Old habits die hard. Fine. I will look through the @NAOorguk report into the MoD's Equipment Plan. From the summary and some early commentary it looks normal in that it looks totally awful. There's 0£ for any contingency and every pound has been allocated? Efficient right? No 1/8

There's no £ set aside to replace aging capabilities like minehunters. "As there is no unallocated funding in the Plan, the Department can only add new projects by disinvesting elsewhere or securing additional funding from HM Treasury".We're facing total capability cuts again 2/8

Projects overunning? Take em out! "reduced cost forecasts by £10.4 billion to reflect judgements that it will not deliver projects as quickly as originally planned. However, it has once again removed these costs from the Plan rather than reprofiling them over a 10-year period 3/8

Weak £ and expensive fuel increase cost estimate by £1.3bn. RAF super exposed as 41% of all its equipment bought in USD. BAEs Dreadnought (new Trident sub) and Type 26 are singled out for major cost overruns due to complexity ('70th percentile') 4/8

"funding provisions do not cover all of the Department’s plans to develop future military capabilities" such as specialist air transport, aforementioned minehunters, any more than 48 JSFs, new Typhoon radars, 5th gen fighter to name a few. Money simply not in the budget. 5/8

You want proof of these savings? But I'm a General/Admiral etc! How dare you! "we found TLBs could not always provide evidence to explain why they had deducted some potential savings from cost forecasts, or what assurance Head Office had sought on
these estimates." 6/8

The inspirationally named ‘Warhead Savings Challenge’, "has reduced costs by around £550 million in the past three Equipment Plans to reflect speculative savings from a planned restructuring it could not confirm until 2020-21". Speculation and nuclear bombs. Bad mix. 7/8

Imagine this scenario in any sane business: "Because of the way the Department is organised...Head Office can neither easily access the TLBs’ financial information to identify the reasons for changes to the Equipment Plan’s costs, nor challenge the TLBs’ judgements." 8/8

(TLBs are 'Top Level Budgets")