Still, a man portable high power laser is kind of cool.
My guess as to the power? To my not particularly trained eye, I would guess about 1kW.
„Laser weapons“ powered by a backpack energy source have appeared in the Russian Armed Forces pic.twitter.com/Z5aE2JnYIg
— Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) August 23, 2026
As to the tech? It could just be batteries, or maybe a fuel cell and a capacitor.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯General Dynamics got over $½ billion to manage a new factory producing 155mm howitzer shells. It has yet to deliver a single round.
The Pentagon ain't asking for its money back either.
A robot was on fire. Again.
It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.
Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”
Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.
The situation never improved. The U.S. Army, which funded the factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report from the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July.
The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
To quote Samuel L. Jackson, "Motherf%$#er!"
It appears that Trump has another issue with the New Ford Class aircraft carriers, he thinks that the the location of the island toward the stern is ugly, and wants it changed.
This is even stupider than his order to remove the electronic catapults on the new class. (The electronic catapults, arresting gear, and lifts have all been a bit of a cluster f%$#, but we're well past the limits of the sunk cost fallacy there)
The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The service is evaluating the feasibility of moving the multistory tower that acts as the carrier’s command center farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to resemble older vessels, the officials said. The review, which has not been previously reported, is in response to Trump’s concerns about the “look” of the new Ford-class ships, where the tower is near the rear, these people said.
The timing and extent of the Navy’s evaluation is unclear, with current and former officials cautioning that the service was concerned that such a change would require significant time and money. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.
Moving that command center, known as the “island,” would be the second major design change prompted by the president, who on Thursday issued a national security memorandum directing the Navy to develop a plan to revert to older steam-powered catapults on future carriers. The systems help launch jets off the ships’ flight decks.
Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.The Navy also examined the issue during his first term as president, said a former senior U.S. official. A study found that moving the island could cost billions of dollars in redesign costs and significantly delay the program, this person said.
The stupid, it burns.
European countries are looking for alternate sources for weapons because they are concerned about the misuse of ITAR regulations by the United States.
The use of American subsystems has always been complex for European defense contractors, since it gives Washington a veto over potential exports, and even before Trump, these limits were frequently applied more for industrial protection rather than security concerns.
Today, there is absolutely no trust remaining.
US firms seeking to tap into ballooning European defense budgets are finding a new roadblock emerging: a desire by European capitals to avoid US control of weapon sales.
There have long been concerns about how American International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) restrict foreign governments’ ability to sell or transfer domestically built weapons that contain components originating in the US. And that concern is becoming harder to ignore as skepticism surrounding US and European relations has led to a serious push on the continent to move away from buying weapons with US-controlled parts, according to a half-dozen people who talked to Breaking Defense.………
In its simplest terms, ITAR is a set of US government rules to regulate the export and import of defense and military items on the United States Munitions List (USML), including services and technical data.
Scott Wise, a partner at Crowell & Moring and a member of the law firm’s international trade group, said the bulk of foreign governments’ concerns on ITAR is the “see-through rule.” That rule, he told Breaking Defense, means ITAR regulators track the US-made components inside a foreign-built weapon system and control where those parts go and what they’re used for.
Consequences.
Even if this were to make it into the final bill, the Pentagon would never enforce it.
Just look at the fate of the march in rights in the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The have never been used.
Still it is nice that the problem has been identified.
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved a must-pass bill with a provision that could bar some defense contractors from executing stock buybacks or paying dividends unless they have Defense Department approval.
The measure, an annual bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, was approved 18-9 in a closed-door committee meeting last week. The stock buyback provision’s inclusion in the committee’s bill greatly increases its chances of becoming law and sets up a potential sea change in how the Pentagon interacts with some of the country’s largest businesses..........
The provision in the bill, Section 815, specifically would prohibit the Pentagon from entering into contracts with contractors unless the contractor agrees in writing not to “purchase an equity security of such entity, or any parent entity of such entity, that is listed on a national securities exchange” or “pay dividends or make any other capital distribution with respect to the equity securities of the entity.”
The provision would take effect June 15, 2027. The defense secretary could agree to waive the limitation if the contractor provides a “qualifying defense investment plan.”
The F-35 has only a 25% mission read rate.
No wonder Iran won the war.
The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter’s readiness rates continued to decline through fiscal 2025, with the fleet’s full mission capable rate falling to 25%, according to a new Government Accountability Office report released Thursday.
The mission capable rate, which measures the percentage of time aircraft can perform at least one of their tasked missions, dropped from 67% in fiscal 2021 to 44% in fiscal 2025, GAO found.
