Is money an insurmountable obstacle now?
 

I know its easy to be simplistic over these kind of headlines but under the current circumstances, honestly.

Anger as the RAF retires 30 'quick reaction alert' Typhoon jets used to protect Britain from potential attacks by Putin | Daily Mail Online

FB

Boris spent $30 Billion ( and that’s not a typo) on an track and trace app that did not work, but there is no money to maintain a few jets? It’s madness!

The country spent £200 billion (and counting) on Brexit. Appreciate no one wants to hear the B word anymore, but it's a bit rich for the Daily Mail and others who pushed for it to now complain we don't have any money.

Don't blame the RAF. Defence spending has got to rise, especially in the current climate. However, adding 2p to income tax would lose the election. The modern generation have grown up with the "Peace Dividend", and don't want to know. I know people who will not buy newspapers or watch TV news. so they have no idea what's going on. Give them endless pictures of fluffy cats and they are happy. (Mr Angry of Purley)

Finningley Boy
 

I shall give a direct answer to your question.

Yes. On so many levels.

The world is slowly but surely descending into predictable chaos and even as it happens our government still can’t see fit to increase defence spending in a meaningful way. If not now, when?

Equipment costs too much, our procurement process is too cumbersome and wasteful and, even if we had the kit, we can’t afford to pay and house our personnel well enough to make them stay.

When guys went off to China there was a rush to call them traitors. Maybe we should have done a little more introspection and asked ourselves why. Life is expensive nowadays and skill sets are marketable.

Whatever half-arsed measures are thought up now to stave the flow may well be too little, too late.

BV

The 'modern generation' has also grown up with underfunded public services and falling living standards, so you can perhaps understand that their priorities might now lie elsewhere.

Agreed in general; the whole country need more spending. But the first duty of a government is the protection of the nation. I suspect if a certain person had his way, public services would be non-existent.

Give ‘em to Ukraine. I’m sure they can put them to use assuming the craft are still airworthy or easily made so.

The Romans neatly summed it up. Si vis pacem, bellum. Something we in this country signally fail to do. So we send the armed forces into conflicts they are neither trained nor equipped for.
All dictated by the treasury and compounded by an inefficient and wasteful procurement system.

The flip side of that coin is over-expectation for public services. People talk about the NHS being underfunded. It has had above inflation spending growth every single year, even under the Tories. What they actually mean is that spending growth has not kept pace with historical norms, which are 4-5% above inflation. At no point does anyone - ever - query whether this is actually affordable.

Between the NHS, Education, Welfare and pensions you've basically spent something like 50% of all government spending - this during a period of the highest taxation ever. Those three budgets will happily swallow all other spending if left unchecked. They are all in essence unconstrained demand.

But we can't have that debate - because any talk of changing funding mechanisms to something more sustainable (eg a European insurance model) is immediately howled down as "privatisation, sold to the yanks".

The other issue with those budgets is that they are largely resource - because they're largely paying people and buying consumables - which the Treasury hates because it can't be capitalised as an asset. Just like - here's the aviation content - service wages and civilian support.

The elephant in the room is the sustainability of those budgets and their current funding mechanism. Everything else is trivia.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum” actually. If you desire peace, prepare for war. Thank you Renatus (and Plato previously). Incidentally, this is where the name of the 9mm round comes from.

Mog

Narrowly beat me to it Mog!

I always believed the Defence of the Realm was the first priority of any Government.

Mog,
many thanks. My limited Latin is even rustier that I thought. But I think most would understand the drift.

I disagree that a political party that raises taxes for defence will lose the next general election. What we need is a party that can sell defence to the public. Too much pussy footing around the subject of Putin.
The public needs to be sold that the `peace dividend` comes at a price. A price in money and lives and if we scrimp and save rather than spend on our military that price is much larger for everyone.
We also need to dig a bit deeper on the headline story. Is there a valid reason why these aircraft are being decommissioned? After all the Daily Fail isn't entirely an accurate representation of the news.

I instruct at my local RAFAC Sqn, last week I was talking to a group of the Civilian Instructors (ie the adult staff) and I mentioned the situation in Gaza. Cue blank looks from one and I had to explain the entire incident from 7 Oct onwards… he professed that he ‘did not read the papers or watch the news’. Ignorance of current affairs would appear to be fairly widespread.

The tranche 1 retirement is hardly news, having been announced in 2021

As I think I posted in an earlier rant, we may be at our near our highest ever taxation as a proportion of GDP but so are most if not all 'Western developed countries' and we are by no means near the top of the list. It is not just higher taxes for defence but for all government expenditure that needs selling to the people. Much though I dislike George Galloway his victory shows that given the right combination of circumstances British electors will elect an individual and not accept the nominee imposed on them by a party machine. It is a truism that governments lose elections, opposition parties win by default. In general elections most people do not vote on the policies of the contending parties but on whether they want to change the government (or because ' I've always voted X'). We don't get to vote on the individual policies, they are just imposed on us in the same way local councillors are elected by a small proportion of the eligible and take decisions that were never presented to the population. Apparently this is democracy.:oh:

The statistics surrounding the UK state religion of the NHS are (deliberately misleading) e.g. UK health expenditure is less than France but that is because non-governmment spending is included in health GDP figures. In France you pay to see a GP and an if resident can claim back a proportion (normally 70% of the total less €1), if you stay in hospital you pay the daily forfait €20 and may get it reimbursed by your insurer. (there are low income exemptions). You pay a proportion of the cost of prescription meds not a flat fee. Our religion insists you must see a GP or stay in hospital for nothing and pay a flat fee for prescription meds even if you are an investment banker or commercial airline pilot:E. The US is the world's largest health spender as a proportion of GDP but I wouldn't want to be poor and sick if I lived there, it pays 6.5% of its GDP on education as opposed to our 5.5% (which is among the highest in Europe). As a proportion of GDP social spending (public and private combined) in the US is not much lower than UK. The US chooses to afford spending a much bigger proportion of GDP on defence.

As NAB implies personnel costs are the biggest chunk of UK defence expenditure c.26.1% combining military and civilian.

Defence fell from 5th to 6th departmental grouping of UK government expenditure in 2023.
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....839c0eb911.jpg
https://www.gov.uk/government/statis...resources-2023



NATO equipment expenditure target 20% of defence spending - achieved by all members in 2023. Median NATO equipment expenditure 2023 - 27.8% UK equipment expenditure 2022/23 NATO estimate 28.6% MoD Specialist Equipment figure 2022/23 17.5% up from 2021/22. There is clearly a big difference in either what NATO and MoD classify as equipment expense or some serious creative accounting going on. As a comparison, Service and civilian personnel costs in 2022/23 were 26% of defence expenditure down from 29%.


https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....59d5497212.jpg
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_216897.htm

Out of interest are the Tranche 1's actually flyers, or have they been Christmas Tree'd for parts, I was told ages ago they used to move some of the Christmas Tree'd aircraft about at night to avoid Joe public seeing them.

No, give some to the steely-eyed Red Arrows, that'll impress someone!

I note the DM is firmly blaming 'RAF chiefs' for the decision rather than the muppets whose backsides it usually licks. Surprise.