Phil,
Welcome - always good to get an external view.
Is there anything wrong with this picture? Serious question.
Yes, a few things.
Oh, and don't dither over the spec, keep changing the spec, change the spec when you don't understand what the full consequences will be, or sign up to some ridiculous deal whereby government money covers every possible mistake the manufacturers make. Then you might get something with decent clarity of purpose, in a timely manner, within a respectable distance of the original quote.
Well, the MoD/RAF is notorious for changing specs and off-take numbers, as well as for writing rubbish contracts and stuffing themselves. So this is a pretty major problem.
If we want a new ground attack aircraft, why don't we just bloody well make one
See above. And what threat environment do you want this new jet to work in? Unless reasonably benign at ML, then it starts to get rather pricey VERY quickly - we're not talking about zero-timed Hunters with Litening pods, I'm guessing.
other people (well, Saudi) might buy them, to overall positive fiscal effect.
Extremely unlikely to provide "overall positive fiscal effect" (which I assume means a profit). The only way you can demonstrate that most aircraft exports make a profit is to write off large portions of the R&D and then show that you've made a profit on the incremental sales. I'd be interested to see the costs for Al Yamamah (sp?) to see if we actually made any cash on the Saudi Tornado deals if you were to include the cost of the Tornado R&D.
Of course, if you write off the R&D, then you could even make Concorde profitable.... but it didn't do much for the taxpayers or the BAC shareholders.
Maybe I'm being too pessimistic, and I'd love to be proved wrong, but....
S41