The full mission capable rate, the share of time aircraft can perform all assigned missions, slid from 38% to 25% over the same period.
Air Force officials attributed part of the fiscal 2025 drop to new jets that couldn’t perform their missions because of software delays, along with scarce parts and corrosion problems, according to the report.
“The F-35 is DOD’s most costly weapon system, but it hasn’t met performance goals and costs to sustain the aircraft continue to increase,” GAO wrote in a summary accompanying the report.
The Military Industrial Complex is now eating itself.
The French and German future fighter project has been shut down over disputes over workshare.
This is not a surprise. Dassault has always insisted on having complete control of so-called, "Joint," projects, with its partners getting little beyond serving as the program's banker.
One need only look at the two modern examples of cross border aviation projects that actually reached production, the SEPECAT Jaguar, (A joint venture of Breuget and British Aircraft Corporation) and the Concorde. (A joint venture of Sud Aviation and British Aircraft Corporation)
You will notice that the Dassault had no part in any of this.
More than 40 years after France withdrew from the Future European Fighter Aircraft program, Paris and Berlin have called it quits on their effort to work on a sixth-generation combat aircraft in a partnership also involving Spain.
………
Dassault, which was the industrial lead on the fighter program, a year ago voiced displeasure with the program’s structure. The company said it lacked sufficient control and wanted change. That set off months of industrial bickering. The issue came to a head with a new phase of the development program that was due to start in October.
………
Geopolitics also collided with the FCAS. When the governments shook hands, their ambition to develop a fighter was more an industrial and jobs undertaking than a military necessity. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 drove a change in mindset, making defense more central to French and German motivations. That also crystallized requirements differences. France needs a fighter that is carrier-capable and can deliver nuclear weapons. Germany does not.
………
Fighter requirements are likely to be reset. Germany and Spain are no longer driven to shoehorn their needs into those of France, which were constrained by carrier compatibility. Throughout the program, Dassault and Airbus concept drawings for the fighter differed, suggesting the gap in requirements definition.
………
When an Anglo-French project to develop a variable-geometry combat aircraft failed in the 1960s after Paris pulled out, London pursued a program with Germany and Italy that ultimately produced the Panavia Tornado. The French withdrawal from the pan-European Future European Fighter Aircraft came two decades later, birthing the Rafale on one side and the Eurofighter Typhoon on the other. In the 2010s, Paris and London explored development of an uncrewed combat air vehicle. The two split when the UK voted to leave the EU, spurring France and Germany to explore the FCAS instead.
Rather unsurprisingly, Germany is working with Spain to resurrect the program.
In a significant development for Europe’s future air combat ambitions, Airbus is trying to restart the program to develop a sixth-generation combat jet, now under German and Spanish leadership. This comes less than a week after the Franco-German-led New Generation Fighter (NGF) effort effectively collapsed in its original form, amid acrimony between Paris and Berlin. The NGF was planned as the crewed centerpiece of the pan-European Future Combat Air System (FCAS), which Airbus, as the leading European aerospace corporation, now hopes to get back on track.
Partnering with Dassault on a fighter project is a losing proposition.
Between the lame FF(X), the F/A-XX games and the battleship effwittery, all I can say is that the last time anyone screwed the Navy as hard as Mango Musso, Kegs, and the Ruler Of The Queen's Navee are doing, the Navy had to get the Air Force to take him out. pic.twitter.com/i1kL6zoII5
— Bill Sweetman (@ValkStrategy) April 22, 2026
Mr. Sweetman, you just won the internet.
This is f%$#ing brilliant.
Emil Michael, who is the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering made millions of dollars in profits after select xAI for the Pentagon.
You remember xAI, don't you? It's Elon Musk's LLM artificial intelligence program.
You know, the one that was generating child porn.
A high-profile US defense department official who oversees the agency’s artificial intelligence efforts made a profit of up to $24m selling a private investment he held in Elon Musk’s AI company earlier this year, according to government ethics records released this month. The value of his stake totaled a maximum of a million dollars when he joined the department.
Emil Michael, who is the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering under the Trump administration, oversees negotiations with AI companies and has been pushing the defense department to rapidly increase the widespread use of AI.
Michael declared in March 2025 that he had a position in xAI valued between $500,000 and $1m.
