A Tale Of Two Vehicles

The British Armed Forces, once known around the world for their professionalism and ability to get things done, are falling apart. Some of this is down to the infection of wokery pushed by politicians and some senior officers. A lot more can be blamed on a chronic funding shortage, with the defence budget languishing at historically low levels and - even worse - endlessly padded with other, non-defence items to make it look a lot higher than it actually is. However, the most insidious problem of all is the shambolic and incompetent way much of the money that is available gets spent.

In 2014 the US Army started to wonder if, instead of having its light infantry (Airborne and so on) walk everywhere carrying all their worldly goods in big heavy rucksacks, it might not be nice to give them vehicles so they could drive around instead. They weren’t looking for a combat vehicle that soldiers could fight from, just basic transport to let them get to the battlefield much more quickly. So they bodged up some prototypes out of stripped-down pickup trucks and gave them to soldiers to test.

Based on the tests they decided this was quite a good idea, so in 2019 they asked three companies to make prototypes. They liked the GM Defense one the best, even though it’s basically just the running gear of a Chevy Colorado truck with some mudguards, nine seats and a roll cage stuck on top. They bought a few dozen and gave those to soldiers to test.

The soldiers tested them, went to the local equivalent of Halfords, bought lots of bits - luggage racks, tow hooks and so on - and bolted them to the vehicles to make them more useful. A few months later the army collected them again (complete with all the extra bits the soldiers had added), gave them back to GM and said, “Make them like this. And make lots of them.” In 2020 GM started mass production. In 2021 the first vehicles (complete with factory-installed tow hooks, luggage racks etc) were delivered to units as the M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV). Now they have over a thousand of them, with dozens more arriving every month. As well as the basic troop taxi there are now electronic warfare, cargo and fire support versions, all produced by simply removing some of the seats and bolting on other off-the-shelf components. There’s even an anti-drone variant, equipped with radars, a big generator and a laser weapon system. The whole project, including development and the purchase of 2,065 vehicles, has cost under a billion pounds.

The British Army’s Ajax reconnaissance vehicle can be traced back to a project called FLAV (Family of Light Armoured Vehicles), which started in 1985. It’s been axed and restarted from scratch twice and reorganised twice more, first becoming FFLAV (Future Family of Light Armoured Vehicles), then TRACER (Tactical Reconnaissance Armoured Combat Equipment Requirement), then FRES (Future Rapid Effects System) and finally FRES SV (FRES Specialist Vehicle). So far the project has been running for 41 years, has officially cost at least £5.5 billion (and probably twice that, in reality) and hasn’t delivered a single usable vehicle.

The CVR(T) vehicles Ajax was supposed to replace were all totally rebuilt in the mid-1990s, because their replacement was clearly not imminent, and finally retired three years ago. They had served for 53 years, instead of the 25 they were designed for. Now the British Army has no armoured reconnaissance vehicles at all, until Ajax is finally operational - if it ever is; Initial Operational Capability was declared last year, then withdrawn in January after it turned out the vehicle’s notorious noise and vibration problems still haven’t been fixed.

The ISV is a much cheaper and simpler vehicle than Ajax, so in some ways it’s an unfair comparison, but even so the difference is stark. The US Army had an idea, started testing it, and five years later soldiers were driving around in prototypes. A year after that, operational vehicles were coming off the production line ready to be shipped to units. Meanwhile, after 41 years and a huge pile of money, all we have to show for the Ajax project is a bloated, overweight shed that leaves its crews dizzy, deaf and vomiting.

The MoD, the British government and even some senior military officers do not take defence seriously. They prefer forming endless committees, writing endless reports and issuing endless new specifications to actually giving soldiers equipment that’s good enough to do the job and affordable enough to be bought in large numbers. And, with the collapse of the post-Cold War delusions of a peaceful world ruled by international law, this expensive idiocy is putting us in a very dangerous place.

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