The Ministry of Defence has confirmed that the British Army currently has no requirement for a light tank capability, despite monitoring the employment of such systems internationally.
Responding to a written parliamentary question from Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, Defence Minister Luke Pollard said the Army routinely assesses which vehicles are most appropriate to meet specific capability requirements.
Pollard noted that the base platform of the Philippines Army’s Sabrah Light Tank is the ASCOD 2 chassis, the same family of vehicle that underpins the British Army’s Ajax programme.
However, he stated: “At present, the British Army has no requirement for a light tank capability.”
He added that the Army continues to monitor the use of light tanks alongside wider global developments in armoured fighting vehicles. The minister also addressed the Spanish Army’s VCZAP Castor, describing it as the combat engineering variant of the ASCOD 2 chassis.
Pollard said that under the British Army’s Armoured Cavalry programme, the Army is introducing the ARGUS variant of the Ajax family, which is expected to deliver an advanced engineer reconnaissance function. He said that together with the existing Trojan and Terrier platforms, ARGUS will provide the Army with what he described as a comprehensive suite of combat engineering capabilities.
So UK is dependent on Spanish vehicle manufacturing- even if it makes the crews lose control of their bodily functions, and causes long term disability.
A strange world we live in?
When country that invented armoured vehicles, destroys its own sovereign capability, ignores world class sovereign suppliers to include patented foreign parts that fail to produce a safe vehicle, ten years after it was supposed to be delivered.
This from the Army that has managed to spend £25,000,000,000 over the preceding years without fielding a vehicle fleet.
The same Army that in a recent Estonian exercise ‘Hedgehog2025’ lost a brigade to ten Ukrainian drone operators.
Are the British Army learning lessons?
Wanting to spend £ billions more on Ajax?
Is this sense or sanity?
Remember for the cost of one Ajax you can buy over 10,000 drones.
The DIP has still not been published. No indication when it will be.
I would say losing to Ukranian drone operators is very much a lesson learnt, but keep doom mongering and inventing reasons to be depressed and miserable. That’s what the comments sections is all about I guess. I suppose if you were in charge it would be smooth sailing and no mistakes would ever be made and you would of course find all the money you needed to create the perfect military. Pull yourself together and come back into the real world.
Was it stated that the British Army was OPFOR in that Drone Exercise.?.
I think part of the OPFOR was British army but it’s not really the point. The bigger issue is people treating exercises like Sports Games where you release two teams onto the pitch and one wins and the other looses, rather than the tightly controlled training and learning events they actually are.
As an example; there once was an exercise in the USA where some British troops and US SOF where working together as a deep screen for an American Brigade. Exercise Control gave the US SOF intel on where the OPFOR’s armour was and generated a requirement to find, fix, and if possible degrade/destroy the OPFOR Armour. SOF handed the task over to the British who sent out a Patrol into the area, that found the enemy armour, called American fires onto it, and destroyed about a squadron’s worth of it.
Exercise Control then regenerated the Squadron and a day or two later the 101st Airborne used Apache’s and ATGM’s to destroy that armoured force again.
The headline would have been “British Forces destroy Americans in Exercise in USA” had that event made the news, or “The Americans where so badly beat that they had to be reset multiple times.” But of course, that was the point. The idea was to give US SOF a chance to practice hunting armour and a US Brigade Combat team a chance to practice (if I recall correctly) repelling an armoured assault.
Now I don’t have insider knowledge on Exercise Hedgehog, but my gut feeling is that if I’m a NATO commander and we’re running a big exercise with some Ukrainian Drone operators, I’m going to try to set up the exercise in such a way that as much of my force as possible gets exposed to those Ukrainian Drone operators, for maximum training benefit.
Whilst fair and win/lose is all media stories, there is a significant gap in the UK forces around small drones and counter drone capability. Realistically our forces would be in serious trouble if they walked into the Ukraine conflict. There needs to be a sea change in how drones are looked at by the military, they need to stop looking at them as expensive top end assets and start thinking disposable things used by your average foot soldier.
We must say what suits our socialist masters narrative.
It does indeed.
Not sure why anybody would be surprised by this, CVRT is effectively the UK’s light tank capability, and that’s moving to Ajax. So as long as the Ajax program is running the UK isn’t going to be looking at light tanks.