Rob Page sits with his body against the wall at a coffee shop in central London because he says it helps him to hear better. Eight years ago it would not have been a problem.
But after testing the British Army’s armoured fighting vehicle, Ajax, the retired lieutenant colonel has lost 20 per cent of his hearing. He suffers from tinnitus, keeping him awake at night.
Hundreds of other soldiers have been exposed to excessive noise and vibration as senior officers, civil servants and industry employees pushed ahead with the troubled programme despite warnings the vehicle was not safe.
Ajax armoured fighting vehicles cost about £10 million each
In the coming days the government will decide whether to scrap the £6.3 billion project or try to fix the problems plaguing the vehicle once and for all.
Page, 47, is the first former servicemen to speak publicly about the seven-year Ajax scandal, which he claims has left some of those soldiers with permanent life-changing injuries. He had spent 19 years in the army, serving in Challenger tanks, Warrior armoured personnel carriers and tracked reconnaissance vehicles, when he was brought in to lead the Ajax programme as commanding officer of the Armoured Trials and Development Unit from 2019-21. “If you’re looking around for people with armoured experience in the army, I was probably quite high on the list,” he said. • Troops had hearing problems weeks before Ajax declared safe He was responsible for the safe conduct of the trials. The Ajax team under his command was between 30 and 40 soldiers, although he was in charge of as many as 150 troops in the unit overall. When the programme began in 2010 the initial expectation was for Ajax to enter service around 2017. It would replace the army’s ageing fleet of combat vehicle reconnaissance (tracked), known as CVR(T), and amount to the biggest single order for a British armoured vehicle in more than 20 years. Assembled by the prime contractor, General Dynamics, an its facility in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, there would eventually be 589 vehicles in six variants. Ajax was the fighting and reconnaissance variant, equipped with a turret fitted with a 40mm cannon. It would fire on the move at speed and be designed to gather intelligence to share with infantry units who would follow on the battlefield. The design was based on an already existing European vehicle called the Ascod 2, but the Ministry of Defence had 1,200 modifications to make it more advanced. The six Ajax variants at the Bovington army base in Dorset While some of the Ascod 2 vehicles had rubber tracks, Ajax would have metal ones. This would ensure they were able to operate in warmer climates, provide better protection from mine blasts and be easily fixed if they incurred damage. But they would also be noisier, heavier and vibrate more as a result. It did not take long for Page to hear complaints from soldiers under his command. “So almost immediately in 2019 the soldiers were saying ‘my back is sore, my knees are sore, my wrists are sore’. I knew it was new and novel and I had never felt or experienced that in all the armoured vehicles I’ve worked on.” Page started researching the impact of vibration on the human body. He wanted to measure where the vibration was coming from and how it was being transmitted to the soldiers. “General Dynamics resisted that, and said ‘it meets the standard and we don’t need to do this and we are not going to pay for it’,” he said. At that point, the army could have stepped in and paid for the vehicle to be “instrumented” — have vibration and noise measuring equipment on different parts of the vehicle — to find out the hazard. “That didn’t happen,” Page said. In December 2019 he was so concerned about the vibration he raised the alarm with civil servants and the army. He compared the situation to the handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. “I think we must push an engineering solution rapidly. We cannot be in the business of a Chernobyl-style approach of known hazard exposure and then medical checks. That is not a proactive or defendable position in 2020,” he wrote in an email at the time. The “Elephants Foot”, a mass of radioactive nuclear fuel that formed during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES His emails were disclosed in a 2023 review of the programme carried out by Clive Sheldon KC but Page was never named — until now. Page suggested in 2019 they try rubber tracks on the vehicles. However, senior officers at army headquarters decided it would be too expensive, he said. Months after his email, Defence Equipment & Support, part of the MoD, commissioned testing of noise and vibration levels and in August 2020 the Institute of Naval Medicine carried out tests on the vehicle. Despite asking repeatedly for the results, Page was not given them until much later. Had he seen the results, he would have known that the institute had recommended soldiers not drive the vehicle faster than 20 kilometres per hour. “I didn’t know that until much later on,” he said, adding that soldiers were driving it at 40 km/h. The injuries that came later could have potentially been avoided, he said. JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE TIMES Some of the soldiers started reporting tinnitus. Over time the hearing protection given to soldiers was replaced with a dual-layer headset meant to mitigate the noise problems. Page said that seemed to work better but the soldiers were still feeling the effects of vibration. General Dynamics then “unhelpfully” said the soldiers were putting their “feet and their hands in the wrong places”, he said. “I was like, we can’t have a situation where the controls are so tight operating the vehicles becomes really difficult.” General Dynamics UK said the initial