Douglas Carswell's Blog

Eurofighter: good value?

How much bang have we got from the £37 Billion buck we've spent on the Eurofighter? Designed to defend German airspace against Soviet MiGs in the 1980s, is it proving its worth in the mobile expeditionary wars we actually seem to fight?

The Ministry of Defence seems keen that we should all know that a Eurofighter destroyed a whole Libyan tank. Perhaps even a second-hand pick up truck, too.

What they're less keen to let on is that most of the £200 Million 'planes are locked away in a hanger someplace. Despite their soaring price tag, there's still not enough spare parts or trained pilots to fly them.

Meanwhile elsewhere our armed forces are chronically overstreached, with ships and planes cut up for scrap. Spending the equivalent of a whole year's defence budget on Eurofighter doesn't look like a very good example of how to convert what economic muscle we have into military punch, does it?

Looking at the history of the Eurofighter project, I find it difficult not to wonder if our defence budget is really spent on what our armed forces need, or instead on what it suits defence contractors to sell?

At £200 million plus per plane, could we not have bought a better value aircraft elsewhere? The American's seem to cope with those F-18. Might not the skies above Tripoli today be thick with unmanned drones, capable of selective strikes, if we'd spent a fraction of the Eurofighter budget more wisely?

The period of time between the last cavalry charge in Sudan and the first tank charge in the First World War Flanders was less than that between the collapse of the Berlin wall and today. And yet we seem less flexible at adapting how we spend our defence budget than ever.

Why the chronic inability to adapt? In short, too many vested interests have too great an influence.

In the Defence Ministry, there are vested interests who would rather money went on "their" project - however expensive and wasteful - rather than on a better value alternative.

Outside the MoD are vested contractor interests, who are keen to keep the big money projects going. There's nothing wrong with corporate interests pursuing corporate interests. It's what they do. And when there's competition and choice, it can be beneficial.

The trouble is that when it comes to defence spending, there isn't enough choice or competition.

Worst of all perhaps, there are too few politicians willing to take on vested interests and ensure we spend our defence budget in the interests of our armed forces as a whole.

Those on the centre right have longer understood that spending more on public services needs to be accompanied by reform. It's time to apply that same idea to defence, too.

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