Yet you seem to be in favour of direct taxation (which I guess is your 'institutionalised theft') being used to fund the military.

Who ultimately benefits from the military industrial complex most? Those seeking power or those who rely upon concepts such as universal medicine and a state pension?

All those who aren't speaking German/Russian/Japanese against their will, I should think.

Roadster:

Thank you for a most incisive response. So many people seem to have forgotten that one cannot sustain all the magnanimity without a way to protect it. They keep throwing away their national security and therefore their lifestyle for the price of a flat screen TV and their weekly packs of fags.

Hmmmmm. NHS and taxes......... Bit of thread drift gents?

:ok:

Scuttled,

Not really, get rid of the NHS and buy more planes, ships,boats, tanks and things warry. Or fill in more potholes.

As a soon to be civvie I vote fill in the potholes.

They can't even repair potholes properly :}

Whilst I agree with that idea in principal, it's all ok until we actually go up against some fuzzy wuzzies that have a state of the art Airforce, and more than we have....

Quality over quantity is fine as long as you can knock down what they can throw at you, these days we can't, let's face it, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, none of these could we have done on our own, once upon a time we could have, today we would struggle to invade Jersey!

If Russia decided to send a surface fleet to penetrate UK waters, what Naval assets would we have to send out to intercept them all? The Mersey ferry?

Nutloose:

Let's be honest... We'd have a job defending ourselves from an invasion by Jersey...:sad:

in most large conflicts you find that after a year or so of disasters the politicians run off every senior officer over the age of 48 at which point things start to improve.............

The Great Duke fought his last battle at 46...........

AA

I largely agree with you - by spending eye watering amounts of money on social security, not only have we created a culture of dependency and expectancy but we've also abdicated our human responsibilities towards one another and our society at large. The anonymous 'they' now bear the responsibility of everything from keeping the streets clean, to what happens if I'm unemployed; theoretically, if everyone between the age of 16 and say 50, gave up one day a month to social service and security, then that's probably around 360 million working days a year that could go towards society... it's just an elementary point about how everyone uses the welfare state and big government as an excuse to abdicate their personal responsibilities towards society, but that's an awful lot of tax revenue that could be saved by everybody chipping in! As a parting shot on the subject, how many staunch left wing supporters see a homeless guy and think "I should do something about that" - the answer is probably very, very few...the default reaction is likely to be "the government should do something about that" i.e. the anonymous 'they' should take care of it and remove money from the economy in the process!

As for healthcare, it's a little more difficult, but the same problems of unaccountability towards over-consumption exist.

Regards,
the Bastard

OK, have I got this right?

RN - circa 20 years ago: ' We need a carrier to Power Project'!

Govt of the day - 'That's a good idea - let's order 2 just in case one is in dry dock!'

RN - 'By the way, we need buckets of cash over their life to keep these things afloat!'

GotD - 'That's OK, we're Noo Labour, we've got oodles of dosh for you chaps!'

RN - 'Great Stuff, at last we can really return to the hey day of the Navy east of Suez!'

Meanwhile in the Real World:

MOD - 'Budgets getting a bit tight, Navy, you sure you still want those carriers and fancy go faster jets from the Yanks?'

RN - 'Why not, seems like a good idea and we're prepared to forego other capabilities as long as we can power project like we did in the 60s!'

MOD - 'Fairy Snuff, sailor boy! Let's cut you back in destroyers, frigates, Sea Harriers and every other capability (too many to mention) that you are prepared to relinquish!'

RN - 'That's a bloody good idea - got to keep these carriers on track and bring those Daves into service'.

MOD - 'Right Navy, you've got a flotilla of 19 warfighting vessels left!'

RN - 'Sh*t, really!'

MOD - 'Yep, but you'll still get your carriers before 2030! Dave's could be a bit tricky though as we just found out that slings and arrows to get them on and off are a bit costly!'

RN - 'Just had a thought, can we have some more boats to protect our carriers? Nineteen will never be enough to protect a HVSA!'

MOD - 'Nope! Can't afford them AND carriers!'

RN - 'Sh*t! We've just created our very own self-licking lollipop!'


And that, my friends, is how the Navy managed to get themselves in their own bloody mess!

Cancel it now before we waste any more money on the Navy's ideal of living in the past!

£500M would be a small price to pay and the savings would assist greatly in getting the MOD budget back on an even keel (pardon the pun!)

