Leon:-
Let's look at flying. The MAA has added huge expense to all areas pf flying aircraft. However, it has been applied disproportionately in my view. Trying to run a fleet of gliders (Vikings) or light aircraft (Tutors) under the same regime as a Typhoon or Chinook is just plain daft. I can fly a perfectly safe glider for £20 an hour and a light aircraft for £100 an hour under a perfectly safe civil airworthiness system - however you can multiply these figures by 10 for the glider and 5 for the light aircraft when operated by the military. Why do we insist on this worthless waste of cash by applying MAA rules to things so simple?
The MAA is part of the problem and not a solution. The same VSOs that you rail against above are the reason that military aircraft fleets became unairworthy and why it is cheaper to scrap them than to return them to airworthiness. Ages ago, like when I was around, we had a silent dedicated army of skilled engineers such as our own tucumseh who ensured that the aircraft that I flew were airworthy when released to service and remained airworthy until finally withdrawn from service. Those dedicated engineers were replaced by unskilled non-engineers who were prepared to suborn the regs and thus make savings at the cost of safety. Those savings have long since expired and now the cost in blood and treasure continues in their place.
The Royal Air Force was designed as a uniformed bureaucracy outside of the station gates. Like the savings made by attacking Air Safety, those of the 1920s have long since turned to waste. Once the three Service ministries had been subsumed into Mountbatten's MOD, that bureaucracy headed by RAF VSOs has done for airworthiness and thus has almost done for the Royal Air Force.
Unless and until the Military Air Regulator and the Air Accident Investigator are made independent of the MOD, and of each other, there will be no change in that trend. The words chickens and roost come to mind...