Originally Posted by
Goanna01
The UK appears to have a reasonably large defence budget but very limited conventional capabilities (if what I’ve read on here is correct), is it that nukes are very expensive to maintain or are there other reasons?
The military is massively overstaffed with unnecessary Top Neddies. (ie more admirals than ships) and MoD far far too big for the forces it 'manages' - far far too many civil servants with massive pensions and costs. (more drones in the MoD than soldiers in the Army isn't it?)
Procurement is grotesquely inefficient and wasteful, costs of large programmes, and presumably small ones too are frequently uncontrolled and routinely suffer immense £££££ overruns.
One suspects maintenance contracts are far too lax, non-puniutive especially on timescale (7 year refits for a sub for instance) and therefore cost too.
Procurement tends to buy immensely costly and delicate high-tech when off the shelf solutions could often be bought in far greater numbers and be almost as effective. Where we do buy off the shelf we seem to need to make massive and unnecessary bespoke multi-year long alterations that cause immense extra costs (Chinook/Nimrod for instance).
We spend squillions on the wrong thing - 2 carriers - when we haven't enough skimmers to escort even one of them nor able to afford aircraft to put on them. So we buy far far too few of the wrong over-costly under capable aircraft because blind dogma prevented the ships from being properly equipped to carry proper aircraft and be as useful as they should be.
Nuclear derterrent is admittedly hugely costly.
Basically, inept management and vast amounts of blinkered decades-outdated thinking and self-interest one suspects.
Maybe some of that is not altogether correct, but I fear most of it is. It's an internatiuonal disgrace and shame on our nation, and bloody dangerous.