Foldie:ugh:

Fixed that for you AA ;)

American Naval assets.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view), there's no one left to give a good thumping to - well, not like we used to anyway. If we returned to "the good old days", we'd have rather a lot of chaps and assets all Quixiotic-like, looking for a fight that they would never find.
It would seem that all the old protagonists now have more in common than they have in argument - dealing with fundamentalism.
From my viewpoint, I find the "hearts and minds" approach in Afghanistan rather daft. I can give food and money to a bloke and he'll tell me I'm wonderful. Once I leave, if someone comes in and puts a gun to the chaps head, common sense suggests, he'll tell the Gunslinger he's wonderful. So, either one is going to take these terrorists/gangsters out or declare victory and leave. If the former, no amount of sending young kids into villages with the attendant risks of ied's, is going to solve the problem. It's been tried before. As Einstein said "Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". Well, I think that fits nicely with Afghanistan over the past couple of hundred years.
If one accepts that the likely world threat is now fundamentalist terrorism, then the fight is either on the streets of our cities or in the hidden training grounds. Warships, fast jets and infantry don't really seem to fit the bill. The idea is to presumably kill "senior terrorists", and on that basis, it would appear that drones, special forces and helicopter gunships can do this quite well and of course, a lot cheaper.

TTH:

I'm certainly not trying to hold up the US DoD procurement system as some kind of holy grail but how come they seem to do so much better than MoDPE or whatever it is today?

AA

MoD has a simple but effective process that is designed to avoid wasting money. It is called "Requirement Scrutiny".

It is mandated by the Chief Accounting Officer and SofS.

It is an offence to implement it, and has been since December 1992.

It is not an offence to instruct someone not to implement it (ditto).

Numerous senior staffs have reiterated and enforced this ruling, including Chiefs of Defence Procurement. Successive Ministers and PUSs have underwritten the rulings and flatly refused to overturn or expunge disciplinary records.

Some light exists at the end of the tunnel, as the Public Accounts Committee published a report in December calling for better scrutiny. However, now it has been pointed out to them (via the Chair, Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP) that their recommendations contradict MoD and Ministers, it is uncertain if they'll follow through with any action.

It is really quite simple. MoD actively and robustly defends it's right to discipline staffs under this ruling - activity which costs a lot of money. To commit ANY MoD funding/resource requires formal approval. Therefore, it can be said that it is MoD policy to waste money, or they would not be permitted the resources to support their actions.

Tec:

One can't really make this stuff up...

So, what you are saying is that it is the MoD's business to waste money, purchase useless equipment and risk the lives of those they send forward.

Or am I fantasizing? :hmm:

AA

Clearly what I say it ever so slightly tongue in cheek, but it is absolutely true. If they were serious about preventing waste, they would not go to the huge time and expense of consistently protecting and justifying the actions of those who knowingly waste, and instruct others to.

It won't have escaped you that, as the regulations require the "scrutineer" (in the case of procurers, someone with formal Technical and Financial Approval delegation) to make a declaration that a "requirement" passes scrutiny (a lengthy checklist, starting with the question "Why is it needed?"), then to make a false declaration is to commit fraud. To instruct one to make such a false declaration is incitement to commit fraud. To support the latter is conspiracy to commit fraud.

Most civil servants don't have a good word to say about their Trades Unions, but in this case the subject was raised at national level, because members who were instructed to commit this fraud where damned if they do and damned if they don't (it being an offence to refuse a legal order). Senior staffs and Ministers formally ruled that, under these circumstances, the only offence (out of those I list) was the refusal to obey. At that point, the Union withdrew and no longer supports staffs placed in this position. They call it a "Matter of Conscience", and presumably you must examine your conscience and decide if you want to be sacked for refusing to commit fraud. That is why so much waste occurs.

As I said, all the above is currently with the PAC (and the Civil Service Commission) and I'll let you know the outcome. (Which I predict will be No Further Action).

AA,

The DoD is far from infallible. I suspect the Spam press doesn't make too much of a song and dance about delays and overruns. unlike the glorious UK media...........

Senate bill targets DOD cost overruns

• Feb 25, 2009

Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced a bill this week aimed at curbing the cost and scheduling overruns on large defense contracts, reports GovExec.

Their legislation, the 2009 Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act, would require re-examination of defense contracts if their costs increase by more than 25 percent from the initial estimate.

The Defense Department’s 95 largest acquisition programs are an average of two years behind schedule and have exceeded their original budgets by a combined total of almost $300 billion, according to Levin.

The bill contains provisions that would tighten the requirements of the rarely enforced 1982 Nunn-McCurdy law, which mandates that Defense must cancel any weapons program that experiences cost overruns of more than 25 percent unless it can show that it is essential to national security, no cheaper alternative is available and the revised costs are reasonable.


The Levin-McCain bill also would require the DOD to:

• Re-establish systems engineering organizations and developmental testing capabilities.
• Introduce trade-offs between cost, schedule and performance early in the program cycle.
• Use prototypes more often, including competitive prototypes, to prove that new technologies work before attempting to produce them.
• Start an annual awards program to recognize the performance of the Defense acquisition workforce.
• Establish the position of director of independent cost assessment to ensure that cost estimates for major defense acquisition programs are fair, reliable and unbiased.

Tec:

Thanks...

Gaz:

As I said, I'm not holding the US system up as any kind of standard but it just seems that American screw-ups are simply not on the same scale of pure incompetence as that of the MoD.

You may be right that it's the reporting but I would suspect that the media over here, (with it's anti-conservative and anti-military bias), would report with glee anything that would make the military look like a waste of money.