reports of noise and vibration from soldiers more than five years ago led to a detailed technical investigation conducted jointly by the company and others. A spokesman said: “Soldier safety is our highest priority at GDUK. Since 2019, we have worked with the British Army and the Ministry of Defence to conduct extensive testing and trials. We continue, without any hesitation or limitation, to support them.” In 2017 Page had a full medical that concluded his hearing was normal. In 2020, after trialling Ajax, he was told he had lost 20 per cent of his hearing. Page will never be sure if his hearing loss was directly caused by Ajax but did not serve on other armoured vehicles during the period. Trials on Ajax were paused in 2021 when hundreds of soldiers had been exposed to noise and vibration issues, and four had to be medically discharged. The following year Page left the army. “Ajax was a very heavy two years. It didn’t sit well with me and I felt responsible,” he said. In 2023 immense pressure was said to have been put on ministers by General Dynamics to push ahead with the programme. “Shareholders were going bananas. GD was desperate to unlock a tranche of £400 million,” one MoD insider said. Ben Wallace, defence secretary at the time, said he believed Ajax had “turned the corner”. The insider said they were “disturbed” by their time in the MoD. They described it as an “alarming department” and said those responsible for procurement programmes had their careers “dependent on reaching IOC [initial operating capability] even if they suspected the equipment was faulty or not required”. IOC is a formal milestone where the vehicle is deemed fit for operations. The General Dynamics spokesman said vehicle enhancements and headset changes had been implemented since issues were first identified more than five years ago. “Since February 2023, independent assessments confirm noise and vibration levels are within approved legislative limits,” he said. On November 6 this year the MoD declared the vehicle had reached IOC — eight years later than planned. Soldiers working on Ajax were shocked it had reached the milestone, given what they believed were continuing problems with the vehicle. On a visit to the factory in Merthyr Tydfil, Luke Pollard, the procurement minister, said he had been assured the vehicle was now safe and problems were “firmly in the past”. Hours later it emerged a handful of troops had been sent to hospital after an exercise in the summer with suspected hearing and vibration problems, including severe headaches. In late November, The Times revealed 31 troops had suffered from hearing problems and issues related to vibration in another exercise. Soldiers taking part in the Titan Storm exercise emerged from the vehicles vomiting and in some cases their bodies shaking so violently they could not control them. The use of Ajax vehicles — each costing about £10 million — was paused for a fortnight as the department carried out a review. The two-week deadline has passed. • Ajax joins a long list of woeful weaponry General Dynamics and the MoD are still trying to ascertain what the problem is — 15 years after the project began. As far as General Dynamics UK is concerned, a comprehensive analysis has already taken place of the root causes and design changes have been “subjected to rigorous testing” over 42,000 km. The soldiers, who feel their concerns have been ignored, say they have been blamed for improper use of the vehicle. The army believes rubber tracks may be the solution, six years after Page first suggested it. General Sir Roly Walker, the chief of the general staff, decided to try Ajax for himself this month. The Ajax was passed fit for service last month, but the programme was paused again weeks later ANDREW LINNETT/PA Ajax — with its sensors and communications systems — is deemed to be a core part of the army’s plans to build a modernised warfighting division. Without it, some insiders believe a huge capability gap will be left in the already stretched army, and hundreds of jobs in Wales will be lost. A decision on whether to scrap the programme or invest billions more in getting it right will be made by the defence secretary, John Healey — possibly as soon as next week. “The whole idea around deterrence is you have got to have a credible capability that people should be scared of,” Page said. “What the army deserves is a fighting capability that supports the way it wants to operate and that soldiers have confidence in.” The MoD said: “We will always put the safety of our personnel first and the current pause shows that we will investigate any issues when they arise. The concerns raised by Lieutenant Colonel Page in 2019 were looked at under the previous government in the 2023 Sheldon review. We take any allegations very seriously and will look closely at any evidence provided.” It said a ministerial-led review into the Ajax programme would “assess how effective the department has been at implementing the actions of previous reviews, and seeking anything further that is required regarding safety”. General Dynamics UK said: “Now with over 170 vehicles fielded across 12 Army units and a further 62,000 km covered with Army crews since 2024, we have full confidence that this vehicle meets customer specifications. “Ajax now holds the most comprehensive safety case of any armoured platform worldwide, covering vibration, acoustics, ergonomics and crew health. This is one of the most tested combat vehicles ever produced.” The company said it was committed to delivering the capability to the British Army to support the UK’s role in Nato. “We have full confidence in the performance and the protection it provides our soldiers. It is the world’s most advanced, fully digitised armoured fighting vehicle,” the spokesman added.
