Procrastinating, shurely?
We started by procrastinating and when that didn't work moved onto prevaricating. Neither seems to have worked in the grand scheme of things.
And whilst Merlin may have been a political choice foisted on the Air Force many moons ago rather than the military preference, those cries throughout the intervening years of get rid of it and give us Chinook would now seem to fall into the bracket of be careful what you wish for given the uncertainty being created in the current fiscally constrained times.