In a stealth move fitting of an announcement it wants to hide, the government has come up with a “do nothing” solution to a desperate military need – a decision that’s as feeble as the equipment itself is obsolete.
The government is going to continue commissioning the Ajax armoured reconnaissance vehicle – a piece of kit that’s almost a decade late, massively over budget, and for which there is no longer any military use.
The British army was supposed to take delivery of 589 new and networked vehicles, to give it a technological edge for decades to come, as a replacement for the venerable Warrior armoured personnel carrier that had been in service since the 1980s.
Back then it made sense to have a big, tracked, tank-like machine that could take a section of infantry soldiers and blast the enemy with a 30mm cannon.
Ajax was due for delivery in 2017. Its purpose was questionable then. But in the age of drone warfare, it is now almost entirely obsolete.
Russian soldiers have been blown up and burned, in hundreds of armoured vehicles, by Ukrainian drones. Neither side in Europe’s biggest war since 1945 now uses heavy armour of this kind except in dire emergencies.
And it is in precisely that situation where the Ajax is most useless.
Recent trials of the system, still being made for the UK forces by General Dynamics in Wales, left crews in a jelly-like state, some of them incoherent and deaf, suffering from headaches and generally wounded by using Ajax on an exercise that demonstrated how great it wasn’t.
Thirty five soldiers were in 23 vehicles and suffered injuries that an enemy force would have been delighted with, because it meant that the Ajax squadrons were rendered inoperable.
Luke Pollard, the armed forces minister, later discovered that officials had hidden from him the fact that the machines were causing crews ill health and injury.
This kind of stupidity can lead to strategic failure. Vladimir Putin was led to believe by his generals and intelligence agencies that Russia would sack Kyiv inside a week. He needed to believe this, and they enabled his self-delusion. Now Russia is stuck in a war it cannot win, and has increased the size of its enemy, Nato, by two whole nations. That’s strategic failure.
Pollard and the government did not seize the moment, after the debacle of the Ajax exercise last year, to dump the whole project. Rather they have done the unforgivable in any military doctrine – they have reinforced failure.
Soon after the exercise, the Ministry of Defence put out all kinds of excuses for the failure of the weapons system, which boiled down to saying that soldiers had spent too long in the vehicles and had been worked too hard.
Later it emerged that vibrations had combined with carbon monoxide poisoning, turning Ajax into a self-sabotaging chemical weapon deployed against its own crews.
The MoD did not admit that the whole project had been an unmitigated £6.3bn disaster. It suggested, rather, that the Ajax vehicles would need a few upgrades, and if carefully driven, with the right tension in the tracks and no doubt tea breaks for the crews, all would be fine.
The government seems to have agreed to this. All minds were focused on Keir Starmer’s travails over another strategic blunder – the appointment as Britain’s ambassador to Washington of a man who had stayed friends with a convicted paedophile – so it slipped out the announcement that Ajax was still on track.
“I have implemented strict new controls on the reintroduction of the Ajax vehicles that is focused on providing a significantly improved user experience,” Pollard said.
He has missed the point that the “user experience” of anyone in an APC (armoured personnel carrier) of this kind in pre-drone warfare was always going to be bloody and awful. These are machines designed, when they work, for reconnaissance and stand-off infantry support with heavy weapons.
Their modular design was supposed to allow for them to function as troop carriers, too. If the crew of an Ajax vehicle needs special earphones and head protection to get in it, what hope is there that infantry being raced around the front lines will want to get into a roaring target that will scramble their brains as badly as a near miss from a mortar?
Nil is the answer.
The business-speak language of Pollard shows that Ajax is not a military issue, but yet another political problem. The government doesn’t want to cancel the programme, for which it has no responsibility, because that would involve a decision.
“While we are proceeding cautiously with Ajax, we know we have more to do to rebuild confidence in the vehicle, and we do not underestimate the work still ahead,” Pollard said. Well, the “work ahead” should include a cursory flick through social media feeds on the Ukrainian defence strategy against Russia.
Ukraine has a few M113 APC vehicles donated by the US. Designed in the 1960s, these old warhorses were popular on the front lines because they were simple, tough, delivered a punch, and protected against some inkling attacks. But there are very few armoured vehicles on today’s battlefields, because ground and air drones can easily find and destroy them.
Aside from moving troops, the jobs that Ajax has been designed to do in theory – long-range reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, and networking of data on the battlefield – are done with drones. Not some of them: all of them.
A government that cared whether the country was safer for what is being spent by the MoD would kill off Ajax.
It was terrible to start with, and it is now so late that it has no place on the modern battlefield.
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