How MoD wastes billions

Not a bad Dispatches on Channel 4, always allowing for the obligatory British chippiness about social class.

One thing, though - the programme made a direct comparison between the battlefield utility Future Lynx helicopter procurement and the "off the shelf" medium lift US Blackhawk that everyone on the ground has been clamouring for ever since IEDs made ground transport so hellishly vulnerable.

The correct comparison would have been with the medium lift Merlin, but one can see why the programme shied away from that, as the Merlin procurement predates the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The issue there would have been whether to cancel a long-lead procurement programme in order to buy Blackhawks.

Still a valid point, but not so striking. And the per unit cost quoted for Blackhawks (£10 million) was just plain wrong. Taiwan recently acquired 60 Blackhawks for $3.1 billion, to include essential training, spares, tools, etc., which works out at about £32 million a copy. 

A shame they over-egged that pudding, because the principal reason for Future Lynx, admitted by Army chief Richard Dannatt, was the ludicrous arrangement whereby the RAF has a monopoly on operating the larger helicopters. The Army was so desperate to have battlefield helicopters under the operational control of the ground commander that they were forced to settle for the Future Lynx.

That's insane. The programme really should have zeroed in on the RAF's primary culpability for the whole mess. The simplest way of adjusting British military expenditure to fiscal realities is to abolish that totally superfluous service and to redistribute the arbitrary third of the defence budget that is wasted on it.