Oranges and Apples, Tourist, as I suspect you well know. Can we not conflate tactical (or even strategic) decisions taken in war, that as you say gang aft a-gley, with decisions to save money at the cost of safety?
The latter was the intention of the VSOs that inflicted their policy upon Air Safety in the late 80's (funny how that matches your suggestion as to the pointlessness of Flight Safety from thereabouts). What did they think the result would be if not to increase Airworthiness related losses in equipment and personnel? The reason of course for them feeling compelled to take such drastic and irreversible action was the calamitous effects of new procedures introduced by AMSO. The result of such procedures was spelled out, the results of the subsequent attack on Air Safety was spelled out. The warnings were ignored, the messengers persecuted. The effects are still with us today and will remain so until we have an MAA and MilAAIB independent of the MOD and of each other.
Your graph of course looks very convincing, but the huge starting rate was caused mainly by pilot/aircrew error. That was whittled away by cultural change and training improvements which thankfully still apply. Hidden in the graph are airworthiness related accidents. They too will show some improvement thanks to technical strides in equipment performance. The point is that the improvement would have been even greater if military airworthiness had not been deliberately attacked in the meantime.
There is no point in saying that the rate is low enough so let's have fun. Every loss is someone's life and more loss of military capacity. That is the really annoying thing about this saga; in covering self induced losses (and each other!) these VSO's ensured a long term drain of life and military potential that continues to this day. I doubt that Nelson would have been very impressed!
Last edited by Chugalug2; 25th Oct 2015 at 13:10.