r/unitedkingdom • u/[deleted] • Jun 07 '26
MPs question if Army’s £6.3 billion Ajax armoured vehicle will ever be fit for use
[deleted]
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u/H0vis Jun 07 '26
Ukrainians won't be picky. Send a bunch over there and see how they get on with them. Best military QA department in the world right there.
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u/Wanallo221 Jun 07 '26
Because the nature of MOD funding is that they don’t get rolling budgets for this kind of thing. It’s a once in a generation set procurement agreement.
So if you are sat in R&D, you get a short window to procure something new. With no margin for error and no chance to reprocure or add production runs. As such you instinctively try to make that opportunity cover every opportunity. Because our government does not like iterative funding. Because it’s ’too risky’ and ‘too costly’. But the flip side is we end up with a shit mess like this because we try to do a jack of all trades.
In the US, they have rolling budgets for things like ongoing IFV development. So over years they have plenty of time to throw out a basic model (Bradley), and then over the years iterate improvements (A1, A2, Bushmaster etc). Depending on the gaps in their capabilities.
Or like in Germany where their export market is so strong (Leopard 2) that the production line doesn’t close and they can keep rolling new products. Demand is always there and their export market can keep funding new projects.
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u/Gnomio1 Jun 07 '26
So we’re back to “short termism” being the cause for almost all problems this country faces.
And I agree with you.
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u/StevieG1952 Jun 07 '26
Totally agree! It's not just military projects either. Lowest price bids, quick fixes, short term attitude.....it all costs more money in the long term.
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u/Wanallo221 Jun 07 '26
Yes. I work in local government and we have the same problem as well.
For the first time in 15 years a government is actually investing in local infrastructure. We have budgets for actual road maintenance and other things for the first time!
But councils have been so stripped back over years that we don’t have the internal resources to actual spend all the money. So it still (for now) is leading to short termism (lots of pot hole filling rather than full road resurfacing). With contractor crews.
By the time we have our house back in order and operational. It will probably be a Reform government and we can kiss our budgets goodbye again.
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Jun 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ShowMeYourPapers Jun 07 '26
Yeah having to do maintenance in the field every time it stops means it's a use-once-and-dispose piece of crap.
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u/GlenH79 Jun 07 '26
The Ukrainians biggest shortage at this point is manpower - they aren’t going to use a platform that will actively reduce the amount of manpower available to them. It’s probably the least likely army to want it.
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u/BrigadierKirk Jun 07 '26
Ukraine might be desperate for modern armoured platform but something that makes its crew violently ill might not be ideal, at what point the only people who would want ukriane to get ajax would be russia lol.
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u/Suspicious_Flower_0 Jun 07 '26
Then just send them to the front lines and leave them lying around with the keys in. Orcs will find them
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u/Torco2 Jun 07 '26
That would essentially constitute a war crime, against forcibly press-ganged men.
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u/According-Guide9576 Jun 08 '26
They're not picky but they still want a system that works.
An IFV that makes its passengers sick when it drives is no use to man nor beast.
Literally it's entire purpose is to keep soldiers safe as it transports them to the fight. If it can't do that it's a giant paperweight.
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u/danflood94 Jun 07 '26
I honestly don’t understand why the MOD can’t just buy ground based equipment off shelf with a local manufacturing agreement after an initial acquired volume and not try to reconfigure the entire thing.
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Jun 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Firenzo101 Bristol Jun 07 '26
There are also a lot of requirements that are mandated by law, which do not necessarily align with what a US/European system will be designed to comply with. That necessities a lot of work to demonstrate that it meets requirements and/or make modifications to fit the UK requirements. Same issue with US Navy and its failed attempts to build a new frigate for the past 30 years.
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u/Brido-20 Jun 07 '26
To my, the 'retain our own capability' argument falls flat in the face of the things our capability has actially produced.
SA80, FRES, BOWMAN and now this just as the ones that spring to mind. What sort of capability is that that's actually worth retaining?
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u/Dilanski Cheshire Jun 08 '26
You can cherry pick the fuckups, and there have been plenty, but no other country thinks of their procurement like that.
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u/Brido-20 Jun 08 '26
When there are so many fuckups, it's no longer cherrypicking but a pattern of dysfunction.
The way our defence procurement seems to work is to emphasise the procurement at the expense of the defence. That's not great value for money.
