{"id":276910,"date":"2016-11-02T10:12:40","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T09:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/death-trap-uks-new-3-5bn-tank-can-only-beat-incompetent-enemies\/"},"modified":"2016-11-02T21:02:19","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T20:02:19","slug":"death-trap-uks-new-3-5bn-tank-can-only-beat-incompetent-enemies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/death-trap-uks-new-3-5bn-tank-can-only-beat-incompetent-enemies\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Death trap\u2019: UK\u2019s new \u00a33.5bn tank can only beat \u2018incompetent enemies\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"article__summary summary \">Glitches with the Ajax\u2019s advanced weaponry could leave the \u00a33.5 billion (US$4.28 billion) project heavily delayed as questions are raised over the utility of the lightly-armored vehicles against Russian artillery.<\/div>\n<div class=\"article__summary summary \"><\/div>\n<div class=\"article__text text \">\n<p>A former senior defense official told the Times on Tuesday that Ajax \u201c<em>is fine if you are operating against incompetent enemies, but if you are up against a peer enemy this thing is useless, it\u2019s a death trap<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>ritain signed a deal with US arms giant General Dynamics for nearly 600 Ajax mini-tanks in 2014 with the first deliveries expected in 2017 and the full order in the UK by 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Issues were first reported during overseas trials in 2016, with one official who recently left the Ministry of Defence (MoD) telling the paper \u201c<em>there are quite a few reasons why the program has been delayed.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He said a device attached to the turret to feed rounds into an attached weapon \u201c<em>failed<\/em>\u201d when \u201c<em>subject to vibration.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Arms firms and the MoD have rallied around the project.<\/p>\n<p>A spokesperson for BAE Systems claimed \u201c<em>deliveries were ahead of schedule,\u201d<\/em> while a Lockheed spokesperson insisted \u201c<em>early indications point to a component failure and not a design flaw.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rt.com\/uk\/364933-ajax-tank-military-faults\/?utm_source=rss&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=RSS\">Read Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Glitches with the Ajax\u2019s advanced weaponry could leave the \u00a33.5 billion (US$4.28 billion) project heavily delayed as questions are raised over the utility of the lightly-armored vehicles against Russian artillery. A former senior defense official told the Times on Tuesday that Ajax \u201cis fine if you are operating against incompetent enemies, but if you are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":276911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-276910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}