Do not have a bloody clue

This is not just the bean counters. This is also likely to be because of lack of / confusing policy from the Torys.

The F35. The turd that keeps on smelling.

And now a turd that's under the control of a non-trustworthy nation.

Yes, the whole policy was a mess from start to finish because it was clear that the desired capability could not be funded. So, the decision was taken to try and buy it piecemeal.

IIRC the decision was to buy the aircraft carriers but initially with no aircraft… It would have been better to delay the whole thing.

And the F35 was never really suitable for UK and NATO's expected area of deployment – though we were all still full in on the "war on terror" at the time. The F35 suits America's need to project power around the world; a need which is as much psychological as it is strategic which is why the costs are always allowed to explode. Blighty hasn't had the need nor the ability to do this since the end of the empire in the 1960s.

Russia's war in Ukraine, and Trump's inability to understand how the rules-based order benefits the US but requires allies to enforce, have given Europe the chance to rethink its defence needs and procurement. Rafales and Gripens along with Ukrainian drones and missiles make a lot more sense for a small, densely populated continent with possibly at least one aggressive neighbour.

We might hope that the British bunglement would now realise that buying all their key equipment from Yank suppliers was a stupid, stupid, stupid idea, and think about how they're going to meet future defence asset needs either domestically or as a joint European effort. Then again, I know that's a forlorn hope.

buying all their key equipment from Yank suppliers was a stupid, stupid, stupid idea

Fortunately we have [1]more Eurofighters than F-35 , but less from the USA is good, even more so since the coming of the orange one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_Kingdom_military_aircraft

The problem is that the beancounters are given the beans piecemeal by politicians who work in 5-year chunks.

The problem is that the beancounters are given the beans piecemeal by politicians who work in 5-year chunks.

Not even five years, I'm afraid. Occasionally government have made a three year spending settlement and that's worked well up to a point, but that's not the case currently, and even during multi-year spending allocations, the departmental spending levers are yanked between full ahead and full stop on an annual basis. Those departments where spending is dominated by large treasury funded projects such as MoD, MoJ, or DFT suffer particularly because their appalling project forecasting and management means that when project A incurs some huge unforeseen costs, project B is stopped, delayed, rescoped or otherwise slashed in the hope that the total department spending remains with the treasury spending limit. The same applies to a more modest extent in other government departments who are busy mis-managing projects they aren't capable of, such as the Home Office.

The one department that doesn't have this problem is DESNZ, and that's because their major projects are almost entirely energy sector, and are funded not by treasury but by private companies who then recover those costs from energy bill payers - as anybody paying an energy bill will be aware.

Beancounters do have a clue. Even when it's wrong. The government has a thing called the discount rate. So when you're talking about spending now, to save money later - they basically say that if some spending now is going to save a billion in ten years time - then you can't spend more than about £650m to do so. So, for example, we deliberately slow-built Type 26 ASW frigates, over 10 years for the first 3 in the class - because that kept the annual payments Treasury had to make lower. Which means that the first 3 in class are probably going to cost £200m each more than they should have. Also meaning we've had to expensively do life-extension work on Type 23, to keep them from falling apart.

But on a billion pound warship that saving of £200m over ten years is actually less than the discount rate, so given that they were ordered during a time of high government debt - there's an argument that it actually made sense.

Of course, that argument is wrong, because we also had to pay to keep Type 23 going and we're now suffereing capability gaps because some of those couldn't be Life-extended because they were so knackered. Also, because we only ordered the first 3, with the next order for 5 to follow, that meant that BAe were unable to justify building their "frigate factory", which they might have done with an order for 8 (and certainly would have done with the original order for 13). And now we've got an order from Norway, both ours and theirs are going to be later than we wanted. And only the last ordered will be cheap, which means Norway will probably end up paying less than we have for the same ships.

On the other hand, because we've ordered 5 Type 31 from Babcock, to do the cheaper patrol frigate role, we've now got another shipyard going, and they're also looking to get exports. Plus it keeps BAe honest, and persuaded them that they needed to build the frigate-hall even just to complete the order of the second tranche of 5 - which they might not otherwise have done.

As for the F-35 mess, half of this stuff isn't the MoD's fault. They've gone for the cheaper option of ordering our aircraft late, because Lockheed Martin have so badly fucked up the tech refresh 3 and block 4 upgrades. This means that the we'll have fewer of the early aircraft that can't be upgraded to the complete standard - when it finally happens. This also means that we're not going to end up buying anything like the 160 aircraft originally talked about - because hopefully Tempest is going to work out, and then that can fulfill the RAF's needs and the Navy can keep hold of the 72 we've actually budgetted to buy. But the MoD have refused to buy the second tranche of 25 (24+1 for the crashed plane) until the Block 4 software is complete and we can actually get our weapons integrated.

