Boeing E-3D Sentry AEW1, 2015. Wikicommons. Ronnie Macdonald from Chelmsford and Largs, UK. Some rights reserved.
In the past decade, the UK military has been embroiled in countless equipment sagas involving waste, delay, and cost overrun. Of them all, two are most glaring: the failure to replace the RAF’s maritime reconnaissance capability, and the problems attending the Royal Navy’s fleet of six Type-45 air-defence destroyers. A new report highlights the process whereby just one expensive contract was agreed.
But first, a recap on those two sagas. The maritime role was based on the old Nimrods, which were most often in the news when deployed to search far offshore for ships in trouble. An ever more costly BAE Systems upgrade was due to replace them, until the whole project – development and management alike – proved a fiasco. The ministry of defence (MoD) finally cancelled it in 2010.
