it'll be open to cutting (again).
Is that cutting as in financial cuts, or cutting as in chopping up airframes?
You make good points, and both are 100% political. To single source needs God +1 to approve, and you're often at the mercy of which company is flavour of the month. I well recall one CDP, Walmsley, who decreed that a completed programme, delivered 5 months ahead of schedule, 33% under "cost" and to a better spec should be cancelled (i.e. over 3000 LRUs scrapped), started all over again and awarded to Thales. And he had signed the original procurement strategy. (But as Haddon-Cave said "it makes no sense to put a submariner in charge of air platforms").
