First 50 vehicles, costing nearly £10m each, finally ready to deploy to Nato’s eastern flank, where drones now dominate
Britain’s military has announced the first delivery of Ajax armoured vehicles, eight years behind schedule and amid questions about their relevance as cheap drones dominate the battlefields of Ukraine.
The junior defence minister Luke Pollard said the first 50 vehicles, costing nearly £10m each, were ready to deploy on Nato’s eastern flank, though he acknowledged the problems of the past when delivery deadlines of 2017, 2020 and 2021 were all missed.
“There a lot of lessons we can learn,” Pollard said at an Ajax manufacturing site in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales. The Ajax took “many, many years to contract … and we need to cut that hugely [to] only a few months”, he added.
“Our mission as a country is to support our Nato allies, and in particular to secure the eastern flank,” the minister said, although there were no specific announcements about the use of a vehicle whose long delays had become a military embarrassment.
