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New British Light Armored Vechile


Kentucky-roughrider

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The SIngapore Air Force is one of the largest users of F-16s in the world, ...

After the USA, Taiwan, S. Korea, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, the UAE & formerly (more bought & greater numbers operated in the past) the Netherlands & Belgium.

 

Singapore has bought about as many F-16s as Denmark or Norway, though it has more currently operational than either of them.

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I hink they are thinking if not designing a version of this vehicle with a 120 mm gun as a replacement for the Challenger, personally I think that would be as much a mistake as trying to replace the M1A2 with a MGS Striker or a M8 Thunderbolt (the version with a 120mm gun)

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I hink they are thinking if not designing a version of this vehicle with a 120 mm gun as a replacement for the Challenger, personally I think that would be as much a mistake as trying to replace the M1A2 with a MGS Striker or a M8 Thunderbolt (the version with a 120mm gun)

We were talking about this on ARRSE but specifically on the topic of the 40mm CTA; very laudable weapon but why? Just us and the French using it and Warrior could have stayed at 30mm ish with a more common weapon system but the benefits of stab and automatic loading. Pretty obvious they expect these vehicles to operate without tanks. Watch for an ATGW add on.

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To me, the big issue with the 40mm CTA is the failure to sell it to anyone else. It seems such a good idea that it's disappointing that nobody else has bought it.

 

Maybe the French will succeed in selling AFVs fitted with it, but given the recent record of British AFV sales (lack of), I have little hope of us selling it packaged with an AFV. We need to persuade someone else to fit it to their AFVs, which they're selling abroad.

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Yeah, but this time it started out rather differently. Partnership with another country with a good record of AFV sales, aimed at a market bigger than just the Royal Armoured Corps, with no features which would obviously limit it to the British army, & launched at a time when the UK was still (or just had been) exporting AFVs, & was involved in some international & potentially exportable projects which the gun might suit.

 

Then along came what I think is the longest period of sheer lunacy in British AFV procurement, in which we pretty much closed down our AFV production, spent a billion quid or so on projects which didn't lead to a single operational vehicle, pulled out of international projects which have succeeded without us, started & abandoned our own projects apparently at random, bought off the shelf stuff to meet urgent needs which we'd previously written off as irrelevant, & in general, convinced the rest of the world that we'd given up & there was no point in paying any attention to what we were doing.

 

All the while, the CTA gun was chugging along in the background, proceeding painfully slowly (short of resources?), but getting there eventually. It's pretty much the nearest thing to a bright spot. It'd be a terrible shame not to make proper use of it.

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I think that the 40 mm CTA cannon is not used wider in NATO or outside of it has mostly to do with the fact that most NATO members have bought new IFV (CV90 variants mostly) in recent years. The CTA just came a bit late to the race and all the armys had already settled on a different cannon.

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There are numerous problems with UK government procurement in general but with MoD in particular.

 

I think we've probably moaned about them all many times in here already, and the problems faced by the UK MoD are little different to those seen in other countries.

 

- Strategic budgets set by governments who do not think about the cost of the military commitments they are making

- Strategic budgets interfered with by inter-service rivalry.

- Political constituencies driving procurement selection to "safeguard jobs" without having a cost model that covers that aspect.

- Political infighting in oversight committees causing unwarranted bad publicity

- Government changes resulting in cancellations for short-term political gain rather than for the nation's strategic interests.

- Cronyism

- Lobbying and outright blackmail by major contractors.

- Ministerial incompetence

- Civil Servant job protectionism

- Ideological decision making wrt privatisation and outsourcing.

- Union stupidity

- Managerial incompetence (two sorts - general inability to do any kind of job well and the MBA-inspired "do what looks good short term so I can keep one job move ahead of the catastrophe my short-term thinking leads to)

- Mission creep.

- Requirements gallop

- Absence of credible existential threat. (A good thing, right?)

 

I culd go o nand on.

sound like a few of the jobs I have worked on

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I think that the 40 mm CTA cannon is not used wider in NATO or outside of it has mostly to do with the fact that most NATO members have bought new IFV (CV90 variants mostly) in recent years. The CTA just came a bit late to the race and all the armys had already settled on a different cannon.

