Lease! Words fail me, you think these idiots would have learnt from the C17 lease, it would have been far cheaper to buy in the first place rather than lease.
The purchase price at the time was over budget so the lease thing was imagined as a back door approach to C-17 acquisition. Remember this was before the Afghan war began. It was lease or no C-17.
Then the war began in 2001, the usage the RAF had planned for the C-17 went above what had been signed in the contract, and the price of the C-17s became a moot point......