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.

Over the last few decades, British defence funding has been dogged by
the motto 'there isn't going to be another real war, old chap' but of
course wars have a habit of turning up - and then we are stuffed.

Add also that the politicians declare that "the UK will only face
conflicts in these particular areas" and make cuts accordingly: usually
followed by an out-of-area problem which of course HM Forces are
expected to deal with anyway.

During the Falklands we had ships that were wired up with cable that
gave off toxic fumes when it burned, and the men had overalls of man-
made fibre that shrunk nicely onto the body when close to a fire. And
as for the prospect of ships being attacked by more than one aircraft at
a time - couldn't possibly happen. Close defence? Lord 'what's a
Vulcan cannon' Chalfont didn't have much to offer when questioned on the
subject.

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

All such defects can be guaranteed to have been foreseen - and the
warnings filtered out by a staffing system under pressure from the
Treasury. We have the competence to avoid these traps, we just lack a
coherent vision at the top.

Not even that; we just have a political class accustomed to a "can do"
attitude from the Forces, and too much experience of getting results
despite repeated cuts.

--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk