A senior employee of General Dynamics UK has posted comments on social media suggesting that crews bear responsibility for several problems associated with the British Army’s Ajax armoured vehicle.
The remarks were made on the widely followed FillYourBoots Facebook page during a discussion about ongoing issues affecting the programme.
The individual, who identifies publicly as an Acceptance Manager and whose employment history includes roles such as Ajax Trials Manager and Trial Manager for reliability growth work, responded to a post describing a range of faults reported by soldiers and trial personnel. In his response, he stated that issues, aside from coolant leaks, were attributable to crew error, poor maintenance and shortcomings in command decisions. The comment directed criticism toward those discussing technical problems with the vehicle.
Further public comments from the same individual appear on LinkedIn, where he took part in an extended exchange with another user discussing recent reports of sickness and hearing injury among soldiers operating Ajax. In those posts, he questioned the reliability of media reporting and suggested that some public criticism came from people with no direct exposure to the platform. He also wrote that he would not comment on specific incidents until full facts were available but stated that he remained confident in the vehicle and its capability. The exchange included responses to another user who said he had worked with personnel involved in initiating a safety stop during recent activity and who maintained that crews had experienced significant sickness and hearing symptoms.
The vehicle has been the subject of multiple parliamentary questions following reports earlier this year that soldiers again experienced hearing damage and vibration injuries during use, despite previous declarations that the system was safe to operate. These latest reports followed earlier concerns raised during trials in previous years.
In responses to Parliament, Defence Minister Luke Pollard said that the Ministry of Defence declared Initial Operating Capability in November only after receiving written assurances from senior Army officials and acquisition personnel that the vehicle was safe. Pollard stated that the assurances confirmed Ajax was demonstrably safe to operate at the time IOC was approved.
Further review activity has since been announced. A new ministerial led examination is now underway and is being carried out by external experts, including Malcolm Chalmers. The review will assess how previous recommendations were implemented and will report directly to the Defence Secretary.
The individual’s online remarks appeared on a public page where the user’s profile lists detailed employment history with General Dynamics Land Systems, including several years working on testing and acceptance activity linked to Ajax. The comments were made in response to an ongoing and widely viewed discussion on the platform.
General Dynamics UK was invited to confirm whether it wished to comment on the post or clarify its position regarding public statements made by employees about the programme. No response had been received at the time of publication.
That’s a very good way to lose people very quickly. Apart from coming across as an absolute belter, if you put a product out there that is so far from squaddie proof that troops make themselves ill, then your product isn’t fit for purpose.
From a guy I know at ATDU, it appears that Ajax is particularly hard to maintain by the crew compared to to things like Warrior. The fact it’s 40 years newer makes that unforgivable. (Noting the spec should have included ease or speed of crew maintenance)
Realistically, 40-year old cars are easier to maintain than new ones.
But military equipment is supposed to be designed to stay in the fight, it’s not a car.
We’re talking about the generation and sustainment of combat power.
The example cited to me was: Warrior battery change 2 hours. Ajax 4-5 days.
I’ve always wanted Ajax to work and wanted it to be good. And the more I hear from the troops, it just isn’t. It’s not just grumbling or wanting to go back to what they know, it’s just not working well at all. And these are guys who were excited to get it and work out how to operate it effectively.
To add insult to injury, I’ve heard it does not like bushes and small trees either. If you compare Scimiter’s dimensions against Ajax, it’s similar to comparing a Jaguar V Rhino and that must have a huge impact on general performance and agility. Is it time the Army took charge and recalled Scimitar and delayed the Warrior drawdown? Regarding Scimitar, this would be an ideal platform for an unmanned reconnaissance platform, regardless of what the Ajax outcomes will be?
Always felt that CVR(T) would have been an obvious candidate for the Soucy band tracks. They basically halve the track weight, fitted to something like Scimitar, that would make a potentially huge weight saving. Perhaps more importantly for recce operations, is that they are significantly quieter than steel tracks. Plus having less weight to move around should increase the Scimitar’s speed and range.
An autonomous CVR(T) I’d say is pretty doable, but the RADEN will need replacing due to it clip feed.
Strangely, the future battle vehicles may be small autonomous units able to smother the battlefront, without placing personnel in direct danger. Scimitars would be ideal platforms, but as you say, the weaponry would need to be tailored to suit its purpose. Ajax looks impressive, but it is tall, wide and heavy and possibly compromised in typical reconnaissance territory.
Ease of maintenance and field reparability are at the core of fightability of anything MILSPEC.
This is not at all good. Mind you that was one of the issues with the USN LCS program.
I will be honest first thing that sprung to mind was the one or two shite! LE’s I meet in my 14 years in the Royal Artillery and some Majors! Leadership styles!
Oh dear! It gets worse:
‘I am an anonymous General Dynamics Employee (ex army)….
– Vehicles regularly come off the production line with circa 150 faults on them.
– We can’t even build the vehicles to meet the test standard which we came up with ourselves.
General Dynamics management will force the whole team of soldiers to come in all weekend at a moments notice just because we have 1 guy working overtime.
– As an ex soldier myself seeing how General Dynamics management abuse the fact that soldiers essentially don’t have any employment rights is painful to watch, if the Soldiers refuse to work ridiculous hours of overtime or multiple weekends straight our senior managers who have the email addresses of high up officers in Army HQ will directly contact them and force the soldiers into work.
– Sometimes when a vehicle has passed inspection and the Army now owns it, our low level managers at General Dynamics will encourage us to rob parts off it to repair one that has failed an inspection.’
‘The defensive attitude of the majority of GD staff is becoming clearly visible…..It’s becoming very much them and us divide.
Instead of helping each other to find the issues and rectify them allowing the platform and program to move forward safely thus not wasting £10bn of the tax payers money, they seem to just want to find a way to blame the users to try and save face…..
There are known multiple vehicles arriving at units unfit for purpose, and unfit to operate due to issues that should have been rectified before loaded on HETs.
Critical vehicle fitted items missing, FFEs not fit for purpose, track issues, camera screen issues, driver / commander seat issues, Coms/Bowman vibrating its self to bits and stopping working, engine and automotive issues. The list is endless. It just seems GD don’t care, they pump the half-arsed vehicles out and take the publics money. There is no care for the users Health and Safety and GD just reply with ‘well this is what the army asked for’…
The whole sarga is a joke. And if it continues I doubt the platforms will survive the next 12/18 months and GD will pile in… or someone will be seriously injured and medically discharged yet again thanks the incompetence of GD.’
FYBUK
Professor Malcolm Chalmers appears to be the right man to sort this out:
‘…..whether the UK could field the heavy division which is committed to NATO without an Ally providing a Brigade. Professor Malcolm Chalmers questioned whether any such division could be deployed given that the British Army lacked both equipment and the logistics required to support it.’
Defence Journal 05 Feb 2024
Cost about 1 billion to change suspension to hydro gas and rubber tracks. As GD Uzk made loss paying loans due to suspension of payments you can see why it was bodged up lol.
As acceptance manager he presumably accepted sub standard Spanish vehicles with substandard welding, non parallel sides, mounting holes on wrong centres and non square bores…and people should listen to him??
It appears he’s part of the problem rather than part of the solution
Possibly the biggest bellringer since Quasimodo.
Is the poster really who he claims to be, or just a fantasist winding people up for attention?
Are they mutually exclusive?
I have a funny story that I would like to share. Last year I went to tank fest and when I arrived I parked up next to a pretty nice new looking yellow Ferrari. I commented to my lad and said someone’s doing well. Anyway I walked around the various exhibits and then came across the Ajax display. I commented to my lad that who was with me that this is the new British Army combat Infantry fighting vehicle vehicle that was an absolute crock of s**t and explained some of the issues to my lad, namely the noise and vibration that makes the users feel nauseous and sick. Well as I was talking a rather disgruntled man came to me who was standing by the Ajax like a guard dog, who overheard and then vehemently defended it. I was then okay I get your points and lets see if they can iron out the issues. I then thought to myself after he must be an employee of GD as he really was quite enthusiastic about the Ajax. Anyway it was time to leave, so we started walking back to the car and we then noticed that same guy was walking in front of us heading for his car, well I wonder which car was his. You guessed, he got into his yellow Ferrari and drove off. I looked at my lad and smiled as we instantly realised something. Anyway I will leave that for you to decide what we learned that day
GD have form for asinine comments when dealing with Ajax. When the noise and vibration issues were first made public, they said that it met the minimum legal requirements. Can you imagine a car manufacturer having that strapline and actually selling any cars? It’s an attitude problem as much as anything else, and MOD shouldn’t have fallen into a similar way of thinking. Minimally ticking the boxes isn’t good enough for a multi-million pound platform that’s supposed to stay in service for decades.
