CMOR wrote:Luke jones wrote:CMOR wrote:They're much more likely to get the turrets if Warrior CSP does not go forward, though....which I would have thought is quite an attractive option at this point. You're getting a wheeled, modern, well-protected IFV, and even if the integration costs are a crazy £400 million, you're still saving £400 million (£800 million being the estimate for the production costs of Warrior CSP at this point).
I agree the Army buying Boxer as is makes absolutely no sense, but hey, it's Army procurement, nothing makes sense.
But going down that road means you are using a huge budget to do the same thing.
Whichever way you look at it, Warrior upgraded is half the price of Boxer, and thats the Boxer without the turret.
Picking up 500+ Boxer is serious cash.
If they upgraded 500 Warrior instead they would literally save billions of the Boxer budget.
The saving could pay for all 220 Chally to get upgraded not the rumoured 150 and maybe an upgrade on AS90 too.
Add the Ajax on order into 4 recce regiments and you have the basis of 3 full fat armoured brigades.
I would rather be sat in a Warrior with a 40mm turret than a Boxer with 50cal any day of the week.
I think the way to look at it is this: the Army has 4 or 5 big things it needs or plans, and doesn't have the money to pay for all of them, so something has to give:
1. Ajax. (3.5 billion + VAT)
2. Boxer. (£2.8 billion)
3. Warrior CSP. (£800 million at least, maybe more like £1 billion in reality)
4. Challenger 2 LEP. (£1.3 billion)
5. Artillery modernization. (£????, currently unfunded requirements left, right, & centre)
Challenger 2 LEP seems fairly non-discretionary; having thought about it quite a bit, and gone back and forth a few times, I think gapping tanks for 10+ years is probably not prudent, so the LEP needs to go forward, and may as well be done properly (with a whole new turret).
While cancelling the Boxer order certainly saves you more money than cancelling Warrior CSP, I think the fact that you're still getting a vehicle with a tired hull and inadequate powerpack, versus a brand-new, highly deployable modern vehicle, pushes me towards thinking that over life course of the respective vehicles you're probably saving money in the long term by going with Boxer and putting the turrets planned for Warrior on it. Let's say we save 500 million-ish here.
So we come to Ajax, which is the biggest single expense, and arguably the dodgiest in terms of actual utility. It adds back in all the deployability problem that the Boxer purchase is supposed to help solve, and the planned usage of Ajax in the Strike concept is just incoherent for this & other reasons. If you're looking to save a lot of money to fund other requirements/please the Treasury, this giant and very out-of-place order is probably where I'd go, other than Warrior CSP. Do you really need quite so many command variants, & so many scouts?
The alternative, as you say, is to scrap the Boxer order and the Strike concept and revert to conventional armoured brigades, with Ajax plugging back into that role. You save some money, for sure, but you've got a very substantial deployability problem, and a decent chunk of your force is going to hit the same obsolescence problems in 10 years or so that are bedevilling you now.