In USA, republicans are all for sinking quadrillions and dubloonions into military funding.
To be fair, I'm not asking for the (useless) British government to spend significantly more on defence, I'm asking that they get me my money's worth from what they do spend.
But through poor specification, repeated design changes, lack of forward planning and outright incompetence we design an asset and then because the costs have gone up we buy too few of them. Through an excess of ambition, poor management, poor decision making we end up doing stuff eg like spending £4bn on Nimrod MRA4, and then scrapping the whole lot. Or specifying a modification to the Chinooks we bought, which the MoD's own flight safety people wouldn't permit to be used, even when we were desparate for helos in Afghanistan. Or <insert innumerable defence procurement fuckups here>.
We do have to cut our cloth according to our means and needs - but that's no excuse for the colossal waste of our military spending, or for its ineffectual outcome.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
