Fanatic
You have fallen into the obvious, but understandable, trap of trying to apply arguments of common sense and military effectiveness to this equation. While it may seem that the government are gambling with military lives by scrapping the SHARs, they are gambling with lives all of the time anyway, so it is surely only a matter of degree?
Britain has one of the strongest economies in the world yet we have a third world health service, failing transport infrastructure and a poor public education system. It is a clear choice that our govt has made not to invest more money in the armed forces. If you look at the MOD website there are tables comparing our defence expenditure with that of other European nations. If the govt decided to up defence spending, they could. It would, however, be at the expense of some other area of spending and probably not a vote winner. While we as a nation have global interests it must be admitted that there are very few immediate threats to the UK mainland. The population will probably not be too concerned about the military unless there was more immediate danger to our way of life.
The reality is surely that most people in this country would rather live a life of comfort with all modcons and a high disposable income than pay what they consider to be unnecessarily high taxes to pay for a military capability when there is no apparent threat.
For the record, I think we should keep the SHAR fleet. It is just a pity that we haven't got enough pilots to man them.