Four Horizon-class air-defence frigates operated by the French and Italian navies are being upgraded under a contract worth approximately €1.5 billion, and the customer states the object of that programme beginning with obsolescence resolution of systems and equipment, before the design, development and integration of new ones. The figure is worth holding against two others drawn from the same body of documents. A British award for aircraft consumable spares covering approximately 11,000 stock numbers across five aircraft fleets carries an initial value of £27 million and a maximum of £70 million. The estate that award sits inside holds around 520,000 types of inventory at a net book value of £11.8 billion. Obsolescence therefore appears in the public record at three different scales at once: a consumables service measured in tens of millions of pounds, an inventory estate measured in billions of pounds, and a single four-ship modernisation measured in billions of euro. A military customer can require exactly the same capability and still face a consequential procurement decision, because a component or a system has ceased to be available on the terms that made the original arrangement work. Buying the remaining stock preserves one route to support; redesigning around another component creates a different set of costs, permissions and acceptance decisions. Neither response follows automatically from ownership of the system. The obligation to maintain an established capability becomes a commitment to finance materials, engineering and qualification, and the question this report takes up is how, and to whom, that commitment is contractually assigned.