Shiny new British Army tank unable to reverse over 20 cm high sleeping plods!

cu3ed said:
Did you ever see the kinda funny TV movie about that???..I thought the entire thing was a comedy, then they tell you about it for real at the end.
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Yeah was fantastic, having worked alongside MOD procurement before I can see so many parallels.
 
adolf hamster said:
does copy-pasting an american design, somehow even managing to screw that up, then handing it to the germans to fix really count as "invented here"?

yes i know hk was british owned at the time, still german engineers doing the fixing.....
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I do think the SA80 gets an unfair amount of hate - I was Infantry for 24 years and never really had any issues with it, a lot of complaints seemed to come from support arms who just didn't use it enough to know how to get the best out of it.

My only real gripe about it would be the weight, it was already heavy before the bipod mod went onto it. M16 and AK family feel like they are toys in comparison. It is very accurate and easy to hit with at decent ranges, short length is good in tight spaces and when you are in vehicles. Needing to be fired right handed is a drawback and making the weapon ready feels strange when you first use it but you get used to that.
 
We basically took a vehicle designed in service elsewhere and weighs about 30 tons and we turn it into a bloated 40+ ton vehicle, only the inept MOD could achieve this, mind boggles what those who make the decisions are thinking.

One only needs to look at the bloody boxer programme for how idiotic they are... Well that and the challenger/arty sham.
 
We should just ask China for their designs, they're probably US blueprints obtained from Hillary's private email server anyway. :p
 
jsmoke said:
How can that be in this day and age?
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Nepotism, people getting jobs they are unfit for or ones that they dont care about. Bad leadership resulting in hiring crap people for the job etc etc.

Ultimately, it comes down to the humans that were tasked with the job being crap.
 
Jono8 said:
Nepotism, people getting jobs they are unfit for or ones that they dont care about. Bad leadership resulting in hiring crap people for the job etc etc.

Ultimately, it comes down to the humans that were tasked with the job being crap.
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Plus for some reason, whenever public procurement goes wrong, far too many people place the blame on the private builders rather than the public speccers.

As a general rule, most private companies build exactly whats been agreed, no more and no less.
 
I_M_Weasel said:
I do think the SA80 gets an unfair amount of hate - I was Infantry for 24 years and never really had any issues with it, a lot of complaints seemed to come from support arms who just didn't use it enough to know how to get the best out of it.

My only real gripe about it would be the weight, it was already heavy before the bipod mod went onto it. M16 and AK family feel like they are toys in comparison. It is very accurate and easy to hit with at decent ranges, short length is good in tight spaces and when you are in vehicles. Needing to be fired right handed is a drawback and making the weapon ready feels strange when you first use it but you get used to that.
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Stripping it back to basics, the weight alone was enough to put me off carrying it. Did my weapons handling test with it initially, wouldn’t go anywhere near one again if I had my choice.
 
jsmoke said:
How can that be in this day and age?
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Jono8 said:
Nepotism, people getting jobs they are unfit for or ones that they dont care about. Bad leadership resulting in hiring crap people for the job etc etc.

Ultimately, it comes down to the humans that were tasked with the job being crap.
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Absolutely 100% spot on. Too many genuinely bad workers at both the MOD civil service level (as expected in my experience) and sadly (but not so unsurprisingly) at the upper Military level too. I'm sure that at least some people in the project were tearing their hair out as their leadership made stupid decision after stupid decision but this is just yet another procurement nightmare which proves the current system is unfit for purpose.

Ideally it should work like this (but never does and never will) -

Army Leadership - "We want a new tank so we'll talk to the end user and ask what they want"

End User - "We want the following............XYZ"

Army leadership - "OK, MOD ask industry to submit designs for a tank with XYZ and we have ABC amount to spend"

MOD - "Industry, we want a tank with XYZ for ABC amount of money"

Industry - "Here's 2-8 designs with XYZ (or as close as we can get to it) within the ABC budget for you to test and then choose from"

MOD - "Army, here's your designs ready for testing"

Army Leadership - "End User, test these and tell us what you think?"

