Much has been said recently, in the media and by politicians, about the idiotic nature of entering into a contract which means it will cost more to cancel the two new Royal Navy carriers, than to continue building them. This implies that those in the MoD and military responsible for these contracts have been naive at best, and incompetent at worst. I actually don't think they are either naive or incompetent. On the contrary, I think they have been extremely clever.
We have a long history in this country, going back over many decades, of commissioning grand projects only to cancel them later when the bills start coming in. This has been especially true of military projects. The record of the last Labour government with regard to the military was shameful, repeatedly increasing the demands put upon our forces while constantly starving them of the resources adequately to meet their needs.
When the idea of replacing the carrier fleet was first voiced, I have little doubt that Navy chiefs and their MoD counterparts would have viewed it with more than a little cynicism. They will have known that the chances of the carriers actually being built, had history followed its usual course, was extremely low. They will have known that there would be an election early on in the process, and that once the electoral advantages of the project in the shipyard constituencies had been exhausted, there was a good chance of the project being cancelled whichever party gained power, especially if the economy took a downturn which, even then, looked likely.
So in order actually to get their new carriers, the Navy would have to be extremely clever and pull off something quite exceptional and unprecedented. Money talks, and that is especially true in government, so they needed to create a situation where the financial case for cancellation was unattractive. What better way to do that than to write punative penalty clauses into the contract. They weren't put there by accident, nor were they the act of a greedy armaments industry taking advantage of a weaker public sector. I believe they were deliberately placed there by the MoD and Navy to ensure that, whichever party was in government, and whatever the economic consideration, those carriers definitely would be built. And fair play to them, I say. Desperate times require desperate measures!
Whether they actually get their two carriers though, is less certain, and more of a gamble. Yesterday, the captain of HMS Ark Royal was very upbeat about the likelihood of both new carriers joining the fleet, which either indicates he's woefully out of touch with recent announcements, or that he knows something we don't. But considering they won't enter service until 2020 at the earliest that's a long time for things to change. We all know that what governments say and what governments do are two very different things, so by the time the ships are built I'd say they have a fair chance of both going to sea. The Navy's gamble may well pay off. It will be interesting to see if they can pull of this trick again, or whether future governments wise up to it.
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