 

Meanwhile the French are trying to sell it on the foreign market. ;)

 

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Of course they try, that is the point of having a weapons factory. ;) But how many projects are there at the moment that ask for a machine cannon and have not yet settled on a design? And they must be able to buy french/british, too.

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UK has never had any great enthusiasm for fully automatic cannon in light AFVs. It's also a truism that UK has quite a good record of focussing on the terminal effects of munitions, instead of the more common practice of getting terribly excited about the firing device. The current cannon is 30mm but it is at the end of its life, and technology has moved on. Hence it is now possible to fit a 40mm cannon into a fairly light AFV. Only a fool or a parade-ground army wouldn't do it. Tough on those who recently backed older technology.

 

Re procurement practices, I think many of the preceding posts area tad under-informed and rely too heavily on hysterical tabloid journalism. If there has been a fault in UK I'd suggest the main issues are ambitious requirements (understandable for >25+ yrs service starting up to 10 years in the future) and optimistic budget estimating by the customer. There are no simple fixes for either of these problems apart from buying 15 year old technology of the shelf, and sometimes this is OK.

 

An interesting up to the minute example is the very recent UK purchase of new personal load carrying equipment, comprehensive global competitive trials of existing equipment and products from four competitors. Won by a well known (amongst the hiking fraternity) Israeli company, soldiers doing the trials highly impressed.

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Back then when Yugoslavia evaluated Scimitar in '70s 30mm Rarden was estimated as very accurate and clip loading was considered adequate for recce vehicle that would most usually fire only one or two clips before getting out of fight.

I however get impression that on IFV it is far from a perfect weapon and that it got on Warrior either as cost cutting measure or due the "get it fielded already" thinking.

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I'm not entirely happy that my 20+ years experience of being on the receiving end of UK government procurement practices is considered by one to be "under-informed and rely(ing) too heavily on hysterical tabloid journalism", but nigelfe is entitled to his own opinion, of course.

 

I've outlined in bullet form everything that I have personally seen in hte programmes of which I have visibility, YMMV, but the fact is that we have a track record of at best sub-optimal procurement, failure as a norm and outright incompetence as the ultimate expression of the failures.

 

That said, in general the UOR procurements seem to have avoided most of the failures - I suspect because they left no time for the indecision, political manoeuvring, empire-building and petty horseshit that makes up the snivelling servants' daily diet. Maybe with the redundancy axe falling with ever increasing efficiency on the laziest elements, things will improve, for a while.

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I spent most of my time as a tanker and my brief stint in the Infantry (mortor squad leader) was in an Army Reserve light infantry unit so I don't have any real first hand knowledge, but since it's so common I assume that most armies find it worthwhile.

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Unlike DB's wild assertions, in my over 25 yrs svc I've been pretty happy with the issued equipment. I've also looked at what various allies had and can't remember ever seeing any rough equivalents that were notably better. In fact compared to most of their allies UK equipment was often ahead of the game, obviously there were items that remained in service well past their used by dates, Larkspur springs to mind.

 

Turning to 30mm RARDEN, apart from the inboard space issue, I think it also reflected the long standing UK aversion to automatic weapons. They may be OK in undertrained conscript armies, but the established UK view was that single aimed rounds were usually more effective, and that professional armies could do this. It goes back to 1914!

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Turning to 30mm RARDEN, apart from the inboard space issue, I think it also reflected the long standing UK aversion to automatic weapons. They may be OK in undertrained conscript armies, but the established UK view was that single aimed rounds were usually more effective, and that professional armies could do this. It goes back to 1914!

 

It goes back a bit longer than that. There was initial resistance to issuing magazine rifles in the 1880s on the grounds that soldiers would use up their ammunition too fast. When issued they were equipped with magazine cut offs and were intended to be used single-loaded with the magazine held in reserve for special occasions.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee-Enfield#mediaviewer/File:SMLEAction.jpg

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