The requirements community that sponsors projects in front of the IAB comprises a significant component of military personnel54. As discussed, the dynamic of military careers is such that the single Service allegiance (and performance against the needs / desires of the single Service) is of significant importance to career progression.
Although the EPP (and to some extent the ESP) are managed by the Capability Sponsor, it is fundamentally the IAB (and ultimately the DB) who control access to funding at an individual project level for all but the smallest projects. The IAB relies on Service personnel not exercising their single Service agendas in the approval of equipment. However, the DB exercises primacy over the IAB and has a number of characteristics:
• military personnel exercise control, all of whom have the same incentives to deliver capability for their own Service; and
• influence is sufficiently concentrated that each of the Service heads in effect has a veto over the progress of any individual project.
This leads to a situation where mutual benefit appears to be optimised by no veto being exercised (i.e., each Service has all its projects, or at least its key projects, authorised).