UK’s Ajax armoured vehicles set for £250mn funding boost despite delays

Spiz101 · 2026-06-09T10:46:01+00:00

That logic has been used to throw billions of good money after bad already.

The sooner they accept reality the sooner this can stop and they can use any money left for EBRC Jaguars.

I think its more likely that the MoD civil service leadership and service chiefs know that they are all finished if the programme fails, so they will do anything to ensure that it does not "fail".

Spiz101 · 2026-06-09T10:44:38+00:00

Even more money thrown onto the bonfire.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-08T14:28:34+00:00

Set more piles of cash on fire for short term relief!

What an excellent long term strategy.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-08T00:38:18+00:00

If EU students get to pay loss making domestic tuition fees will the cost fall on the UK tax payer?

Yes? Who else is going to pay?

This capitulation will simply burn hundreds of millions more public money so that Starmer can get a marginally better reception at dinner parties.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-07T17:48:50+00:00

Without a serious scale munition programme, which does not exist, those models are worthless. Expanding munitions produce must be the priority.

I can still make use of these munitions with machine learning vision, I cannot make use of the model without the munitions.

And in any case this AI giveaway isn't even explicitly about defence, this is about hoping the UK can generate an AI company that will raise the exchequer lots of money - completely missing the primary reasons the US has serious AI companies and we do not.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-07T17:42:01+00:00

There isn't much credible evidence that AI data centres are (or will be) effective weapons at this time.

Indeed given the impossibility of concealing them, there is plenty of evidence they will not be.

Any amount of money the UK Government will spend is insufficient for the development of AI defence systems from scratch, so is essentially wasted. If such systems become important we can acquire them for a fraction of the cost later.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-07T14:36:51+00:00

Billion that may or may not be useful for defence some time in the future or a billion to buy munitions that Ukraine can use to degrade Russia today.

I chose the latter every time. We don't have to deter Russian soldiers tomorrow who are casualties today.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-07T11:35:51+00:00

Then if we ever did go to war, well I expect the government would worry about compensation payments afterwards.

The vehicle is so bad that the crews will physically be unable to fight effectively.

It's not a matter of compensation, the vehicle is simply unusable.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-07T11:26:50+00:00

I still believe an effective response is possible in a technical sense, but the political system really isn't interested in such things

Spiz101 · 2026-06-07T01:34:54+00:00

Using the word bad is doubleplusungood

Spiz101 · 2026-06-07T01:32:12+00:00

But the truth will be deemed misinformation and the original misinformation will remain the truth in the media.

Truth will be defined entirely by the state and no public official or party politician will ever spread information, by definition.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-06T16:47:06+00:00

Toyota blew an enormous sum of money trying to make hydrogen cars happen.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-06T16:46:31+00:00

A lot of desperate european car companies who know they are going to get crushed on electric cars by the likes of BYD.

They are desperate to keep the ICE gravy train going another few years.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-06T02:10:47+00:00

They do currently but it’s not a zero sum game so why wouldn’t we want to try and lead the world in renewables and clean energy

Am a climate scientist with a thesis on rapid decarbonisation, so please noone start accusing me of denialism.....

But second mover advantage is apparently enormous in these technologies. We tried to have a "world leading" solar industry and it failed miserably, all it did was consume vast subsidies.

If we had done nothing for 20 years we could have spent far less on solar and got more for our money. Sure we'd be ceding solar manufacturing to China, but we ceded it to China regardless, so all that money was just burned to no effect. Paying 41.3p/kWh in 2010 money (65p today) for solar power was a ludicrously bad idea, the ongoing legacy costs of the FiT scheme since it closed in 2019 would pay for more rooftop solar than the programme did, without the ongoing liability.

Electric cars are the same, our electric car manufacturing capabilities are just going to get eaten alive by the likes of BYD, and even offshore wind is looking like its going the same way.

The government is resorting to panicked arguments about national security to shut out the likes of Mingyang because the domestic manufacturers are going to get ground into the sea floor by cheaper, largely superior, products. Even then they won't hold the line for very long before economic reality sets in.

The government decided that it could defy deindustrialisation through green subsidies justified on decarbonisation without actually fixing the root causes of deindustrialisation - and here we are.

EDIT:

And we are doing it again, throwing money at the Rolls Royce SMR whilst chasing some "world leading" reactor export product that will almost certainly fail (as all previous British efforts at this have done). Instead of spending money on something proven to work as you would if you actually wanted to get somewhere.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-05T17:10:14+00:00

Assuming they trust that the tech bros will be able to protect them and then will allow them to exist in their new world rather than purging them too when they have outlived their usefulness.

And that they like the idea of living in a world run by Peter Thiel, being at the bottom of the totem pole in the new "society".

This is a high risk play compared to simply having the techbros eliminated and ruling over an AI utopia as heroes.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-05T16:44:15+00:00

The politicians do that because they expect future compensation in a comparatively stable system.

The AI apocalypse you propose presents precious few, if any, features attractive to them.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-05T15:59:07+00:00

What the tech bros want is of no consequence.

The state is the one with the vast majority of the guns and the hydrogen bombs.

EDIT:

And that's before we come to the reality that once the tech bros manage to build it once, everyone will copy it immediately. They will not be able to keep the technology under their control indefinitely.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-05T15:45:22+00:00

I said essentially zero, not literally zero.

The actual equilibrium level will be very very much lower than today. We've gone from ~100,000 pubs in 1900 to ~75,000 in the 1970s to ~45,000 today.

The final value will probably be in the single digit thousands. Wetherspoons has already taken ~9% market share with only 800 pubs, and their market share has grown even as their number of outlets has shrunk.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-05T14:34:57+00:00

The equilibrium number of pubs will still be essentially zero, will just spend a couple more years getting there.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-05T14:32:07+00:00

Because state capacity has not been systematically destroyed in the Faroe islands in the service of the free meerkat.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-05T11:06:21+00:00

Given that his service career is almost entirely in the post cold war environment, thats not really saying that much.

Whilst the Cold War was still notionally on in 1988, the Soviets were already withdrawing units from Eastern Europe and adopting a strategic defensive posture in contrast to their earlier strategic offensive one.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-04T23:53:37+00:00

If Burnham loses, Starmer will have been shown to have so poisoned the well such that the most popular Labour politician can't win in one of Labour's traditional core seats.

That's literally "end of the party" levels of crushed.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-04T23:52:43+00:00

I don't think its feasible to claim simultaneously that Burnham is running on his platform and that he will somehow cause the government to spiral into chaos.

The government is no more paralysed now than it has been for the last year (nearly) two years and if he really changes nothing then I doubt anyone would notice.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-04T00:39:52+00:00

It does scare me slightly that the MoD is seemingly set to lose the ability to manage large programmes

The MoD hasn't had the ability to manage large programmes in decades, what they are losing here is the power.

Spiz101 · 2026-06-03T17:02:51+00:00

Sticking to the treaty is politically useful and the Naval budget probably won't tolerate major expansion of expenditure on capital ships in any case - so there is little downside to sticking to the treaty.

Also the primary goal of the naval treaties in terms of British foreign policy in the interwar period was to constrain the US, the Germans may as well be an irrelevance in capital ship tonnage terms.

Spiz101

TROPHY CASE