It's impossible to judge from the information in the article whether this is an absurd and unjustifiable waste of money or not. It doesn't tell us anything abou

It's impossible to judge from the information in the article whether this is an absurd and unjustifiable waste of money or not. It doesn't tell us anything about the requirements, only that the project was to build "a website". https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ is a website. Facebook is also a website. Spending £113m to build Motherfucking Website is insane; spending £113m to build Facebook is a bargain. As other commenters here noted, we can easily imagine extremely complicated requirements. The backend requirements for a "recruitment website" for the military might include all sorts of background checks, including pulling criminal records and automatically trawling social media for content posted by candidates and doing NLP analysis on it to detect warning signs of extremism. There might be some sophisticated proprietary analytics portal for monitoring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. And while there might be a good writeup elsewhere on the web on what exactly this project consisted of, and I'd welcome relevant links, based purely on the content of the article we just don't know. Calling it a "website" without giving any hint of the requirements makes it sound like the army paid £113m for the digital equivalent of a recruitment brochure, yet I seriously doubt that's the real story here. I'd expect HN commenters to be more skeptical of these kinds of portrayals, rather than uncritically accepting the media narrative.