Meanwhile we're still getting something like 15-18% of the work-share. Having only ordered less than 5% of what's currently been delivered. So if LM don't sort their shit out, then I think a move to Tempest, instead of more orders for F-35 is going to be the way to go.

Final 2 points. In a wartime emergency, we may be able to qualify Spear 4 on F-35 as an emergency measure - that's something that's happened a lot. And that figure of £57 billion is pure clickbait. And by that I mean from the Committee, not just El Reg. That's a project lifetime figure, going out to 2060 and I bet it includes for us buying all 150, which I strongly suspect ain't happening now. Because Tempest will be better than F-35 for the RAF, and should be coming in the mid-2030s, which is the same timescale as getting more F-35 with the Block 4 upgrades anyway.

is stunning that the figure for failed projects across country, industry, time on at least one of

1) cost,

2) delivery

3) actual benefit

is 99.5% !!!

it's almost like all those management frameworks, project managers & incredibly expensive consultants are totally pointless.

look at EVERY failure here.... all of them could have been mitigated at protect start if soldering had said...

"WHAT do we ACTUALLY want you do? WHY do we want to do it, WHAT could hold us back? WHAT is the final end state we want and WHY can't we hold off starting spending money until everything is properly lined up?"

THEN go to each supplier and force them to demonstrate to you that THEY have asked the same questions and that THEIR suppliers have asked the questions until you have a FULLY FUNCTIONING plan.

THEN you put shovels in the ground.

A shovel? Even metaphorically this sounds a bit awkward. Why would you put shovel in the ground?

since the 99.5% include road, rail , bridges, dams, IT projects, etc etc etc the shovel in the ground is a perfectly good metaphor.

protect gets signed off & self important management want to start doing stuff before they've even thought out the basics or even know what the end game would be.

"the shovel in the ground is a perfectly good metaphor."

Says a man who's never tried to dig with a shovel. And if you don't know the difference between a spade and a shovel, then I don't trust your other assertions.

"99.5% of projects fail"

And your source for this statistic is?

how big things get done - Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardener

"the iron law of megaproject management " the the Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management 2017

"the empirical reality of It project cost over runs: discovering a power law distribution"

what went wrong with californias high speed rail

do you want me to go on? i mean i COULD come to your house & type the searches in for you or even post you crayon drawings of you struggle with academic posters

"... has only recently begun talks with partner nations about capabikity requirments the new capabilities, ..."

Rather regularly now I encouter situation in a business that seem completely counter intuitive and counter productive.

Invariably if I get an answer to why things look so insane the answer is related to accounts, or some MBA madness about how it does accounting or some beancounting nonsens in councting things related to shareholder value.

This idea of spending £5 this year rather than £50 and it being a better option even if that means it costs you £5000 extra over the next 3yr I cannot rationalise.

You said the evil word : MBA. That in itself explains the problem.

That said, the MoD doesn't have shareholders, so MBAs are not the problem. IPMs (Incompetent Project Managers) are. That and the various budgetary issues that change on the political weathervane.

This idea of spending £5 this year rather than £50 and it being a better option even if that means it costs you £5000 extra over the next 3yr I cannot rationalise.

* Move to rented premises

* Sell the existing premises

* Pay out the profit to shareholders

* Exit the business, which you were never actually interested in, just the assets they held.

They don't care about the long-run costs because they'll have ditched the company by then. It's a carpet-bagging, asset-stripping mentality.

And in private business... well to an extent, caveat emptor. But for some reason we elected these charlatans to public office, and now they've saddled all our public services with the fantastically good value concept of "renting in perpetuity", even though it's far more expensive than investing and owning outright.

And yet we're constantly told that we no choice but to cut welfare spending, plunging the country's poorest and most vulnerable people into poverty.

Actually, that's not really the case. It's very difficult to cut welfare spending, but it is possible to target it better: disability payments have ballooned as a way for some of avoiding "unemployment"; winter fuel allowances could be means-tested; special needs support has become a bonanza for private schools. And, yes, putting up asylum seekers in hotels is economic nonsense. Fixing this would allow reallocation without cutting the budget.

But there are always other boondoggles to look at, especially in the tax system.

According to wikipedia the chair is a Conservative MP. So if they wanted this to change, rather than just shout about it, one would expect they'd object (to be fair, I did not check their voting record, so can be very wrong here) when the budget went through parliament (I'd expect these decisions to have been mostly under their party), instead of loudly aclaiming the consequences of government policy. I am not claiming other parties are any better, I suspect this is mostly systemic.

I'm not sure anybody at MoD will care much, they have to balance their budgets, and they're not elected, so apart from being annoyed at being a target for a committee, it wouldn't change their decision making. So shouting loudly in this context helps nothing. To put this in context, when was anyone promoted in a government agency because they did something a committee did not complain about?

Yes, the waste and efficiency is appalling, but did anybody expect any different in the context of the F35 program, where, realistically, only the US is really able to afford these?

I don't think any partner nation can even afford to risk deploying these, irrespective of their qualities.