First of all, I agree with everything that Richard and Elinor are saying.
I want to stress to the committee that building a naval ship is a very difficult challenge. The Americans are just about to literally junk an entire new class of vessels. Their Freedom-class littoral ships were supposed to be like Corvettes. They can't make them work. They've spent billions, and they will be scrapping them. They've spent probably about $2 billion extra on getting their Ford aircraft carrier class working.
We have to appreciate that this is a long-term, very difficult challenge, so we need someone at the top who will benefit, who will gain. Give them a political payoff for doing the job well and also hold them responsible.
There's a point that Elinor raised. We need to constantly have systems by which we review what is happening. The success of the British system is that they were willing to look at what they'd tried, and then they had an independent capability ask the question, “Is it working, or is it not working?”
We tend to say that we will create the means to make it work, and then we never come back to it. There has to be the acceptance that this is dynamic, and there has to be the acceptance that of course there is a fair system of review, to see if in fact we have the problem the British ran into or if we're actually solving it. That's a mindset that also has to come forward.