On Mon, 10 May 2004 00:16:44 +0100, Paul J. Adam wrote:
In message , Dave Eadsforth
writes
In article , Paul J. Adam
writes
It costs money, which is in seriously short supply. What will you give
up instead?

Is it necessary to think of giving up something instead?

Funding is finite and the list of desirable items is larger than the
money available.

If cannon are
'the cost of doing business' for a fighter - a necessary contingency -
then the money should be allocated.

Is the cannon more or less important than the towed decoys for the DASS?

Is the cannon more or less important than ASRAAM integration?

Do you fund the cannon before or after fitting ALARM capability?

...and so it goes.

I can think of several purchases the MoD has made in recent years
which didn't represent value for money (IMO) and which together
would have saved more than enough to fund Typhoon fully:

1. funding development of F-35, cost: GBP 2 bn. This is a US plane
and Britain doesn't get any significant control over the program.
It's quite likely the Americans will only sell us a second-rate
version without full stealth capabilities. Better would have been to
wait until F-35 is in service and then have a competition with it
and other carrier-borne fighter-bombers.

2. development of Boxer/MRAV, cost GBP ??? m. There was really no
need to fund development of a new 8x8 vehicle -- plenty exist
already, and automotive technology is mature, thus only incremental
improvements could be expected over what already exists. It's even
more of a waste of money, since the UK has withdrawn from the
programme.

3. FCLV (Future Command and Liaison Vehicle), cost: GBP 200 m. This
is a light truck, it looks like an over-sized land rover (there's a
picture at http://www.zen19725.zen.co.uk/weblog/art_222.html).
Britain is buying 400 of themv at over GBP 400,000 each, or about
20 times the cost of the land rovers they'll be replacing. I dare
say it's a good vehicle, but is it really worth 20 times more than
a land rover? I don't think so.

4. Apache. cost: GBP 2.5 bn. attack helicopters are over-rated, and
would probably suffer terrible casualties against an opponent well
armed with HMGs, autocannon, and man-portable SAMs.

5. Poodling for Bush, cost: GBP ??? bn. Britain's involvement in the
invasion of Iraq was political, designed to cloth the American
invasion with a veneer of multilateral respectability. A much
smaller force, say a single brigade, or just a battalion, would have
served this politcal end just as well. I'm sure the USA would have
cocked up the occupation just as badly without British involvement.

That lot's probably about 10 billion quid altogether, which would
pay for a few Eurofighters, and would mean the MoD wouldn't have to
be scraping for savings on not using the guns.

I can offer quite a few modern examples: the problem keeps coming down
to funding.

Does it though? There are countries that sped less on their military
than the UK, but seem to get better value than us. Consider Sweden,
for example. This country has a per capita GDP about the same as
Britain's, and spends a similar proportion of GDP on its armed
forces (2.5 % for Britian, 2% for Sweden). Imagine if Sweden and
Britian had a land border and were hostile towards each other; who
would win? Sweden could mobilise a larger army, and would probably
get air supertiority quite quickly, since Britain doesn't currently
have an air superiority fighter. Now consider that Sweden's
population is *one seventh* of the UK's -- why doesn't Britain have
a more capable military than such a small country? One reason is the
Royal Navy, another is Breitisan's cabability to deploy forces
overseas without full mobilisation, but I don't swee how these
together make up the whole discrepency. Judging by the programmes
I've listed above, the MoD seems to be remarkably insouciant about
value for money.

Better some capability than no capability: other shortfalls
can hopefully be closed by UOR.

Until "screwing up defence" becomes an election issue, it's not a
problem for our lords and masters: and until then it's easy to keep
squeezing defence in the sacred name of Schoolsandhospitals.

Having a decent education system is a pre-requisite to having a
powerful military: ignorant people can't design weapons, they are
harder to train as soldiers, and they don't provide the economic
foundation to fund any of these things.


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