A lot of cars being sold in the UK do *not* meet the minimum legal requirements.
Tesla S and X did not for a long time meet the reliability threshold to run 120,000km without a major component failure – unless a new set of half shafts every 10,000km is OK with you?
It is similar with the early Chinese EV imports now falling apart.
The problem is that manufacturers used to have to register component failures on an EU publicly accessible database – now they don’t. Originally this drove massive increases in car reliability.
As usual the EU car lobby fought back and said that this was ‘expensive’ – actually putting this back would be one of the best defences against importing rubbish into EU and UK.
Tesla 3 & Y are now very reliable with examples going up to silly odometer readings on the original battery. But they have iterated the mechanicals. The software is a different issue.
Also the first batch of cars off any production line will be a nightmare of glitches and niggles.
So no I don’t accept the analogy.
When dive sprockets and track wears the noise goes up till point worn out.
WV diesel cars….?
VW…
So I looked up what data I had on Ascod/Ajax & the spin off variants. Ascod/Ajax are just listed as having torsion bar type suspension. The Ascod based Sabrah 105mm light tank, Israel built for the Philippine army, also has torsion bar plus Piedrafita rotary dampers models AR01 & AR02. (www. piedrafita.com). Does Ajax have rotary dampers? If not, would they help? Ascod is 27.5 tonnes & Sabrah is 33 tonnes, so I assume the rotary dampers are for the extra weight.
Ajax is way past these weights. There are limits on how far you can push it. Australian Redback IFV is build on the K9 SPG chassis.German Lynx is also designed around similar weights. Both these were designed to operate in the 35-45 ton bracket from the start. Ajax is not a 40 ton vehicle by design yet somehow that’s what they built. Ajax is dead in the water. If it was a dog, someone would be in court already.
It has rotary dampers designed for 25 ton vehicle, a torsion bar is good path for transferring noise and vibration to the hull compared with hydro-gas which has a dampening effect.
I keep thinking that there must be a sharp elbowed lawyer somewhere who can put together a case to sue GD for billions
It would probably end up in the American courts so good luck with that!
No GD land is a UK limited company.. so UK court.
👍
Might be worth it! Someones got to answer for this. Even if admitting some joint liability. Really poor job in governance and allowed to go too far. Wonder what the GD Brooker Ascod type chassis is like with the 105mm turret? That must weigh a bit? More than the Ajax? If that works copy that?
Too late. If you want a 105 assault gun / light tank, throw a Belgium 105 turret on any 40 ton tracked IFV you care to name (not Ajax). Job done. You could throw the same 105 turret on a Boxer & drive away with a working (wheeled) light thank (around the same weight).
Seriously, Ajax was not relevant 10 years ago & is even less relevant today.
Oh dear oh dear.
Can someone here confirm that these issues are just with the “Ajax” variant and not any of the others?
I’d had that thought as well.
Just the ones delivering 3x lethality followed by 10x lethality on the leading edge, at pace.
Even with the 3 variants reported on, deliveries are usually front loaded to focus on core types like AJAX and Ares, it makes you wonder if more types will be affected as deliveries increase and all variants become more widely used.
Sky News reported that it is 3 variants of Ajax that have had noise and vibration issues reported. Although I wonder if all types have been used in exercises properly yet with limited deliveries.
This man claims that ATDU soldiers (and officers, probably) know nothing about armour! Most of them are our most experienced armour practitioners.
Also, back in the day, REME Vehicles & Weapons Branch at Chertsey did Ease of Maintenence Assessments (EMAs) on new equipment in development – they did every servicing and repair task imaginable on prototype and pre-production vehicles (& weapons) and changes were made by the manufacturers on their recommendation before full production started. A given vehicle type was not Accepted into service unless it had a EMA ‘pass’. That Branch closed decades ago and I doubt anyone else got tasked to do EMAs, at least not using practical skills – its probably a paperwork exercise now. That’s a big part of this Ajax problem.
No ease of maint on changing southdowns on CR2, often lots of washers behind panel from previous attempts and you need ground down spanner.
Procurement eh!..a camel is a horse designed by a committee 🐫
Yet a camel does actually exist & works as advertised. Ajax does exist, but does not work as advertised.
