Bernard Gray made a number of good points in his report on Defence Acquisition. One of those issues was the annual planning round. I agree with his conclusions, axe the planning rounds and you can probably get rid of a couple of hundred people on the second floor of the MoD. These people spend their entire lives, shuffling (usually to the right) funds to make the annual budget balance. Over the last few years, this shuffling has been 'what can be cut?'. It is a complete waste of time, money and effort and consumes many many hundreds of man (and women) hours. These people are supposed to be managing capability delivery and they spend most of their time just trying to adjust a funding profile. Not a criticism of the people involved, who are often, serving officers just back from deployment, just a criticism of the system.