This is slightly old news but I have been saving it until I could do it justice. And for that, one needs a little background to be able to appreciate and savour the full enormity of the development.

As to the background, in our sister blog, we have written many times of the great white hope of the Army Brass, the £16 billion FRES programme which former CGS Sir Richard Dannatt regarded as essential to the future of his Army.

At the heart of this concept was the medium wheeled armoured personnel carrier, Dannatt's preferred type being the Piranha, the acquisition of which he regarded as so important that he was prepared to forego mine protected vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

View full article here

I realise council workers are often loathed but I hadn't realised road crews needed to roll around tooled up like Action Man.[There appears to be road sign stashed at the back!]

I saw the title in a blog aggregator and thought this might have been about the scientist technocrats enabling our representatives to cease to represent us on most matters climate change related.

Surely the MoD never seriously intended the Piranha to get to Afghanistan regardless of it being found unsurprisingly wanting in surviving threats it wasn't designed to survive. I don't mean that they knew it would not be suitable but that, not being a UOR, they would never have been able to get it there in time!

Not the MoD but Dannatt. This was very much an Army adventure. The whole damn thing was fanatasy, but it didn't stop Dannatt making it his top equipment priority. After "winning" the static warfare of the platoon houses, he anticipated furnishing a mobile FRES Brigade, to range south and interdict the Taliban which, he supposed, would retreat to the desert - with no idea that the warfare might go asymmetric. But then this is the man who championed the Vector as the replacement for the Snatch, and had to be introduced to the concept of the v-shaped hull, of which he had previously been completely unaware.

Brought in to great fanfare in our fleet of A400M?

That still wouldn't have got the Piranha into the battlefield in the time available so that would be wishful thinking from Dannatt even before you consider the issue of protected vehicles.

You do wonder what the man used for brains sometimes ... the very calculations on which he relied were so unrealistic that he could not possibly achieve what he wanted to do. I think the problem is that, at that level, you are surrounded by "yes" men, and there is nobody prepared to tell you that you are behaving like a prat.