Among all voting age Britons the support (42%) for the spending increase is almost twice as strong as the opposition (22%).. Credit: © UK MOD Crown Copyright/British Army.

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has announced the revised in-service dates of the British Army’s Ajax armoured vehicle programme.

The MoD has further confirmed to resume payments to Ajax’s developer General Dynamics to expedite the delivery under the programme.

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The payments have been withheld since December 2020, after ‘noise and vibration’ issues were reported in the vehicles.

The MoD is now providing an initial amount of £480m to resume the pending work. The vehicles are primarily assembled at General Dynamics’ Merthyr Tydfil facility.

The future payments under this programme will be made in accordance with the updated schedule and will depend on the progress of the remaining trials. It will be ‘conditional’ on the delivery of compliant and deployable Ajax platforms.

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said: “Having worked closely with General Dynamics to address the issues, I am pleased to say that we are making progress and are now on course to see the delivery of a suite of hundreds of battle-ready vehicles for the British Army.”

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This programme started in 2010 and requires General Dynamics to deliver a total of 589 Ajax vehicles in six different variants.

According to a UK Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) report from June 2022, the Ajax vehicles programme is several years behind and was initially slated to enter service by 2017.

The updated schedule will allow the Ajax fleet to achieve initial operating capability (IOC) between July and December 2025 and full operational capability (FOC) between October 2028 and September 2029.

The IOC milestone will deliver a ‘trained and deployable squadron’ while the FOC will indicate that the British Army has successfully trained and transformed its forces to work with Ajax vehicles.

Once FOC is achieved, the platforms will provide Armoured Cavalry capabilities to the army’s Deep Reconnaissance Strike Brigade and two Armoured Brigade Combat Teams.