Britain’s military has announced the first delivery of Ajax armoured vehicles, eight years behind schedule and amid questions about their relevance as cheap drones dominate the battlefields of Ukraine.
The junior defence minister Luke Pollard said the first 50 vehicles, costing nearly £10m each, were ready to deploy on Nato’s eastern flank, though he acknowledged the problems of the past when delivery deadlines of 2017, 2020 and 2021 were all missed.
“There a lot of lessons we can learn,” Pollard said at an Ajax manufacturing site in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales. The Ajax took “many, many years to contract … and we need to cut that hugely [to] only a few months”, he added.
“Our mission as a country is to support our Nato allies, and in particular to secure the eastern flank,” the minister said, although there were no specific announcements about the use of a vehicle whose long delays had become a military embarrassment.
When Ajax, an armed reconnaissance vehicle, was first commissioned in 2010, it was anticipated deliveries would begin in early 2017, though by the time a fixed-price £5.5bn contract was awarded to US firm General Dynamics, that had slipped to July 2020.
Initial demonstrations in 2020 and 2021 then revealed that the Ajax was plagued by excessive vibration and noise. Testing was halted after 11 soldiers had to be placed under long-term medical monitoring amid reports of tinnitus and hearing loss.
Pollard said he could not say how many soldiers were still affected by hearing problems, citing patient confidentiality, but “those issues are firmly in the past” and “if it were not safe, we would not be putting it in the hands of our armed forces”.
Demonstrations of the Ajax, on a short drive at the manufacturing site, revealed that it was still noisy, though not obviously excessively so. A dual layer of protection, ear plugs and defenders, had been particularly helpful in improving safety, military sources said.
Though there are a number of variants, the core Ajax vehicle is designed for forward reconnaissance – operating in the “grey zone” or even behind enemy lines – scouting positions from 5 miles away. Using a range of cameras and sensors, it is designed so its crew of three do not have to exit, remaining inside for a week if necessary.
The long delays have led to the Ajax emerging in the fourth year of the Ukraine war, where tanks and armoured vehicles have failed to achieve significant victories for either side. The conflict has become dominated by cheap one-way drones that have become increasingly effective in knocking out armour – which is easily detected near the frontline.
Soldiers involved with the programme argued this did not mean that Ajax had become a waste of money, and said that the UK had a different military approach. “We wouldn’t fight like the Ukrainians,” said L/CoH Andrew Rawlinson, an Ajax vehicle commander, arguing it would not be effective if simply thrown into Ukraine-style trench warfare.
Though some acknowledged Ajax’s reconnaissance functions could be replaced by drones, Rawlinson also said the cheaper technology had its own limitations. “We haven’t got to think, the second its windy we can’t put our drones up,” he said, and emphasised that with many cheap drones the battery life “is about 30 minutes to an hour”.
The British army would enter a war, or engage in peacekeeping in postwar Ukraine or elsewhere, with allies and use a full range of military capabilities, from fighter jets to infantry, military sources added.
Building new armoured reconnaissance vehicles is deemed to be part of maintaining an overall UK military capability, while also employing 4,100 people in the UK.
The Ministry of Defence has ordered 589 Ajax vehicles and their variants, with full delivery now due to be completed at the end of the decade.
