Acceptance of Ajax vehicles from General Dynamics has restarted after more than 30 soldiers fell ill while operating the tracked reconnaissance vehicle last year. Defence minister Luke Pollard said he had agreed to resume acceptance once the Army Safety Investigation Team completed its review and found no single cause behind the symptoms.
Pollard said the safety of personnel was non-negotiable and that all soldiers involved had returned to normal duties following Exercise Titan Storm. He said the majority of those who became unwell suffered temporary symptoms, and added that the decision to restart acceptance came after the investigation concluded there was no single causal mechanism for what happened.
The findings point instead to a mix of factors. The Army said those included noise and vibration, even though the levels were below legal exposure limits, along with technical issues linked to the condition of the platform during the exercise. Environmental and human factors also played a part, including differences in training and experience, cold exposure and the air quality inside the Ajax vehicle itself.
The programme had already been under pressure because of crew safety concerns, and Pollard said the Army would not simply put the vehicles back into service as before. The 23 vehicles used on Exercise Titan Storm will be treated separately and will not be returned to soldiers until it is judged safe to do so. He said the Ministry of Defence was considering a phased approach to restarting the Ajax programme rather than a full immediate return.
That plan would begin with trials using the current version of Ajax, but only with a limited number of vehicles and under very controlled circumstances and maintenance regimes. A second phase would bring changes to air filtration, crew compartment heating and the electrical power generation system, which Pollard said were among the main themes identified after the exercise.
Pollard said the Army had been engaging directly with soldiers throughout the process and that their experiences were shaping what happens next. He said the service would also borrow lessons from the aviation industry by building a common thread between design, maintenance and operation, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the episode that left the programme in limbo last year. The restart answers the immediate question: Ajax is going back into acceptance, but only under tighter controls and with major changes still to come.
