Right, first of all I'm just a pond life JO on a flying base, I'm not a senior officer, and I have not worked in MOD at any stage.....
In my last post I was trying to point out what I believed (possibly incorrectly) to be the financial return for the UK of "buying British". It was also partly to point out that LO's calculation of having to sell 13800 jets before the UK government got sufficient return (tax) from various UK companies involvement in the project for the 138 we might buy to be "free" was probably very pessimistic.....
Having said that:
Deliverance
Half my point was that the government doesn't return any of the benefits to any department that buys British, whether that be Defence, transport, agriculture, etc, etc..... Departments are encouraged to buy British to help the UK economy, but it doesn't help the departments individual budgets, in fact it may hinder them. Any benefit to the country goes into the general pot (in the same way that your road tax doesn't pay for roads) rather than any attempt (which would probably be a nightmare to manage) to "credit" an individual departments budget.
Minigun
I was trying to keep the example as simple as possible. To that end I stated (however unrealistically) that the performance of each tank was similar - so a soldier is as safe/unsafe in one as in the other. In which case (your point 2), how is a soldiers life effected by the choice made in my hypothetical case?
Why Germany and not the US? Why not, its a hypothetical example for goodness sake. I could have picked Spain, Denmark, Brazil, etc and it wouldn't matter. It was just an overseas country vs the UK. The US was just too obvious and boring to pick.... Anyway, the Germans make good tanks
Why Swindon? Why not, it was the first name that popped into my head, and no, I'm not based at Lyneham.
It was a hypothetical example of a UK vs overseas purchase of military equipment, and the money recouped by the UK government in each case. Don't get so bogged down in unimportant details.
ORAC
No need to swear.
Whilst I was aware, and have read about, industrial offsets, I thought they were more usual in larger scale projects. I didn't realize they were as common as you seem to imply. Does this mean that the much trumpeted sale of Hawks to India, mentioned in Cameron's recent visit there with a trade delegation, is actually going to cost the UK more than it earns us (in that we have had to agree to offsets with India)? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was worth celebrating!
Gents, I tried to put down my thoughts on why the government is keen to "buy british" whenever possible, without the individual government departments involved getting any benefit. I tried to pick a simple example. As I wrote it I could see more any more ways in which the money spent makes its way back to the Treasury. I may have been wrong, and stand ready to be corrected (ORACs comment re offsets?). This is a discussion forum after all.....