End User - "Design No3 is the best"

Army Leadership - "MOD, we want design No3, figure out how we pay for it and draw up the contracts."

Instead what we end up with with is a ridiculous mix of high ranking Military leadership making absurd equipment decisions as they have zero recent hands-on experience of modern equipment (most will not have touched a tank or other front line equipment in a decade plus if ever), who rarely take advice from those who have if it differs from their own pre-conceived idea's (1st hand knowledge of this!) added to a civil service who strangely seem to despise the very people they are paid to help and followed by an industry which generally (but not always) thinks they have a great idea but want the Army to fund the R&D to see if it's plausible only AFTER the Army has signed the contracts.

Some of the best kit, best designed equipment and best industry contracts have not come from these stupidly long drawn-out affairs, but instead via the "Oh sweet baby Jesus we need this kit NOW, NOW GODDAMNIT!!!" contracts that the Military call UOR's - Urgent Operational Requests - sent by troops in the field almost directly to industry bypassing the usual bureaucracy saying "We're in the poop right this second and we need something NOW" and these urgent contracts have brought better vehicles (Mastiff etc), better weapons (ACOG, Sig P226, L129A1 etc) and better industry support than almost everything else "modern" that the military have bought via the none urgent system, proving yet again that the current long winded procurement system is absolutely not fit for purpose.
 
Terminal_Boy said:
Why the MoD couldn’t just buy the latest German Marder or Israeli Merkava is beyond me.

Oh wait, it’s the old “not invented here” mentality that created the SA80.
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It's not what we had at the start of ww2 that won us the war - It's what we designed and manufactured during it.

The knowledge and infastructure behind projects like this is as valuable as the hardware it produces when it comes to prolonged warfighting - even if we do have a few shockers along the way.
 
ianh said:
Absolutely 100% spot on. Too many genuinely bad workers at both the MOD civil service level (as expected in my experience) and sadly (but not so unsurprisingly) at the upper Military level too. I'm sure that at least some people in the project were tearing their hair out as their leadership made stupid decision after stupid decision but this is just yet another procurement nightmare which proves the current system is unfit for purpose.

Ideally it should work like this (but never does and never will) -

Army Leadership - "We want a new tank so we'll talk to the end user and ask what they want"

End User - "We want the following............XYZ"

Army leadership - "OK, MOD ask industry to submit designs for a tank with XYZ and we have ABC amount to spend"

MOD - "Industry, we want a tank with XYZ for ABC amount of money"

Industry - "Here's 2-8 designs with XYZ (or as close as we can get to it) within the ABC budget for you to test and then choose from"

MOD - "Army, here's your designs ready for testing"

Army Leadership - "End User, test these and tell us what you think?"

End User - "Design No3 is the best"

Army Leadership - "MOD, we want design No3, figure out how we pay for it and draw up the contracts."

Instead what we end up with with is a ridiculous mix of high ranking Military leadership making absurd equipment decisions as they have zero recent hands-on experience of modern equipment (most will not have touched a tank or other front line equipment in a decade plus if ever), who rarely take advice from those who have if it differs from their own pre-conceived idea's (1st hand knowledge of this!) added to a civil service who strangely seem to despise the very people they are paid to help and followed by an industry which generally (but not always) thinks they have a great idea but want the Army to fund the R&D to see if it's plausible only AFTER the Army has signed the contracts.

Some of the best kit, best designed equipment and best industry contracts have not come from these stupidly long drawn-out affairs, but instead via the "Oh sweet baby Jesus we need this kit NOW, NOW GODDAMNIT!!!" contracts that the Military call UOR's - Urgent Operational Requests - sent by troops in the field almost directly to industry bypassing the usual bureaucracy saying "We're in the poop right this second and we need something NOW" and these urgent contracts have brought better vehicles (Mastiff etc), better weapons (ACOG, Sig P226, L129A1 etc) and better industry support than almost everything else "modern" that the military have bought via the none urgent system, proving yet again that the current long winded procurement system is absolutely not fit for purpose.
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So your cunning plan is to design and manufacture 8 tanks instead of 1?
 
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