Fresh evidence for the AFV inquiry today, including commentary from GD, which is good to see. First a much needed progress update on Ajax delivery

Programme delays are cited as being down to four core areas - demanding requirements, the CT40 cannon, atrophy of UK AFV industrial skills base, and COVID-19

Requirements is a familiar one. As observed before, unusual decision to run development and production concurrently brought obvious problems as issues identified and design adjusted. New requirements inserted as recently as 2019 have not helped schedule

The cannon, which was explicitely drawn out as a significant aggravating factor to WCSPs slow progress in LM's evidence is cited here too. Late delivery of weapons, continual design changes and evolving performance characteristics cited as major issues that impact whole vehicle

The impact of the cannon is cited at 18 months of an overall 20 months delay to the programme, so they're certainly pinning the major issues to it, perhaps moreso than LM did. One wonders what, if any, issue the French are having while UKs two CT40 programmes are struggling

Lack of industrial base is a logical extension of lack of investment in UK AFV sector for better part of 25yrs. Interestingly RBSL's evidence states enduring strong AFV skillbase, one can only assume BAE secured the few remaining experts and admittedly was #1 in UK historically

COVID-19 seems a pretty easy target, given it has only impacted the past 6 months on a programme years behind schedule, but its certainly a contemporary factor that has and will continue to impact schedules, particularly for long lead items

Some nice additional capabilities they would like to pitch in to enhance UK gaps. Most were capabilities in the original FRES programme scope, but slowly chopped away over the years

There is of course much more in the written evidence document, just a few highlights that jumped out to me on first read #miltwitter