Military Madness: Billions of Dollars Going to Military Manufacturers for Useless Equipment

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UK Defence Ministry spent £3.2 billion on tanks

that can’t shoot on the move

24 May, 2021 15:51

An Ajax prototype seen near its future assembly plant in site in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, March 4, 2016

© UK Ministry of Defence

The UK has spent a whopping £3.2 billion ($4.5 billion) on noisy tanks that can’t shoot while moving, according to a Times report. The news comes after critics called on the government to upgrade its “deplorable” armoured fleet.

Developed by General Dynamics, the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle impressed then-Prime Minister David Cameron so much that he ordered 589 of them in 2014, after receiving the Army’s go-ahead four years earlier. Delivery dates have since been missed, and the Army is still waiting to roll out the vehicles, but a Times report on Sunday revealed that technical experts have encountered numerous “safety issues,” including excessive noise inside the vehicles, and cannons that can’t fire while on the move due to vibration.

Armed with 40mm cannons and light machine guns, the Ajax vehicles are lighter and more maneuverable than Britain’s aging main battle tank, the Challenger 2. As such, an inability to fire while moving renders the vehicles useless to the reconnaissance units that would eventually use them in the field.

Nevertheless, the British government has handed over more than £3.2 billion for the vehicles, out of a total programme cost of £5.5 billion, according to Ministry of Defence documents seen by the Times. The most recent round of payments, adding up to nearly £600 million, were made this year.

Government spending watchdogs are apparently unhappy, and one of the Times’ sources suggested that payments are not linked to the delivery of working vehicles. If so, General Dynamics has thus far earned a sizeable chunk of change from the UK's defence coffers without delivering a working product.

The Ajax was conceived to replace the obsolete 1970s-era Scimitar light tanks currently used by armoured reconnaissance units, yet the future of such vehicles was uncertain even before the latest issues with the Ajax emerged. When Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled a massive hike in defence expenditure last year, he said that the government’s spending would “be focused on the technologies that will revolutionize warfare,” including a heavy investment in artificial intelligence and the creation of an RAF Space Command, capable of launching a rocket from Scotland in 2022. 

However, a parliamentary committee in March excoriated the government for neglecting Britain’s conventional forces, drawing attention to the “deplorable” state of Her Majesty’s armored vehicle capability. Their report heavily criticized the cost and delays involved with the Ajax program, including the vibration issue that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace referred to late last year as “a slight pause in the area around the turret.”

“Of the vehicles we do still have, some date back to the early 1960s, when the Morris 1100 was the most popular car and Elvis was the Christmas number one,” committee chairman Tobias Ellwood said at the time. “A mixture of bureaucratic procrastination, military indecision, financial mismanagement and general ineptitude has led to a severe and sustained erosion of our military capabilities.”

Yet the Ajax boondoggle is not the first incidence of mismanagement at the MoD.

When the Ministry of Defence replaced the FN FAL with the Enfield SA80 as its service rifle in the late 1980s, problems soon emerged. The weapon would jam, its metal components would rust and deform, and it proved wholly unusable in desert environments – which became apparent when British soldiers took part in the Gulf War. After a post-war report identifying these faults leaked to the press, the ministry first pretended the report was fake, before embarking on a costly upgrade programme.

More recently, the ministry has been slammed for spending so much money on its two new ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class aircraft carriers that it couldn’t afford the planes and support vessels needed to deploy them for a year, and couldn’t modify the ships to perform amphibious landings – one of their selling points.

Furthermore, the American F-35 fighter jets that these carriers would launch have been plagued by delays, design flaws and cost overruns, to the point where the ministry has refused to say whether it will buy its original order of 138 F-35s, and declined to offer a cost estimate for the programme as a whole. The 48 jets already ordered are estimated to run up a bill of £9.1 billion by 2025, and the government has not commented on whether upgrade costs will drive that figure up further.

There should be investigations into the selection of this inadequate equipment. There must be a reason for selecting junk, and I suspect some people got very rich from these decisions. If corruption isn't involved, then it must come down to spectacular stupidity.

Deep State - Making Junk and Getting Richer - The F-35 Trillion Dollar Disaster

Swedes Vote Climate Policy Biggest Waste of Tax Payer Money in 2019

A Little Levity, but then...

Environmental activist Greta Thunberg, of Sweden, addresses the Climate Action Summit in the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Monday, Sept. 23, 2019.

(AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)AP Photo/Jason DeCrow

CHRIS TOMLINSON

The Swedish public has voted that climate change spending has been the biggest waste of taxpayer money in 2019, according to a poll by the Swedish Taxpayers’ Association.

The Taxpayers’ Association released the results of their annual wasteful spending poll earlier this week, declaring that climate policy had been the biggest waste of money, largely due to the fact that despite the spending, emissions in Sweden had actually slightly increased.

In 2014, the Swedish national government spent 5.2 billion Swedish krona (£419 million/$547 million), a number that has more than doubled to 12.6 billion krona (£1 billion/$1.3 billion) for the planned 2020 budget.

“The government has more than doubled the appropriations for climate policy, but despite this, emissions no longer decrease. In 2018, emissions even increased. That is why climate policy has been voted the worst waste of the year,” Johan Gustafsson, Waste Ombudsman at the Taxpayers’ Association, said.

Breitbart London

@BreitbartLondon

Sweden Looks to Ban Sale of New Petrol and Diesel Cars in Ten Years https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/12/22/sweden-looks-to-ban-sale-of-new-petrol-and-diesel-cars-in-ten-years/ …

The Swedish government, along with the Centre Party and the Liberals have announced they will be looking to ban the sale of new cars that use fossil fuels in the next ten years. 

“Too much tax money is wasted without benefit to those who pay. It is no less important that money has an effect when it is invested in something that is important — rather the opposite,” he added.

In second place in the poll was a project from the artists’ commission that saw over a million krona donated to a project focused on art for earthworms and fungi.

Mats Caldeborg and wife Katrin Zackrisson Caldeborg were behind the project and told newspaper Expressen: “Art for birds, bumblebees, beetles, worms, and fungi is a project that wants to turn upside down in our habitual way of seeing and understanding the world. Here, nature’s smaller inhabitants are not those depicted, but themselves, in their own right, recipients of the art.”

The wasteful spending poll results come as many Swedish municipal governments face financial hardship or even bankruptcy due to a lack of money to support recently arrived migrants who have largely remained out of the labour force.

An estimated 90 per cent of migrants who came to the country during the height of the 2015 migrant crisis and received permanent residency are unemployed.