Oh dear; more shock horror and heads should roll. What isn't obvious from these incisive investigations by Government commissioned Wunderkind is the role played by HM Treasury. Forcing postponment of future equipment programmes results technology moving on. Accommodating that costs money. Force budget "reprofiling" on current programmes and, again, technology moves on and Contractors' overheads increase. Additionally, the FLC requirement has time to change (for good reason) and the spec changes. The net result is yet more delay and cost increase.
This is pretty obvious for Naval programmes and I suspect that Air ones can't be that dissimilar. I'm quite confident that the Nimrod 4 could be delivered this year; except that the money isn't there to pay for it.
Privatising the process would be a brilliant idea but I'm not really sure we could afford the experiment. It would certainly sell off the risk; not!