He sold those holdings on 9 January for between $5m and $25m, according to disclosures filed with the office of government ethics (OGE). He reported that he owned the xAI shares through a company called KQ Partners. (Government financial disclosure reports are designed to show ranges of holdings, rather than precise amounts.) The increase in value amounts to a gain of between 400% and 4,800%.
xAI, which is the company behind Musk’s Grok chatbot, is not publicly traded, so it is unclear how Michael obtained his position, how it was priced or to whom he sold it.
During the period that Michael owned the xAI stock the Pentagon announced two separate agreements with the firm. In July 2025 the Pentagon chose Grok as one of four commercial providers that would help the department utilize artificial intelligence.
The level of routine corruption in the Trump administration is a complete mind-f%$#.
The first production KF-21, South Korea's stealth(ish) fighter jet, has rolled off the assembly line.
Considering that the program officially launched in 2015, this is faster than I would have anticipated.
By way of comparison, it took the US F-22 about 15 years and the US F-35 took about 20 years.
Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) has rolled out the first production KF-21 Boramae fighter jet, less than two years after construction on it began and four years after the first prototype aircraft made it maiden flight.
The aircraft, a two-seat jet carrying the serial number 26-001, rolled out at KAI’s facilities at Sacheon on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, where he said the program embodied the country’s aspirations to be reliant in self-defense, according to national news agency Yonhap.
………
The rollout was a significant development for the KF-21 program, which marked another milestone in January with the completion of its flight test program.
South Korea first conceptualized its own indigenous fighter program 25 years ago, although the final go ahead to start development was only made in 2015. Beside KAI, its development also involving stakeholders such as South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development and Korean defense giant Hanwha.
The KF-21 is considered a 4.5 generation fighter jet and will be equipped with a mix of indigenous and Western sensors and weapons in service, including the KGGB precision glide bomb and European MBDA Meteor air-to-air missile, according to South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA).
Maybe the DoD should look at the RoK's defense procurement practices.
If you are not a plane nerd who remembers British procurement in the 1980s, I will mention a rather peculiar moment in British procurement history, when the British variant of the Tornado strike fighter was delivered without radar because it was not ready.
Instead, it was delivered with concrete ballast in the nose.
The aircraft, or its radar depending on contemporaneous accounts, was nicknamed, "Blue Circle," after a popular brand of concrete at the time.
Well it appears that the latest configuration of the F-35 is being delivered with ballast in place of radar.
This is not because the new APG-85 radar is not ready, but rather because these aircraft were made with mounts for the older APG-81 radar.
The whole JSF program really is a complete cluster-f%$#:Radar mountings in the nose of the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter are different for the current AN/APG-81 by Northrop Grumman and the future AN/APG-85 radar, also by Northrop Grumman–a difference which has helped complicate fielding of the new radar which was to deliver with F-35 Lot 17 but may now instead deliver later, possibly in Lot 20 in the next two years.
“The APG-81 is different than the APG-85, and therefore delivering the aircraft, as currently configured, with an APG-85 radar versus an APG-81 radar is challenging,” Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said in an interview off the House floor on Feb. 3.
“The bulkhead configuration is key because for both of the radars, they are very different,” he said. “Remember, the bulkhead configuration allows the placement of the radar towards the attitude of the array, and the attitude of the array makes all the difference in the world about how the radar operates.”
A dual mount to accommodate either the APG-85 or the APG-81 would take two years to field, a source told sister publication Defense Daily.
“I know all about it, but the delivery of the aircraft is classified,” Wittman said when asked whether he knew if it were true that Lockheed Martin has been delivering F-35s to the military services since last June without radars, including all F-35As. “I can’t speak to the condition of the aircraft so you’ll have to go to the Air Force, the customer, and ask them about that.”
To say that this is f%$#ed up and sh%$ is an understatement.
Because declaring a new ship class to be a "Battleship", (it isn't one) and naming the class after yourself seems to indicate profound feelings of inadequacy.
The entire concept of a 30,000 ton surface combatant is absurd.
First, given the fiascos of the Zumwalt's, Littoral Combat Ships, and the Constellation Class frigates, it is unlikely that this would progress beyond the laying of a keel.
Second, this is not a battleship. It is armed with 5 inch rifled guns, which is well under the firepower of any ship called a battleship.
It is public masturbation masquerading as defense acquisition.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Donald Trump has announced plans for the US navy to build a new generation of warships – known as “Trump-class”.
The ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship, the president said on Monday. The project will begin with construction of two such battleships and eventually be expanded to 20 to 25 new vessels.
John Phelan, the navy secretary, added: “Our adversaries will know, when the Trump-class USS Defiant appears on the horizon, American victory at sea is inevitable.”