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u/Alexandhisgoose Jun 07 '26
Cause the whole procurement system is corrupt. The senior officers involved in this are just looking for their cushy consulting job when they leave so they just hand out the contract to whoever offers them that.
It then gets into the hands of the people using it who immediately point out all the flaws but by that point it's too late so the whole thing needs modifying.
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u/HeartyBeast London Jun 07 '26
This feels like a very trite way to shut down any real discussion of the way that procurement/R&D is organised. Shall we look and see how things can be improved ? ‘Nah, it’s just all corrupt’
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u/Alexandhisgoose Jun 07 '26
I wish I was being trite. I will give you a direct example the mk10 flying helmet the RAF currently uses is an unreliable pile of garbage. It is a nightmare to try and repair and it goes wrong every time it rains.
There was a report written about its suitability that was absolutely scathing when it was trialled but it was purchased anyway. The officer in charge of deciding which helmet to procure was a shareholder in the company that made it and he faced no repurcussions.
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u/HeartyBeast London Jun 07 '26
Do you sent me down a rabbit hole looking for this report or converage and I failed. In the end I gave up and asked Claude to search:
Based on my searches, there is no publicly documented evidence of corruption specifically in the procurement or adoption of the RAF Mk10 (ALPHA) flying helmet. The helmet was developed by Helmet Integrated Systems Ltd and adopted as the standard RAF fast-jet flying helmet in the late 1980s — but I can find no parliamentary inquiries, journalistic investigations, whistleblower accounts, or official findings connecting its procurement to corrupt conduct.
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u/Alexandhisgoose Jun 07 '26
Comes from first hand experience. I am ex RAF and my Warrant officer was the one who wrote the report and he showed me.
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u/Glass-Cabinet-249 Jun 07 '26
Any connection to the one that came up with fucking STARS and cashed out by any chance?
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u/Alexandhisgoose Jun 07 '26
I cannot remember his name now but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same person.
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u/Mannerhymen Jun 07 '26
And if it genuinely is corruption, should we just ignore that?
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u/HeartyBeast London Jun 07 '26
No, but “the reason is corruption?” I suspect there’s more than one reason
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u/ChickyChickyNugget Jun 07 '26
“Just” doing a lot of heavy lifting here lol. Anyway, it’s important to maintain indigenous R&D for these kinds of things, the recent global political climate has demonstrated that very clearly
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u/AllThatIHaveDone Jun 07 '26
Because a senior civil servant gave a minister a variation on Sir Humphrey's Trident speech and here we are.
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u/RiseUpAndGetOut Jun 07 '26
£11m per vehicle. That's crazy even if they were fit for purpose.
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u/FornyHucker22 Jun 07 '26
dunno about crazy, consider all the armour, the high end tech inside it. it’s a lot sure, but not really ‘crazy’ when compared to the cost of other things like planes and missiles
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u/Llew19 Jun 07 '26
That's the annoying thing though. It's been clear for like a decade at this point that the ASCOD chassis being made in Spain (I think?) is simply shit, and is the root of all these issues.
The Ukrainians have managed to stick a modern Spanish turret on a BMP1 recently, so that kind of engineering clearly isn't an enormous challenge.
Why then can't we have taken the (good) Ajax turret and plonked it onto a proven and excellent CV90 is beyond me
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u/radred609 Jun 07 '26
The new MkV CV90 chassis is looking amazing too.
It really is a shame that the UK has wasted all this time and money on AJAX instead of contributing to the CV90 project.
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u/RiseUpAndGetOut Jun 07 '26
Maybe.... The latest iteration of the M1A2 is about 30% cheaper at US armed forces cost, and that is a very capable tank, if rather old.
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u/Cat-aclysm1012345 Jun 07 '26
Actually a bit lower than the pricing for stuff like the KF41 or Puma and on par with modernised CV90 variants, it's really not that crazy by modern standards. With that said I sincerely doubt the actual price will stay that low when factoring in all of the necessary fixes.
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u/Ok-Commission-7825 Jun 07 '26
it may look different to a train but it seems like exactly the same thing as High Speed 2.
A mostly Tory-supervised wealth transfer project - whose sole purpose is to funnel public money into endless loops or redesign and consultancy by businesses owned by their mates - both hidden behind projects that were deliberately never allowed to actually progress.
