...and flexibility or "general purposeness" in mission capability isn't the only cost driver. It has to fit within the operations and support infrastructure which has both physical and organisational constraints. And these constraints keep changing.
And the more you use off the shelf products (or parts of products,or technologies) the more you have to compromise your organisation and infrastructure and the more yyou become exposed to risks of obsolescence.
Cost before risk: sorry, this is just balls. Heads the contractor wins, tails the taxpayer loses? That's exactly the sort of madness I'm talking about.
I'm genuinely mystified as to what you're trying to say here - could you expand on that?
Deals where they make all the money but the taxpayer shoulders the risks are insane
Well they would be if they existed - I've never seen one. The core problem is that defence contracting caps profit at a level that barely provides a meaningful return on the cashflow, let alone the investment. Any excess profit must be handed back (it's a thing called "QMAC"). But while the MOD cap profits they generously allow losses to be of any size. This asymmetry means that the normal business process (where in a well run business the losses on one project will be balanced by the profits on another) cannot happen.
But Risk management and risk pricing is a normal approach to business in any contract bigger than the procurement of a big mac with fries. These are the aspects that keep planning in the real world and costs to a minimum, so I'd be very interested to see your clarification here.
PDR
PS - there is no field in which BAES is a monopoly, even in the UK.