Past battleship classes were typically named after US states. But Trump, whose name already adorns many hotels and golf clubs, is currently on what critics describe as a narcissistic spree.
Narcissistic spree? Ya think?
I will note that the Chinese have no chance of sinking any of the Trump Class ships, because you cannot sink vaporware.
This has as much credibility as Trump's tax returns.
The lobbyists strike again.
Once again, lobbyists for the military-industrial complex win, and right to repair for the military was cut from the latest military spending bill.
F%$# the lobbyists and the so-called moderates who did this.
Congress has released the final version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and critics have been quick to point out that previously proposed rules giving the US military the right to repair its equipment without having to rely on contractors have gone missing.
The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair essential equipment. Both of those provisions were stripped from the final joint-chamber reconciled version of the bill, published Monday, right-to-repair advocates at the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed out in a press release.
Support for the military's right to repair is so broad, and it's one of the few issues where liberal Democrats in Congress are aligned with President Trump. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Sheehy (R-MT) even introduced a bill over the summer that would have legislated "fair and reasonable access" to necessary parts and information that would enable the US military to fix gear faster than farmers with broken John Deere tractors. That bill, referred to the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, hasn't budged since.
The real problem is that the DMCA makes this a favored profit source for too many business. It needs to be relealed.
In any other line of work, the driving philosophy of tech startups would be better defined as fraud.
As we saw with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, this is basically fraud premised on the idea with a sprinkling of fairy dust (or VC funding) you can actually make something that resembles an ongoing business.
The thing is, when you are dealing with meat space, things like diagnostic tests (Theranos) or military autonomous drones simply do not work.
When defense procurement wonks say that systems should be developed on the Silly-Con Valley model, they miss this.
In this case, I am referring to Anduril, a company that is aggressively selling autonomous autonomous vehicles with little success.
The company founder, Palmer Luckey, made his money by creating VR goggles company Oculus (borrowing tech from another company) and then selling out to Facebook, who wanted the technology for their incredibly abortive foray into the, "Metaverse."
How this makes him qualified for anything beyond technology hype is beyond me, as the string of failures of his company projects show. (Actually, I do know how this makes him qualified, he has been a Donald Trump supporter since at least 2016)
The Navy was attempting to launch and recover more than 30 drone boats from a combat ship off the coast of California in May when more than a dozen of the uncrewed vessels failed to carry out their missions. The boats had rejected their inputs and automatically idled as a fail-safe, making them “dead” in the water.
The botched experiment quickly became a potential hazard to other vessels in the exercise. Military personnel scrambled overnight to clean up the mess, towing the boats to shore until 9 a.m. the next day.
The drone boats were relying on autonomy software called Lattice, made by California-based Anduril Industries. The Navy said the exercise was handled safely, but the incident alarmed Navy personnel, who said in a routine follow-up report that company representatives had misguided the military. In comments that were unusual for such a report, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, four sailors warned of “continuous operational security violations, safety violations, and contracting performer misguidances (Anduril Industries).” If the software configuration wasn’t immediately corrected and vetted, they wrote, there would be “extreme risk to force and potential for loss of life.”
(emphasis mine)
BTW, this behavior is classic, "Fake it till you make it."
Since its founding in 2017, Anduril Industries has become one of the hottest companies in a crowded field of defense-tech startups, promising to deliver hardware and software that will usher in a new era of autonomous warfare and equip the U.S. military with the speed that only a startup can offer. The privately held company was valued at more than $30 billion in its last funding round and has scored an impressive number of military contracts to build prototypes of everything from unmanned jet fighters to mixed-reality headsets to battlefield-management systems.
Yeah, this is gonna end well.
………
The startup’s fast-moving approach comes with its share of setbacks—during closed military exercises, at private drone ranges and even on the battlefield in Ukraine.
In California, a mechanical issue damaged the engine in Anduril’s unmanned jet fighter Fury in a ground test over the summer ahead of a critical first flight for the Air Force. In August, a test involving its Anvil counterdrone system caused a 22-acre fire in Oregon. And in the exercises with unmanned boats over the summer off the coast of California, Anduril’s Lattice software struggled to command and control vessels.
Anduril’s only real battlefield experience—in Ukraine—has been marred by problems as well, including vulnerability to enemy jamming, according to former employees and others familiar with the systems in Ukraine. Some front-line soldiers of Ukraine’s SBU security service, for instance, found that their Altius loitering drones crashed and failed to hit their targets. The drones were so problematic that they stopped using them in 2024 and haven’t fielded them since, according to people familiar with the matter.
