Tacumseh makes some very valid points. It has been very difficuly for the RW community to cope with the ever decreasing amount of money allocated to it. As an example, we were supposed to have £4.5Bn for SABR & SABR-SAR. Then "Buff" makes great play of sitting in an Apache and trumpeting the same money...except it's now £1.5Bn less and includes Merlin Mk1 CSP...
This is the problem. Given the correct resource SABR would be, shortly, delivering exactly the ac we need to be fighting these two very RW-intensive wars. We're not getting he ac because the RW "piggy-bank" is continually raided at Options time because Helos are not "core" business for ANY of the three services, and a very "fat cat" in the Land TLB.
It's disheartening to see a new generation of Civil Servants / SO2s grapple with exactly the same issues that SABR dealt with; repeating work, coming to the same conclusions, but this time hampered by yet another roadblock-the DIS.
The consequence of the SABR fiasco is embaressment; as everyone else is migrating to new RW systems (MV-22/NH-90/CH-47F/Ch-53K etc etc ...) we're left with life-extending our current stock because the RW money is a long way away in the EP and even if we had the money, we've missed the bus for buying new aircraft ('cos everyone else has)