Sick, lame and lazy have little to do with the fact that successive governments and their senior officer lackies have repeatedly thrown one of the largest defence budgets in the world up the wall or into the pockets of BAe for this season's must have untried and untested must have toys.
The real problem is that MOD as an entity no longer has even a rudimentary ability to understand what things "should" cost and therefore no ability to argue the toss on a credible basis with the contractors (and it ain't just BAES, although they are the most direct manifestation).
Instead, MoD employ a whole host of consultancy companies to "help" them with understanding cost. Trouble is that many of these consultancies are no more informed than MoD about the technical and engineering elements of these projects and end up falling back on ill-defined "risk" fudge factors and complicated "models" that end up obscuring the real elements of interest, bloating the budget and because the budget is rarely kept under discretion, usually end up as the "price" - a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That's not in any way to suggest that all contractors are sharks - far from it. The process needs to work both ways, but I'm afraid that ignorance and a bloated approvals system militate against common sense ever breaking out.