That the Ukrainians were unwilling to continue to use the drones is telling. They are grabbing onto any system that works at all, but Andruil's crap was below the level of their desparation.
To quote Richard Feynmann, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
As an FYI, Feynmann's quote comes from the last line of his report on the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. He was commenting on how NASA (and the rest of the investigation board) was choosing public relations over the reality behind the accident.
It's gotten to the point that the US Navy cannot develop ships any larger than a dinghy.
Case in the point the recently canceled Constellation-class Frigate Program.
They took an existing platform, the FREMM, which has over 20 ships in service and almost 60 planned for eventual service, and decided to load it up with every bell and whistle that they could think of, resulting in delays, immature technologies, and ballooning cost and weight.
So only the 2 which have been laid down will be built, and the rest have been canceled.
The Navy is walking away from the Constellation-class frigate program to focus on new classes of warships the service can build faster, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced Tuesday on social media.
Under the terms negotiated with shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the Wisconsin shipyard will continue to build Constellation (FFG-62) and Congress (FFG-63) but will cancel the next four planned warships.
“We are reshaping how the Navy builds its fleet. Today, I can announce the first public action is a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program,” reads the statement from Phelan. “The Navy and our industry partners have reached a comprehensive framework that terminates, for the Navy’s convenience, the last four ships of the class, which have not begun construction.”
………
The Navy awarded the contract to build what would become the Constellation to Marinette in 2020 following about six years of deliberation after the Navy determined it would truncate the two classes of Littoral Combat Ships. Marinette previously built the Freedoms as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin before competing for the frigate program on its own. The Navy decided that the competitors to base the warship on an existing parent design to speed up the design of the program. The Navy selected the FREMM multi-mission frigate, already operated by the French and Italian navies, as the parent via a Naval Sea Systems Command rapid requirements process.
However, once the complex design work commenced, the Navy and Marinette had to make vast changes to the design in order to meet stricter U.S. survivability standards. The delays resulted in an estimated three-year setback in the delivery of the first ship from 2026 to 2029 at a cost of about $1.5 billion.
The US Military Industrial Complex is a bigger threat to US security than the Soviet Union was at the height of the Cold War.
More specifically, I support Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, who wants to include an explicit right to repair on all current and future defense procurement contracts for his branch.
On the other side of this dispute are lobbyists for defense contractors, who maintain that allowing solodiers sailors and marines to maintain their own equipment would, "Stifle innovation."
Nope, it's just corrupt rent seeking and does damage to our military:
So we’ve noted repeatedly how there’s a real push afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.
And among those states, not one has actually enforced them despite a wide array of ongoing corporate offenses (though to be fair to states there is kind of a lot going on).
Back in June we mentioned how Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll had committed to including right-to-repair requirements in all existing and future Army contracts with manufacturers. Some very light language to this effect was to be included in the latest National Defense Authorization Act by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Tim Sheehy of Montana.
But despite the bipartisan popularity of right to repair reforms, companies aren’t keen on losing money via a government crackdown on their grift. The various policy and lobbying fronts for America’s defense contractors have been busy this fall trying to frame the modest reforms as an affront on innovation to scuttle the reforms as the House and Senate debate over bill versions:………
Pretty typical military industrial complex graft. Which we could easily fix. If the U.S. wasn’t quite so grotesquely corrupt.
I need to remmeber that term, "Grossly corrupt."
Britain is rolling out a new armored fighting vehicle, the Ajax, and in a recent series of tests, noise levels were so loud that some troops participating in the exercise are still unfit for duty because of the noise levels.
British soldiers who tested the new Ajax armoured fighting vehicle in the summer were so badly affected they can no longer be deployed overseas.
Around five soldiers were medically downgraded and at least two of those are still suffering to the extent they can no longer do their job properly, it is understood.
Ajax armoured fighting vehicles, of which there are six variants, are designed to find the enemy from five miles away, before infantry units and other assets deploy behind them. Using a range of cameras and sensors, the all-terrain vehicle is designed so its crew of three do not have to exit, remaining inside for a week if necessary.
Luke Pollard, the defence procurement minister, said last week that issues with the £10 million reconnaissance vehicles were “firmly in the past”. The £5.5 billion Ajax programme, which first began in 2010, has been delayed for years as trials were paused after hundreds of soldiers suffered hearing loss and other injuries.………
The MoD commissioned Clive Sheldon KC to conduct a review into what went wrong with the Ajax programme. He found in 2023 that the failings that led to the programme going wrong were “systemic and institutional”. Warnings about the safety of the vehicle were played down or ignored, Sheldon found.
