Hello Dolly
There is is no doubt that MoD officials read these threads. They’ve told me so. To be fair, the only time I’ve been formally contacted was to seek help on the background to an old project, as it was obvious from a post I made that I knew something that had been lost to them. I helped them out.
Perhaps “apologists” would have been a better description of the minority who seem blind to what is going on, or have their own agenda. My own opinion is that the Freedom of Information Act has placed an astonishing body of very embarrassing evidence in the public domain. It is the MoD who is paranoid about what they now say or do. When supplying under FOI they seem more intent on blanking out the names of officials and their file references than filtering the actual content. In my case, it is because the originators did the sanitising without understanding the narrative content, or its significance. It is clear they are very nervous about what currently serving officials have done in the past, thinking it would never get out.
As for personal battles, I think each has his own area of, often considerable, experience and expertise. I am not, and never have been, aircrew. My background is one of having had to witness financial waste on an industrial scale in PE, DPA and DLO. Under FOI, I sought and obtained clear written evidence that the MoD, at the most senior levels, continue to practice and condone this. (And, as I have this under FOI, and it complements other open source information, I feel entitled to post on the subject). I sympathise enormously with our Servicemen and women who are continually fobbed off with insufficient and unsuitable kit. This thread is one of the classic examples as it contains elements of everything that is wrong with the MoD (and there is much that is right). There is funding to fit DAS/ESF. The point of many of my posts is that, far from the MoD’s pleas that they don’t get enough funding from the Treasury, it is a 10 minute job to identify hundreds of millions of waste just within my boundary of experience. And if the MoD has been told this, acknowledged it, yet refused to do anything; then they have abrogated their responsibility, avoided a legal obligation and failed in their duty of care to our troops. They’ve dug their own hole my friend.
My continued good wishes to Nigel, Chappie et al.