How to Make Sense of the U.K.'s F-35 Buy: Hire Better Sub Editors
.....had I dreamed up the whole thing about the government cutting the Labour administration's order? Wasn't it all part of an SDSR that had stressed how the purse strings had to be tightened and that the profligacy and reckless over-commitment by the previous administration had to come to an end? I went back to the SDSR: but no, it's still there - page 26/7. So I called the MoD press office to ask how it's possible that the prime contractor and the minister seem to be proceeding as if the SDSR had never happened.
"We'll get back to you," they said. And, on Friday morning, they did. The planned reduction in the number of aircraft was, it turns out, tied to the decision to buy the C rather than the B. The thinking - unpublished in the SDSR but known to its authors - was that the greater range of the C meant that fewer aircraft would be required to deliver the same military capability. When that decision was reversed, and the STOVL version went back on the UK's shopping list, the reduction in fleet size was also reversed, and the planned UK buy went back from the unspecified lower number to 138.
As if all of this wasn't already reading like a draft for a plot line in a future episode of
Yes, Minister or
The Thick of It, the reason for my confusion seals the deal. I have been confounded by a point of grammar.
The item at the top of page 27 reads, in full: "...reduce our planned number of Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. Installing a catapult on the new aircraft carrier will allow us to switch to the more capable carrier variant." Had those two sentences been rearranged and written as one - perhaps, for instance: "...Installing a catapult on the new aircraft carrier will allow us to switch to the more capable carrier variant, reducing the number of Joint Strike Fighter aircraft we need to acquire" - the meaning would have been clear.
The cut in numbers is not a separate issue from the change to cat-and-trap planes - and had those two points not been in separate sentences, everyone would have known for all this time that Britain was still buying 138 jets. My colleagues in the aerospace and defence media who have been writing those detailed editorials and speculative future-force analysis pieces for the past three years could have saved themselves all that brain hurt had a sub-editor in Whitehall managed to grasp the utility of the semicolon. Three years of everyone in the world (apart from staff at Lockheed Martin and the MoD) assuming that the spiralling financial crisis that has seen unprecedented cuts to the British armed services would not, after all, affect the amount of money the country is intending to spend on the most expensive defence equipment programme in history could have been avoided with a little more care in the presentation of two sentences in a single government publication.
Only one small issue remains unresolved. Presumably, therefore, at the time I first spoke to O'Bryan in 2011 - at which point Britain was committed to buying the F-35C - the British government's position was that it was buying fewer than 138 of them, but had not informed Lockheed Martin. Or maybe they did try to tell them, but they put a comma in the wrong place.
In the wrong hands, the English language can be a dangerous tool. At least, this time, its misuse will not - it would appear - end up costing British businesses millions. And for that, at least - and finally - I am thankful. I await Main Gate, and/or the next SDSR, with interest.