Get this muppet out of his cosy little office give him and his mates an Ajax,let them roam around the plain every day for a month and then let’s see what his attitude is like!
any idea how long this review by external experts is projected to take?
at least external experts should be able to give a fair assessment because I imagine there is a lot of ass covering and finger pointing going on by both MoD and GD staff that were involved in this program.
first time I hear of coolant leaks. could that explain the reported cases of vomiting?
I get the feeling a lot of stuff as been swept under the rug, and that vibrations/noise may just be the tip of the iceberg
hopefully we will get a preliminary report just to understand how it could go so wrong, because it’s hard to make sense of this all
one thing is clear, the MoD process to declare equipment IOC is inadequate.
In 2022 the report of the Government investigation was published, they know what’s wrong. By the time the vehicles are stripped, holes bored, hydro-gas mounts welded on, new suspension bought and the vehicles put back its likely to cost about 1 billion. This would have bankrupted GD UK, that’s why they went for mitigation measures which did not work. Likely the only asset is the factory in Wales.
This review by ‘external experts’ sounds the right way to go. But will it be a full technical investigation, exploring every component of design, manufacturing standards, maintenance suitability etc, or is its main aim just to cover the DefenceSec’s posterior for prematurely declaring Ajax good for IOC?
Everything points to the former being absolutely necessary and the fundamental first step on the road to redemption.
We know there is a big weight issue, you don’t get away with dumping a 40 tonne mass on a structure designed for 25 tonnes without some seriously good engineering mitigation. Which doesn’t seem to have happened with GD’s design work.
It sounds like the suspension system simply isn’t up to the job. It is perhaps revealing that, with the Ares version being pitched as an AIFV to the Polish army, a key customer stipulation is that the suspension is replaced by a Polish-made hydropneumatic system.
Another angle that should be explored, but won’t be because it challenges the drifting army staff target, is was it really necessary to load an extra 15 tonnes of ISTAR kit in the back and the weighty 40mm CTA cannon? That kit weighs more than the total weight of the Scimitar, which was a very capable armed scout vehicle!
But the litany of mechanical faults and piss-poor manufacturing quality standards quoted by Monro above is pretty devastating.
A constant feature here is the extent to which technically qualified army specialists are involved in the process. Graham makes a key point about how, in the past, a specialist REME team would have been involved in the development process, checking every aspect of eaae and practicality of maintenance and repair. I doubt that this process still exists, so much of the technical capability has been cut or gapped in the previous defence cuts. DE&S seems to have become primarily a paper-pushing purchasing arm, leaving the contractor to mark their own homework.
If this review is to be of much value, it needs to go out to an independent military automotive outfit. BAE, Reinmetall or similar who have current experience of armoured vehicle design, manufacture and maintenance. They need to do a deep review of th e fundamental design and weight issues, plus break down a few of these supposedly ready-for-action AFVs to see where the problems are. It will need a REME team and the restoration of an EMA sign-off.
A central issue that does need to be thoroughly explored is the role of DE&S in all this. They are supposed to be the technical experts on equipment development. How come that, on their watch, we have arrived at a grossly over-weight vehicle that shakes, rattles and rolls, can’t do inclines and has problems reversing, and sounds to be riddled with sub-standard manufacturing quality issues? They have a serious case to answer but I doubt the MOD civvies will want to go there, too close to home and someone might pin the tail on the donkey.
It needs to be a thorough investigation and result in a complete blueprint for any resumption of manufacture.
If the scale of design and manufacturing problems are anything like described, it will cast serious doubts on GD’s suitability to be involved in the manufacture.
Doubt very much that the posterior-covering MOD will do the right thing here by the troops who will have to take this lemon into battle, they’ll be more concerned about who said what to whom, the cost and potential legal issues and just getting the thing produced so they can tick a box.
that poster seems a typical Russian troll bot until proved otherwise. Whole thing is a national disgrace that just shows what happens when you scotch your domestic production possibilities. That said I am sure there are home grown examples but Ajax really does seem to belong with its name sake, down the drain.
A Robert Skivington according to the DT?
If this project falls then it needs to take a whole load of people with it. Senior military and civil service. If this program is unsalvageable then the government cannot stand for it. Wasting this much tax payers money whilst endangering the effectiveness of our army therefore endangering national security is criminal. There must be consequences. Lashing out at the operators of a vehicle is pathetic. Unfortunately it is a indicator of complete failure. Defensiveness over responsibility. A terrible sign for the future of this project.
Has this bozo been subject to the same conditions as the squaddies that report the injuries… Cos perhaps that’s what is needed for them to understand the gravity of their failure.