About ten soldiers who took part in a training exercise on Ajax vehicles in the summer, weeks before the vehicle was declared ready for operations, were sent to hospital for problems including serious headaches, loss of balance, motion issues and tinnitus, a defence source said.
The army refused to disclose whether the problems were ongoing but for at least two individuals health issues have persisted, The Times has been told.
………
When The Times visited General Dynamics last week, a meter on a mobile phone showed a reading of 90 decibels from a few metres away. Long or repeated exposure at sounds above 85 decibels can cause hearing loss, and employers must provide protection if that level is exceeded, according to the Health and Safety Executive.
Just as an FYI, the dB uses a logarithmic scale, so 90 dB is about 3 times the power of 85 dB.
This level of sound is insane.
I do understand how low-cost drones are giving the US military, which, if it had its way, would develop an $800,000.00 tactical paper clip.
They have discovered that the M-1 Abrams is vulnerable to systems that cost 3 or 4 orders of magnituded than their gold-plated whiz-bang.
You know what is a bad solution for this problem? Removing the .50 Cal M2 Browning machine gun and replacing it with a minigun.
First, as anyone who has tried to hunt birds can tell you, a rifle round is not a good way to take down a small flying creature.
Second, you need to have someone with an open hatch, exposed, to operate the thing.
Third, the minigun cannot do things like taking out IFVs and LAVs reliably.
And then there are the logistical issues.
Whoever signed off on this idea needs another line of work. I would suggest phone sanitizer. dog walker, or stamp licker.
It looks like a move is afoot among the Swiss polity to cancel their F-35 order.
Once again, it's tariffs.
The F-35 never made sense for the Swiss:
Seriously, the Typhoon, Rafale, Gripen, J-10 all cost less to operate, and have architectures that allow the operator to develop their own systems.
They need a relatively inexpensive fighter, and lots of well trained pike-men.
According to reports from El Pais, (translation here) the Spanish government is ending its plans to buy the F-35 from the United States.
Instead, it will buy some European fighter aircraft instead, most likely the Eurofighter Typhoon or the in-development Future Combat Air System.
This is a problem for Spain's aircraft carrier, the Juan Carlos, since it is a STOVL carrier, with a ramp in the front and no arresting gear, and as it stands now, it will not be able to maintain its AV-8B Harriers much longer.
In order to accommodate something like the Rafale-M, they would need to add an arrester gear and angled flight deck, which is a significant rebuild.
The purchase of F-35 Lightning II aircraft, the fifth-generation American stealth fighter, for the Spanish Armed Forces has been definitively shelved, according to a report published by the Spanish newspaper El PaÃs, citing government sources.
Preliminary contacts that had already begun have been suspended indefinitely. Although the government approved a 10.471 billion Euro plan last April and has committed to spending 2% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on security and defense, the decision to invest 85% of these funds in Europe is considered incompatible with acquiring an American aircraft.
………
Spain’s defense ministry never moved beyond a non-binding RFI (Request For Information) for the Lightning II. The 2023 budget even penciled in 6.25 billion Euro for “replacement aircraft for the AV-8B and C-15M, phase 2” (in other words, the Navy’s Harriers and the Air Force’s remaining F-18 Hornets). Looks like those plans are now scrapped.
That leaves the Armada (Navy) in a corner. The AV-8Bs are expected to be retired by 2030, and extending their service is no longer realistic: the aircraft are aging, and with both the USMC and Italian Navy phasing theirs out (and replacing them with the F-35B), Spain would be left as the only operator, facing a vanishing spares market. The only viable STOVL replacement is the F-35B. Passing on it would mean the Juan Carlos I loses its fixed-wing fast jet capability and reverts to helicopters only. Spanish Armada has a problem.
Maybe they could license the Yak 141 from Russia.
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A member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, and a fan of Bernie who thinks Neoliberal (DLC/New Dem) trickle down conomics sucks.Mechanical Engineer with a background in defense, electronics packaging, medical & food equipment, transportation, and manufacturing.
In my spare time (Hah!), I am the developer of the Firefox addon, bbCode for Web Extensions (bbCodeWebEx).
I have two cats, a black cat, and a gray and white long hair cat, who keep me on my toes. (Because he keeps attacking my feet)
I am a Jew and a Zionist, who is married to a woman with exquisitely bad taste in men, and I have two remarkable children with her.
