We all know we don't have the right balance of equipment at the moment.
But whose fault is that?
It is wrong to blame the politicians of today for the mistakes of the politicians and military leaders of the past. The root of the problems that we have today lie in the inflexibility and mistakes of the procurement process in the eighties and nineties, when the foundations for our current equipment palette was painted. "Options for Change" was a military and political plan that was supposed to see us through to today and beyond, at the end of a major confrontation. We only got it partly right.
The army substantially divested itself of heavy armour, and partly invested in expeditionary and special forces - but not sufficiently, and woefully underinvested in equipment (except Apache - though probably Cobra would have been better for CAS and ease of maintenance). But overall they came out surprisingly well - maybe 8/10 overall for effectiveness of their strategic reform.
The RN correctly kept our core nuclear deterrent, but only reluctantly divested in aircraft carriers, and as a result were forced to underinvest in frigates which are our best asset for global diplomatic projection (note diplomatic, not power, projection). Maybe 6/10 for their efforts.
The RAF score maximum 3/10. With their heads firmly entrenched in 1941, they pursued a strategy of prioritising air defence procurement. SH, tropp transport and even AAR languished. It is not as if procurement lead times were too long for reaction to changing times. Typhoon was not irreversibly signed until a year after "Options for Change". Even then it was not too late - had Eurofighter listened to the French, we might have ended up with a swing-role aircraft (Rafale) that could be effective in CAS(TODAY), fly off carriers (TODAY), and still be effective in air defence (TODAY). Instead we ended up with enormous investment in a very impressive but entirely useless swingish-role air defence fighter which can only at great expense be converted to an inefficient CAS role and may never be adaptable to fly from a carrier.
But the most important question is why the RAF were able to win the argument in 1992 at the expense of the army and the RN? The answer lies with the politicians - RAF procurement supplies more jobs than the RN, and RN procurement supplies more jobs than the army.
So until we break the cycle of creating high tech weaponry to suit employment needs, we might never get out of the cycle we have been in since end of WW2.