Expert Witness Journal Issue 63 October 2025 - Flipbook - Page 112
The Ajax Programme:
Lessons in Risk and the
Value of Expert Assurance
The Ajax armoured vehicle programme was intended to be a transformative step for the British
Army: a fleet of six advanced, fully digitised vehicles providing cutting-edge surveillance,
reconnaissance, and support capabilities. However, as the National Audit Office (NAO) details
in its 2022 report, the programme has instead become a cautionary tale of how complex defence
procurement can falter when risk management, technical requirements, and supplier oversight
are not robustly assured from the outset. The consequences include years of delay, spiralling costs,
and critical safety issues, most notably, unresolved noise and vibration problems that have directly
affected the health of Army personnel.
At the heart of Ajax’s troubles lies the drive to deliver
a bespoke solution bristling with new capabilities, but
without sufficient maturity in the underlying technologies or a clear understanding of how they would
integrate. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) specified
around 1,200 capability requirements for each of the
six Ajax variants. While innovation is vital in defence
modernisation, the result was a system so complex
that even the Department and General Dynamics
Land Systems UK (GDLS-UK) struggled to fully understand how components would work together. For
example, the cannon’s design was not mature at contract award, yet its integration was pivotal for the
vehicle’s intended capability.
be integrated onto the Ajax vehicle. The programme
quickly exhausted its schedule contingency and became mired in disputes over technical standards and
acceptance criteria.
Perhaps the most damaging failing has been the inability to anticipate and control the noise and vibration hazards that have rendered the vehicles unsafe
for crew. Despite early indications of excessive vibration and reports from crews as early as 2017, these issues were not prioritised until 2020. By September
2021, the MoD had imposed 27 limitations of use on
Ajax vehicles, 22 of which were safety-related and 11
critical to achieving even initial operating capability.
Testing was insufficiently rigorous and failed to reflect
real-world conditions, ultimately forcing the MoD to
halt progress until solutions could be agreed.
This lack of clarity led to a continual churn of design
changes, 1,897 in total between 2015 and 2021, each
adding delay, cost, and risk. The NAO noted that neither the Department nor GDLS-UK fully understood
some components’ specifications or how they would
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The programme also suffered from fragmented
accountability. The contract intended to transfer financial risk to the contractor, but in practice led to
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