I don’t see providing any facts to back up your stance either. 😉

Nope. Quite true. I’m not trying to blame the WOES of a nation on a bunch of people paid slightly below the NATIONAL AVERAGE wage though.

On a British forum, it would be sensible, & polite, to give any thread about the United States marines a name which made it clear that it did not refer to the Royal Marines.

Quite right I was wondering whether this referred to half from Thieves and Squawkes and half from Victory Berets of Aldershot

If you think the “average” civil servant is not culpable for the current state of the public finances, then you:
(a) are misinformed.
(b) have ulterior motives.
or
(c) are an “average” civil servant.

(d) have some actual knolwedge of the subject
(e) don’t form your opinions from a single source
(f) don’t think that the Daily Fail is a newspaper

Or did you have some facts which you’d like to bring to the discussion?

PS: Not a civil servant but would happily claim to be in this conversation, kinda the same way I feel like claiming to like manlove when a homophobic moron gets involved in gaybashing

VC 10

It is eminently sensible to keep two competing companies alive in order to keep suppliers honest and compettitive. Be that for engines or airframes.

Likewise I have no issue (not that anyone would care if I did!) with DoD ordering a good enough solution from domestic supplier. If DoD have gone through this rigmarole in order to get a more compettitive offer from Boeing and in the process EADs have improved their own stock as a potential future then that’s an extra win.

I repeat my query though: is the Boeing order a fixed-price contract, or are USGov running the risk of price escalating back to the original offer?

It is very important that box wing AAR is made to happen as it looks much more exciting than current offerings.

Possible causes:

BIG NUMBERS. Which allows politicians to state
a) “We will spend £10bn on a new class of X thus showing that we care deeply about defence”
b) “We will cancel class Y saving £10bn thus showing that we care deeply about fiscal responsibility”

DEFENCE is not just another manufacturing sector
a) Suppliers are NOT ALLOWED to sell to just anyone so for example when there was a decade gap in SSN orders the UK SSN designers and makers had no customers lost skills
b) Suppliers are selling to a small number of potential customers at the best of times. Thus they are VERY risk averse. Buying defence kit is not like buying consumer goods, suppliers are just not going to self-fund R&D and hope that they can sell enough units to make a profit. When I buy a tin of beans neither the shop nor canning company have the temerity to ask me to fund their development work in order to get the beans to the shelf in the first place.

As part of government Defence procurement is subject to the whimsies and clarion calls of governments
a) “Private Sector is best“
b) “Every part of procurement must make a profit“
c) “Public Sector is best“
d) “Let’s privatise everything“
e) insert others here

In the UK at least (may or may not apply elsewhere) we suffer from the culture of the enthusiastic idiot/amateur (delete as appropriate). And that applies as much in suppliers as it does in MoD. Technical competence and technical knowledge is simply not valued.