Thanks for the link HH. I did follow that and there was an awful lot of doom and gloom. Have a look at this graph:
At $1.26 the Pound is lower, but not statiscally hugely lower looking at the fluctuations. Having a weak Pound is better for exports and for years our balance has been poor between importing and exporting - so much so that we have become over reliant on the banking and financial sector. Some say the fall in the value of the Pound is exactly what we need (unless of course you are a UK investor or banker!). Even the great Mark Carney has admitted that he got the financial and growth predictions of Brexit wrong. Of course the Remainers will jump on the "I told you so" bus as soon as there is a disaster (like Jamie Oliver and him having to close some of his restaurants that seemed to be doing badly before Brexit - I think his food is overpriced and boring so that is probably the real reason). If I recall correctly the Pound was hovering around $1.40 to $1.45 at least 6 months before Brexit fever hit the UK - so the drop to $1.26 is hardly earth shattering (unless you believe the tripe served up on our media feeds).
I do think there are savings to be made within our own defence budgets that could soak some of this up. Firstly, we need to get DIO and the infra budget under control - the crazy prices we are paying for building and manintenance work is totally unaffordable (I estimate at least 40% could be saved by devolving the budgets back to Stations). Also we need to revisit the way that we sell our 'family silver' for next to nothing to a developers/builders who then doubles to triples what they pay for it and then charge us again top price to build us a 'new build' on our ever dwindling estate. The proposed sell off of Henlow and Halton is a good example. We'll be lucky to get £80M combined for both but the rebuild of RAFCAM, Recruit Trg Sqn and Airmans Command Sqn plus supporting buildings (like SLAM and extra SFA) and roads/paths is likely to come closer to £500M - where are we going to find a spare £1/2Bn?? Look at some of the ridiculous procurment decisions we make, to modify the L85 (SA-80) to A3 standard for the remaining 7 years of its life is going to cost nearly 2/3rds the cost of buying new weapons from Heckler and Koch (who are doing the A3 mod program anyway!). I could go on.
So yes, the recent dip in the Pound is unwanted but it is not quite the end of the world and could easily be managed within allocated resources.
LJ