I would like to put forward a slightly different angle on this. Caveat: this does not necessarily reflect my views, it's just stuff I saw in 30 years as an RAF AD pilot and later as a desk/staff/trials officer.
During the period we're discussing here the Defence budget was tighty squeezed (I know, show me a time when it hasn't been). Like the late 70s and early 80s the Government's decission to buy Trident put a huge strain on the budget and took money away from other programmes. In fact, it lead to a lot of deep cuts - mainly for the Navy who were "lucky" the Falklands happened when they did (don't bother rising to that, you know what I mean).
Similarly, in the late 80s and 90s there was another programme that should (or maybe, COULD) have been well run and reasonably straight forward, but it wasn't. It was EUROFIGHTER and the dreadful politics involved in a four-nation (five to start with, but maybe I can come back to that another time) consortium and possilby 400 sub-contractors led to it eating increasingly huge amounts of cash, sucking money out of the UK defence budget.
As with so many of these programmes/projects, the MoD started to wonder if it was worth it and a number of well-respected senior people started to suggest that the money needed to be spent elsewhere. We even ran COEIAs (Combined Operational Effectiveness and Investment Appraisal for those not familar), which either showed the required political answer or sometimes failed to support the military case. But the answer was very blunt, "you're buying it, it comes out of defence spending and that's it!" I paraphrase, by the way.
Anyway, the result was that lots of other programmes lost out. None was cancelled (or maybe few were cancelled) as they were all deemed necessary to maintaining capability, meeting our senior ally's requirements, improving personnels' protection/comms, etc. I think you may recognise some of those projects.
So, what I'm speculating about is that cash was even tighter than normal, there were hundreds of "essential" programmes going on whilst a huge, additional black hole was sucking the life out of the budget. I went to many meetings where numerous ways of improving combat ID, personal protection, new radios, the SA80, etc, etc, were discussed and PMs (and their predecessors) had to accept funding holes to keep their projects moving - albeit slowly and, in many cases, in a less than ideal form. Future spending was taken "at risk" in the hope that money would appear from nowhere. It was a standard way of doing things and is what left us with the £38 billion black hole. Not because projects were pushed forward unwisely, but because the Government wanted them, but wouldn't guarantee the cash (that will attract some flack, I suspect). So many projects, mods, STFs, UORs were fighting for cash and most lost out to the big one. Tornado IFF M4 was caught in this same trap.
I am not defending or criticising the actions of anyone here, just opening another side to the discussion. But I would say this. Look at the criticism here (let alone anywhere else) for installing, incompletely, a life-saving piece of kit. Done by people, for all sorts of motives, some honourable, some self-serving I'm sure. Imagine the public response if, for example, the guy running the body armour procurement had said, "Well, it's not properly funded, we can't guarantee it's perfect so we'll cancel it for now."
I know I'm being dramatic and over-simplifying things, but only to make a point. I await slings and arrows for this, but just reporting what I saw. I learnt that this is not an ideal world. Of course, before then, I thought it was!
Last edited by Courtney Mil; 30th Dec 2011 at 17:32.