Spiralling cost of UK defence projects signals hard choices

“There’s a risk that we return to the sort of approach we saw in the MoD before 2010,” said Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute. “One where there are difficult choices that have to be made on existing equipment commitments in order to balance the books. Rather than face up to those, the historic response at MoD has simply been to push programmes to the right and allow service dates to slip.”