I think it would be fair to say that the majority of the public do support the people of the Armed Forces.
But what we have little time for is the expanding budget, which has grown to contain an ever increasing proportion of 'remedial programmes' due to incompetence and overspends. The public does not see the Armed Forces as one homogenous unit, but sees it as a myriad of parts, which, like the Curates Egg, is good in parts.
If, and I know its a big if, the MOD had spent its budget more wisely, and not wasted so much of it, I suspect people would be less critical. I don;t think the public bemoan one £ of money spent on active operations and would support more being spent in theatre, but debacles like Nimrod do wear the patience thin and we are a fickle lot. I know there will be those who claim industry is to blame, but it has ever been that OR change their minds regularly, the specification is incomplete and plain old wrong and the buck does stop with the client to say what they want in enough details for the supply chain to deliver.
Its not a case of us public wanting our cake and eat it, but we would quite like that if the MOD asks for money to develop capability, that it does what every other walk of life does - deliver that capability to time, cost and quality.
Sure, we want protection, but its hard to take some parts of the overall MOD seriously when we might conclude that stuff is being made up as they go along.
Last edited by GrahamO; 3rd Nov 2012 at 11:45.