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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the government has come up with a “do nothing” solution to a desperate military need as feeble as the weapon itself is obsolete.

The government is going to carry on with making the Ajax armoured reconnaisance vehicle 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 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 use was questionable then. But in the age of drone warfare it is now almost entirely obsolete.

open image in gallery ( AFP/Getty )

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 dire emergency 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. They were self sabotaging British weapons.

Luke Pollard, the armed forces minister, later discovered that officials had hidden from him the facts 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 in 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 of 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.

open image in gallery The Army paused the use of the Ajax armoured vehicle after 30 soldiers reported feeling unwell during war games exercises ( PA )

Soon after the debacle of the Ajax exercise, the Ministry of Defence put out all kinds of excuses for the failure of the weapons system that boiled down to saying that soldiers had spent too long in the vehicles and worked them too hard.

Later it emerged that vibrations had combined with carbon monoxide poisoning that turned 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 £6.3 billion disaster. It suggested, rather, that the Ajax vehicles would need a few upgrades and if carefully driven, with the right tensions 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 focussed on Sir Keir Starmer’s travails over another strategic blunder, and appointment of a man who stayed friends with a convicted paedophile as Washington ambassador, 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 focussed on providing a significantly improved user experience,” Mr Pollard said.

He has missed the point that the “user experience” of anyone in an APC 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 it to be a troop carrier too. If its crew needs special ear phones 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.

open image in gallery The Ajax armoured fighting vehicle is demonstrated during British Army Expo 2025 at Redford Cavalry Barracks in Edinburgh ( PA )

The business-speak language of Pollard shows that Ajax is yet another political problem - not a military issue. 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 against Russia. Ukraine has a few of 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 is done with drones. Not some of it, all of it.

A government that cared about 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 in the modern battlefield.