They would take advantage of a relatively quiet world to shift resources away from manpower and arms procurement into military R&D, especially information-gathering and processing.
The Department of Work and Pensions appears to be throwing its common goods and services procurement into the common pot finally, which is expected to save it £100m.
For example, the PTA put its thoughts on the procurement into a large pamphlet comprising three booklets.
It breaks the procurement down into lots, but warns that the structure could change in response to feedback from suppliers.
But evidence presented to the committee by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies showed how targeting procurement spend into dilapidated areas can regenerate them.
Following Lambeth's change of stance, a confidential TfL document has now come to light, which calls the entire procurement process into question.
You might think that two companies that dominate a market would just divide it up, but Boeing and Airbus fight over every contract, turning each procurement campaign into a steel-cage match.
One participant said they would like to see savings in procurement channelled into a specific pot to fund social programmes, rather than allowing suppliers to adopt their own approaches and risking "gimmicks or tokenism".
But yesterday Foreign Secretary William Hague said: "When you look at the extent of the procurement entered into by the MoD, far beyond the budget that was meant to be available, one might conclude that it has not been run as well as it might have been.
The revelation in 2004 that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man still feted in Pakistan as the father of its bomb, had turned his country's illicit procurement network into a private and hugely profitable supply chain, ready to sell all sorts of nuclear kit to others, was a huge blow to the global anti-proliferation effort.
