Dr Fox's new model MoD

摘要

IT IS hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Liam Fox, Britain's pugnacious defence secretary. No minister in the incoming coalition government last year inherited a bigger mess or a more dysfunctional department. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, reportedly observed that the defence budget was "the most chaotic, the most disorganised, the most overcommit-ted." In addition to the 8% cut in its funding (over four years) demanded as part of the government's fiscal-austerity plan, the Ministry of Defence (mod) has somehow to close an unfunded liability of £38 billion ($61 billion) up to 2020. This week, just before announcing a major shake-up of the way his department and the armed forces are run, Dr Fox said: "The future defence programme was worse than a delusion-it was a deliberate lie."