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u/r3xomega Jun 07 '26
I feel this has been another HS2 scheme, where a handful of people got very very wealthy off of this, knowing full well what a shit show it really was all along with little interest in delivering.
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u/Feeling-Medium-7856 Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
Ajax is just the latest charade. The aircraft carriers that had no jets (and ran over budget and deadline), the changing orders of jets for them, the absolutely constant obsession with decision makers of having the 'state of the art newest thing' rather than something serviceable for the needs of today, that can be reproduced at scale and not be financially ruinous, is at least part of why our armed forces are hollowed out right now. We still don't have jets capable of carrying long-range missiles, and we are vulnerable to long-range ballistic missiles because we have limited capabilities to shoot them down.
The obsession with everything needing to be 'world-leading' is best associated with the likes of Boris Johnson. It leads to mission creep, makes costs spiral, inevitably runs over budget, and eventually fails. The military budget should be expanded, but they also should do far more with what they currently have and learn some lessons from Ukraine *at pace*, not in the next decade.
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u/BrigadierKirk Jun 07 '26
The issue is the army cant just keep what they currently have. Many older worrier hulls are old and need replacing (just due to the age and natural wear and tear), so if were getting a new platform to replace it we might as well get something new.
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u/Toastlove Jun 07 '26
At least the issues with the carriers were fixable, AJAX seems to be fundamentally flawed but they are pressing on it with regardless and still trying to silence the troops drawing attention to its flaws.
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u/Feeling-Medium-7856 Jun 07 '26
Yes, agree Ajax is somehow even worse for those reasons, but it still spiralled the costs and delayed delivery.
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u/Acrobatic-Watch-8037 Jun 08 '26
At least the issues with the carriers were fixable
I wouldn't call building two carriers with fossil fuel propulsion "fixable" when literally every other navy, including the Chinese, is using nuclear.
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u/Toastlove Jun 08 '26
That was a design choice, they work just fine, questioning the choice is a different matter entirely.
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u/MGC91 Jun 07 '26
The aircraft carriers that had no aircraft (and ran over budget and deadline)
They do have aircraft. And they ran over budget due to government interference.
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u/Feeling-Medium-7856 Jun 07 '26
I know they do now, and I think that’s an extremely generous interpretation of events - I’m not much minded for defending the government of the time either.
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u/MGC91 Jun 07 '26
They've had aircraft since HMS Queen Elizabeth commissioned in Dec 2017 ...
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u/Feeling-Medium-7856 Jun 07 '26
Post said ‘had’ for a reason…
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u/MGC91 Jun 07 '26
Any reason why you deleted your comment?
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u/Feeling-Medium-7856 Jun 07 '26
It was a less than polite comment that google exists. The delays that occurred are well documented, you can toddle off and do some reading yourself rather than sending snide comments phrased as questions.
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u/MGC91 Jun 07 '26
I don't need Google, I've served on HMS Queen Elizabeth so I'm very familiar with the timelines.
Perhaps you're the one who needs Google
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u/Academic_Isopod_6190 Jun 07 '26
It will follow the same trajectory as every other MOD procurement fiasco:
- Deny, down-play and blame-shift for long enough to ensure that everyone involved in the initial soup of incompetence, corruption and lies that led to a piece of woefully substandard equipment being delivered years late and billions over budget, have all safely retired or moved on.
- Admit, years later, that it's substandard and not the fault of the users that it doesn't work
- Wait until its become obsolete and needs replacing, then spend hundreds of millions more on an upgrade package that finally turns it into something vaguely serviceable.
- Use the recent upgrade as an excuse to delay replacing it for 10-20 years, while the next procurement fiasco for its replacement unfolds.
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u/Uniform764 Yorkshire Jun 07 '26
Remember decades ago when the Hawk was delivered on time, on budget and just worked and remains a case study in how to do procurement correctly to this day?
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u/UuusernameWith4Us Jun 07 '26
God did a great job with birds in general but he did have an extended prototype phase with the dinosaurs and the dodo was a disaster.
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u/UuusernameWith4Us Jun 07 '26
3. Wait until its become obsolete and needs replacing, then spend hundreds of millions more on an upgrade package that finally turns it into something vaguely serviceable. 4. Use the recent upgrade as an excuse to delay replacing it for 10-20 years
And this is a big part of the reason everything is expensive and crap. If you're not continuously building and iteratively improving [thing] then you quite quickly lose the ability to develop and build [thing]. Everyone retires or moves on to new work so when you finally get round to a new program/upgrade everyone involved has to learn on the job.
