As to flexibility, I'm not proposing that designs should attempt to be a solution to all problems simulateously. Instead, I'm proposing that over-specialisation should be avoided because it provokes frequent, late specification changes that cost time and money and probably don't yield results which stay finely-tuned for long.
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.
Fine. That's a much less serious risk than the current situation, which provides warships that aren't ships and can barely make war.
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.
I think that might be a bit of a generalisation, but that's not the problem. The problem is that, again, this is being used as an excuse to practically guarantee a terrible deal for the UK.
Ultimately the argument PDR seems to be advancing is that it's normal and acceptable for more or less everything to be many times overbudget, years or decades late and borderline nonfunctional, because... er... excuses.
This is, literally, incredible. It is not credible that any organisation (by which I mean the UK military-industrial complex as a whole) could foul anything up this badly, this obviously, this publicly, for so long, so many times, and have it not be an issue of either incompetence or malfeasance.
P