PRESS

This is not to suggest that discussion of UK military
expenditure has been entirely free from contention.
Since the transfer of power from the Labour to
Coalition government in 2010, the UK defense debate
has been dominated by the discovery of a so-called
black hole in the defense budget: an unfunded liability
of committed expenditure (largely on new equipment)
between 2010 and 2020. A figure of £38 billion
(roughly equivalent to the UK annual defense budget)
is most often cited, although there are uncertainties as
to how that sum was calculated.
Nevertheless, in September 2011, Defense Secretary
Liam Fox announced that the shortfall had almost
been eliminated, and just months later, Philip Hammond,
Fox’s successor, was reportedly confident that
the black hole had been entirely eliminated and that
the government would indeed be able to fund the Future
Force 2020 (FF2020) modernization program that
was announced in the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security
Review (SDSR). 3
In January 2013, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced
that it was now in a position to commit as
much as £160 billion over 10 years to a defense equipment
plan “that will enable the MoD to deliver Future
Force 2020.” In Hammond’s words:
This £160 billion equipment plan will ensure the UK’s
Armed Forces remain among the most capable and
best equipped in the world, providing the military
with the confidence that the equipment they need is
fully funded. 4
Hammond’s confidence is open to question, however.
In the first place, some defense industrialists and
acquisition analysts are concerned that the MoD has
simply replaced the irresponsibility of overspend-
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