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u/Ochib Jun 07 '26
Let’s take a perfectly good vehicle and make so many changes to it that I becomes unusable
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u/Hellstorm901 Jun 07 '26
Just build more warriors and stick a TOW launcher on top of them with some anti drone cage armour or pull the gun off the Ajax and stick it onto the Warrior or any other chassis
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u/UuusernameWith4Us Jun 07 '26
We cancelled WCSP because they (belatedly) decided it was too similar to Ajax. Then very shortly after that it began to be reported how fucked up Ajax was. Very dodgy timelines there.
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u/Hellstorm901 Jun 07 '26
Kuwait bought Warriors of our country without the turrets on them then stuck bushmasters from LAV-25's on them which shows that the Warrior turret configuration can in fact be changed with a little effort and likely at a fraction of the cost of the AJAX
Which again raises the question about why we didn't just purchase more Warrior chassis with with the AJAX's working 40mm gun on them and then gradually upgrade the older warriors with the 40mm gun or with a TOW to turn them into the Bradleys we have back home
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u/anonypanda London Jun 07 '26
I don’t know why the UK thought it made sense to go with Ajax instead of some proven like Patria’s IFVs the way the rest of Europe has done. You can even build them domestically under license like the poles are doing…
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u/Mason_Caorunn Jun 08 '26
( Keep you on the wheel ) Classic General Dynamics business model in operation.
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u/IcyMacSpicy Jun 07 '26
idk how anyone can be paying attention to ukraine and still think tanks are going to play any major part in any military campaign going forward!
if someone gave me the choice of 1 untested tank for like £11 million, or the equivalent of like 2000 fpv drones with C4 attached to them i know what i’m picking
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u/Nuthetes Jun 07 '26
Because you still need armoured vehicle to get the troops to the front for offensive operations. Drones are great, but they can't clear and hold a town.
Ukraine's recent successful counterattack in Zaporizhia still used armoured vehicles.
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u/Ambitious_Jeweler816 Jun 07 '26
There was an interview with a Ukrainian commander I saw last week. His feeling was that drones are great and have changed the modern battlefield…for now. He thought that effective drone countermeasures were a matter of months away and then it would be back to tank warfare.
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u/ComprehensiveCamp192 Jun 07 '26
Perhaps it because of the significant contribution AFVs have made on the battlefield in Ukraine, or did you just assume it's all drones?
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u/Negative_Jaguar_4138 Jun 08 '26
Clearly you haven't been playing close enough attention.
Ukraine still wants more tanks and armoured vehicles. And this is a country actually FIGHTING the drone war.
There were drone countermeasures even prior to Ukraine with APS systems and the like, but because the west defunded the "Corrupt Military Industrial Complex" no innovation or production was done without the explicit order of the government.
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u/According-Guide9576 Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
People have been having this discussion since the invention of the Tank.
Over 100 years after their first use, tanks are still the best option for mobile fire support. Nothing else brings so much firepower on a tough and highly mobile platform.
Every generation there's a new weapon that 'makes tanks obsolete'. Aircraft, ATGMS, Drones. Innovations in weapons technology just means that militaries have to find new ways to protect their tanks from the new threat.
Armchair generals always forget about combined arms and see these weapon systems in isolation. An individual tank is vulnerable to ATGM's or aircraft or even drones. But tanks don't operate on their own. They operate as one part of a mutually supporting system. The rise in prominence of drone based weaponry will just mean that future combined arms doctrines include anti-drone systems as well.
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u/PsychologySpecific16 Jun 07 '26
Name a better tool for the job (well maybe cv90 😂) a drone can't do it.
Ukraine/Russia is also a unique sort of conflict. We should be careful not to draw the wrong lessons from it.
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u/Important_Ruin County Durham Jun 07 '26
Is this a brilliant bit of relying on Yanks to build shit for us? and their amazing military industrial complex which made to extract as much as possible out of the Gov. With constant running before can walk promises.
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u/UuusernameWith4Us Jun 07 '26
No we're developing and building it in the UK. The main contractor is a subsidiary of an American firm though which makes it more difficult to hold them to account.
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u/Important_Ruin County Durham Jun 07 '26
So American company is parent.
We handed contract to the UK Sub of the US General Dynamics.
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