All interesting points, but still I see the British attitude that only we have it right and everyone else cannot be trusted to do a good job. While I completely agree that there are certain circumstances where in a new platform, one must be cautious, are we REALLY saying that everyone else is wrong and we are the only honest and competent assessors out there?
Another circumstance perhaps - thousands of Chinooks with perhaps millions of flying hours without a relevant incident, and the UK decides to spend £100m of taxpayers money stripping out verifiably safe systems, evidenced by said millions of flying hours, to put back an earlier generation of system "because we haven't approved it".
This is all reminiscent of British Rail in the period up to 1990 when everything was to specific BR standards and as a consequence, the kit worked, but was unreliable, impossible to maintain, unique and hence ridiculously expensive. The doomsayers were around but when BR started to adopt ALARP with emphasis on the R , then costs dropped, reliability improved and safety events reduced as the benefits of using the same standards as everyone elses brought the safety benefits of economies of scale.
Perhaps this is the way of T&E - not taking the sarcastically suggested approach of blindly believing the salesmen, but for once, insisting the T&E community provide evidence themselves on why others standards are actually wrong, rather than just different.
We could buy F15, F35, F22 and have a superb air force, and hardly need any T&E as we we would be buying proven, in service technology. Yet somehow I suspect our industry would object on the basis that such leading aircraft were insufficiently tested and the millions of flying hours without incident were irrelevant.
We do not have a bottomless Defence budget and I for one would vote for body armour and vehicles on the ground, rather than unnecessary duplication of aircraft testing where adequate evidence already exists, but is ignored "because we are British and Johnny foreigner cannot be trusted".