Foxhound Rescue
by Anthony C Heaford --- Service number 30088729 --- 23 February 2025
Britain – all of us, willingly or not - sent soldiers, marines, contractors and all the others to two wars in ‘mobile coffins’ – the snatch land rovers. Its replacement, the £1-Million/each but breaks-down-in-hot-weather Foxhound patrol vehicle from General Dynamics, arrived non-taskworthy in summer 2012 Afghanistan.This report details that £uck-up >>> £400+Million of British Procurement Corruption That Cost America Dearly
Now the British government is giving General Dynamics – THE CULPRIT - £1-Billion to make the Foxhound taskworthy!
A Better Solution
1. Stop flogging a dead Foxhound! Give all 400-vehicles to police / bomb disposal in Britain because the overheating problem only kicks-in above 50° Celsius (deserts, jungles). At the end of the day the vehicle is not best suited to warfare (no spare wheel, field maintanence issues, composite armour compromises, a senior army non-commissioned officer blew the whistle in the 2017 'Trucking Useless' news report, etcetera) and is too expensive to retrofit, in my opinion.
2. Allow special forces, etcetera to requisition Foxhounds when necessary for their operations.
3. Find the best, tested vehicles (not prototypes) and build them on licence here in Britain. Skilled apprenticeships will revive our manufacturing base because innovation comes from time-served experience more than academic study, in my opinion.
4. 75% of work force has to be army reserve - i.e. if you build military kit you have to maintain it in theatre too, on a soldier's wage! Keep experienced, over-55-year-olds on as the 25% civilians, to pass skills on to the younger reserves, and maintain a fulltime / overtime work force during times of conflict (normally over-55s would work a four-day-week, and get an allotment).
Note: I knew the Foxhound failed hot weather trials in 2012 Afghanistan and that it wasn’t fit for service. But I didn’t formally report the matter other than discussing it on an anonymous military forum, called the Army Rumour Service, or arrse for short. Being a time-served mechanical fitter and experienced field service technician, I know there’s commissioning problems and assumed the Foxhound would be fixed. Then the 2017 Trucking Useless report came out and I realised our forces’ lives were being risked by an utterly corrupt chain of command, government and industry, aka, the Military Industrial Complex. I hope this suggestion shows I am only trying to give our forces the best fighting chance they can have.