UK shameful waste of tax payers funds in defense spending:
Example 2022:
The MOD’s £300bn waste of public money
The British public is facing a new round of austerity while the Ministry of Defence squanders vast sums of money on weapons that are unusable in any foreseeable conflict.
To take one current example: the ministry has spent more than £3bn of the public’s money, with the prospect of having to pay out £2bn more, on an armoured car called Ajax. The vehicle, tests show, deafens and injures the occupants, it cannot reverse over obstacles more than 20 centimetres high, and is too unwieldy to fit in the RAF’s transport aircraft.
The project was conceived in 2010 and due to be completed in 2017. By December 2021 the MoD had paid £3.2bn for just 26 Ajax vehicles, none of which it can use.
Defence minister Alec Shelbrooke said recently he “cannot determine a realistic timetable” about when the Ajax would be operational. Some defence industry commentators say it never will be.
The company pocketing billions from the Ajax is the UK subsidiary of the American company, General Dynamics. The company’s manager of the project is Carew Wilks, a former army general in charge of the MoD’s “land equipment” department. General Sir Peter Wall, a former head of the army, was appointed a non-executive director of the company.
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One of Britain’s two aircraft carriers is currently being repaired. (Photo: MOD)
The allure of notionally prestigious weapons systems has seduced Labour as much as the Conservatives. Gordon Brown enthusiastically backed Blair’s agreement to build two aircraft carriers, the largest warships built for the Royal Navy, in Rosyth, close to Brown’s Scottish constituency.
Their combined cost, initially estimated at less than £4bn, rose to more than £6bn.
They are designed to carry the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) version of US F35 Lightning II jets. This version of Lockheed Martin’s F35s has a shorter range and smaller payload than the alternative catapult and arrester gear (“cats and traps”) version that was abandoned on grounds of cost.
The MoD’s plan to buy 48 jets for the two carriers – the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales – is estimated to cost £18.8bn over 30 years.
The carriers are extremely vulnerable to long range missiles being developed notably by China, making a mockery of the “show of strength” hailed by the MoD when the Queen Elizabeth was deployed to the Pacific in 2021.
Lord Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, described the carriers to me as “behemoths…unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”.
And at precisely the moment we are at greatest risk of war with Russia, one of the carriers is marooned in Rosyth, being repaired for a leaking propeller – a problem that has persistently plagued the vessel.
The government says the Prince of Wales carrier has spent 267 days at sea and 193 days undergoing repairs since it was commissioned in December 2019.
Watchkeeper is a large unarmed drone operated by the British Army rather than the RAF. It is assigned to the Royal Artillery and its primary purpose is to aid the targeting of artillery and rocket strikes.
Watchkeeper was built jointly by Thales UK and the Israeli company Elbit Systems and is based on the Elbit’s Hermes 450 drone. Fifty-four Watchkeepers were built under a £1 billion contract and were originally due to be in service in 2011. Much delayed, a small number of Watchkeepers were deployed to Afghanistan in the final weeks of UK operations there in late 2014.
Eight Watchkeeper drones have crashed in the UK during testing or training exercises since 2014.
Watchkeepers were deployed to help spot refugees attempting to cross the Channel in September 2020, but the operation was quietly ended the following month.
In September 2022, Ministers stated that £1.31 billion had been spent on Watchkeeper to date and in April 2024, the Watchkeeper was branded ‘an unmitigated disaster’ by former MoD Minister Marc Francois and member of the Defence Select Committee.
In November 2024, the Defence Secretary John Healey announced in the House of Commons that the UK was scrapping the entire Watchkeeper fleet in order to save funds. While it was initially suggested the drones could be withdrawn by the end of 2024, a new contract announcement indicated the drones would continue to be in service until March 2027.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 
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