Spending on defence over the last 12 years has not matched the demands made on our armed forces, and the equipment programme is underfunded by nearly £35 billion, writes Antonia Cox in More bang for the buck: how we can get better value from the defence budget, published on Monday 1 February by the Centre for Policy Studies.
Both major parties are committed to a Strategic Defence Review following the general election. But Antonia Cox argues that besides the hard choices to be made in an SDR, the MoD must show that it has learned the lessons of past failures in military procurement and that we can get better value from our equipment budget. ...
The public wants to see service personnel to be properly equipped. That is more important than local industrial considerations. The good news is that by learning the lessons of previous failures in defence procurement, it should be possible to deliver more for less.