Defence Special

The latest edition of Private Eye features one of it's Defence Specials. It reports on faulty chain guns on the Warrior vehicle, the difficulties of the anti-Taliban war effort in Afghanistan and the difficulties in the plan to privatise military training.

Regarding the problem with the chain gun Private Eye have this to say:

The Warrior is the tracked vehicle used to transport soldiers on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its chain gun is reloaded by an electric motor and fired by and electric pedal inside the vehicle. Internal papers leaked to the press reveal that the army had known it was involved in the "undemanded fire" incidents since at least 1999 in which British troops have been injured and Iraqi civilians unintentionally killed.

And on my old favourite Defence Training this:

With the credit crunch also having put costs up the £1bn, something has to give. So when defence minister Bob Ainsworth announced that the MoD was ploughing ahead, he pointed out that “considerable progress has been made in driving down costs”. This will involve cutting the length of training courses by 25 percent through “compression, rationalisation and harmonisation”. Officially that means cutting waste but those involved in defence training say there is nothing like the scope for 25 percent cuts.

So defence training will have to suffer to spare the PFI deal, even though the off-balance sheet allure of PFI - which defence ministers admitted was the reason for a PFI in the first place - has vanished as all PFIs are going back on the books.

Click on image for the full defence special.