THERE HAS BEEN a bit of a flurry of interest recently over the British army’s ‘new’ armoured fighting vehicles, following on from the long-delayed publication of the government’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which in turn laid out how the 62 recommendations of George Robertson’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) of June 2025 were to be funded.
Leave aside for the moment that the SDR was out of date before the ink was dry and the DIP vague and underwhelming. Lots of new military equipment is now in development or on offer, but still with little detail on how it’s going to be paid for.
Let’s take the British army’s armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) programmes as an example. Without getting right down into the weeds, there are three main vehicle types we should consider; Challenger 3 (CR3), the army’s ‘new’ main battle tank (MBT), the troubled Ajax armoured cavalry vehicle programme, and Boxer, the new eight-wheeled infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) plus variants.
CR3 is arguably not a new MBT at all, but an upgrade of the current Challenger 2 tank which officially entered service in 1998, so at 25 + years old is mighty long in the tooth for a tank which has had no major upgrades since then. The new Challenger basically takes the old hull and plonks a new turret on top. And at long last a British tank will mount the Rheinmetall 120 mm smoothbore gun, firing ammunition which is compatible with our NATO allies.
It will not be a bad tank at all, but does have several flaws. It retains the same 1200hp engine of its predecessor, which the Ukrainians have flagged up as being underpowered for their current needs. Only 148 are being procured on current plans, which means they might last a fortnight in a peer-to-peer conventional conflict. And only 60 active protection systems (APS) – which automatically intercept incoming missiles and projectiles – are being bought, meaning 88 CR3s will be without.
My personal view, however, is that that it will probably be the last western MBT designed and built to an outdated, nay obsolete, design philosophy.
What do I mean by that? Well, there is an emerging consensus that the current generation of western MBTs – Leopard 2, M1A2 Abrams, and now CR3 – are now too big, too heavy, too expensive, and too vulnerable to favour continuing with their particular design parameters. They represent, essentially, putting all your eggs into one basket. And, as we have seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, one relatively cheap drone can eliminate such expensive and sophisticated vehicles given a bit of luck.
Next, Ajax, a slow motion car crash of a project and a prime example of how not to do military equipment procurement. Suffice to say it is over 10 years late, has cost approximately £6.3 billion to date, and those vehicles which have been completed and delivered can’t be used because the noise and vibration they generate has permanently damaged the health of some of their crews.
And time has moved on. It was designed in the pre-drone era and is now very vulnerable on the modern battlefield. So Ajax is now a legacy vehicle – which doesn’t work – looking for a role. At 42 tonnes with a huge thermal (thanks crew heaters!) and acoustic signature it’s basically a target just waiting to be taken out. Putting our boys and girls in it will be bordering on the criminal. It should have been cancelled years ago.
Thankfully, there is some optimism when it comes to Boxer, the eight-wheeled IFV now coming into service with the British army. Originally a joint Dutch/German initiative, it is in service with a large number of operators around the globe. Typically, the UK was part of the original consortium to produce the vehicle, withdrew from the project in 2003, and rejoined in 2018 after domestic initiatives failed. Britain now has 100 vehicles delivered plus another 523 on order.
Despite the delay, the good news for the British army is that Boxer is now a combat proven and mature vehicle design. I still have some concerns about is size and weight – and cost – and am not so sure about the RCH-155 self-propelled artillery model ordered by the UK in May of this year – it looks a bit top heavy to me – but by all accounts seems to be very capable. So for once it looks like the army is getting an IFV which does what it says on the tin.
But there’s no hiding the fact that equipment procurement for the British army is a bit of a mess. I have written about this extensively in the past and don’t need to repeat the arguments here, but the root causes are a sclerotic MoD rooted in practices which might have been acceptable in the 1950s but cannot hope to keep up with the pace of modern technological advances, plus a pathological fascination with ‘gold-plating’ every requirement.
The answer lies is a complete revision and remodelling of the MoD. Is Andy Burnham the man to pick up the challenge?
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Photo courtesy of the British Army
