted, an Air Force many times the size too.
What's gone wrong? The differences are far, far too big to be accounted for by relative values of currency, economic status or even legacy equipment, surely?
Paper strength is one thing. How many of those major units are actually seaworthy at any one time. Or capable of deploying fully trained and stored?
There's also a transparency issue. Do we actually know how much they spend? Or are we using their official figures and taking them as gospel? Are those figures audited? Something which actually incurs a fair amount of expense just in doing so (or more accurately, conducting endless VFM studies/ABC options), as denizens of ABW and the TLBs will attest.