Taliban Give Thumbs-Up to MoD Budgeting

According to a secret Shitehall report CD copy left on a Bakerloo line tube train and sold on to the Daily Shitraker for thirty pieces of silver, the Ministry of Defence’s systems for buying new equipment are so inefficient they are hampering the military’s ability to conduct attack – or defence - operations.

The Shitraker claims the dossier concluded the MoD's acquisition programme was £35 zillion over budget and five years behind schedule – and their last inventory still included stocks of longbows and arrows left over from Agincourt – and horse shoe nails from the Wars of the Roses.

The 1,276,348 page report highlights various glaring ‘mammoths in the board room’ such as why it takes 20 years to buy a ship, or an aircraft, or a tank – and why it always seem to cost at least treble the amount originally budgeted.

The report casts aspersions on the current programme’s affordability in both the short and long terms and opines that the MoD's procurement section should preferably be staffed by persons with a basic education, a proficiency in the application of the three ‘R’s and an IQ score higher than a corgi’s.

It further comments that the established tradition of hiring MoD personnel on the merits they went to the ‘right schools’ – ‘know someone’s father’ – ‘belong to the same Masonic Lodge’ – or any other nepotistic or corrupt crony reason must cease or Shitehall would be wholly taken over by career thickies and Hooray Henry types : precisely the cause of the British Empire coming to an ignoble and untimely end.

"The problems, and the sums of money involved, have lost their power to shock, so endemic is the issue," claims the dossier’s author - Shitehall Mandarin Sir Quentin Snivellington-Snide.

"It seems as though military equipment acquisition is vying in a technological race with the delivery of civilian software systems for the title of 'world's most delayed technical solution' - even the basket case Rattletrack train service cannot compete with these levels of incompetence and mismanagement."

“This is now a mammoth in the government’s Cabinet chamber that has become so massive it has its own postcode and can be picked up on Google Earth.”

Conversely Ministry of Defence spokeswoman Fellatia Sodomberg, a former Anne Summers sales lady, told a press conference "We are constantly improving the procurement process which has seen us deliver £10 billion of equipment to our lads in the K-FOR battle zones of the Balkans since February.”

When informed by one inconsiderate hack from Pox News that the British military contingent of the NATO / K-FOR peacekeeping force had now been reduced to six troopers and an Alsatian guard dog since the conclusion of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, Ms. Sodomberg apparently spit the proverbial dummy and declared “Well, that’s just the effing problem, isn’t it – no fucker tells us anything!”

Last month, the House of Conmans' defence select committee admitted a lack of wheelbarrows was undermining UK forces' operations and troop protection in Afghanistan, where the weekly British death toll has now reached embarrassingly high figures – with daily casualties coming equally from friendly fire by stoned shit-for-brains US troops and the actual perceived enemy – the Taliban.

Criticism has also come from within the government's own ranks. Foreign Office minister Sir Rupert Toerag received an insta-bollocking from Business Secretary Lord Scandalson to row back from his comments after informing a reporter from the Incompetence Review "We definitely don't have enough wheelbarrows” and then making the wholly numpty dumpty suggestion to overcome ammunition shortages in Afghanistan of ”Well, how about they use the bullets again.”

However the official Afghan rebel spokesman Taliban Dan – in London on a BAE Armaments shopping spree with a suitcase full of opium harvest cash - told a reporter from the Extraordinary Rendition Gazette that “We love this British incompetence for expediting logistics – they are winning our war for us. God bless Gordon Brown.”

But all is not lost for Snivellington-Snide’s 1,276.348 page report – for the MoD is planning to outsource the xeroxing of several million copies of the bulky report to India then truck them north to Afghanistan’s Bellend Province- to be used as barricades and for building bomb-proof bunkers.