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The British Army's chosen rifle is the troubled SA80, developed at the Royal Small Arms factory in Enfield. Launched to a fanfare of applause in 1985 as the modern weapon of choice for the Army, soldiers soon complained that the gun - developed at a cost of £384 million - had serious faults.
In March last year, the Ministry of Defence scientists identified 'underlying problems' with the rifle. Soldiers in the Gulf complained that firing pins broke, sand jammed the mechanism, a faulty catch allowed the magazine to fall out, the trigger stuck and the bayonets fell off during training. It was even suspended from Nato's list of acceptable weapons and the faults discovered so far have cost over £24 million to rectify. And it was no good for left-handers.

The news that British soldiers had problems using their radio units is also not new. Soldiers in Kosovo reportedly had to borrow cellular phones from reporters there as their own communications didn't work.
Most British units use the obsolete Clansman radio, developed originally in the 1960s. Its signals were, according to the reports, regularly intercepted by the Serbs.

And there is no immediate solution in site: it was announced last month that, after many delays, the new £2.2 billion Bowman radio system will be delayed by two years, and is scheduled to enter service in 2004 - eight years late.

But even that is not the end of the saga. Because Ministry of Defence rules mean that 'acceptance' of a product is defined as use by a brigade-sized part of the army, only around 2000 people could end up using the new equipment out of 102,000 serving soldiers.

It's all part of what is becoming a fine tradition of army equipment problems. A National Audit Office report in 1988 found that the military's stocktaking process was hopelessly inefficient and that millions of pounds of equipment had gone missing. Soldiers in the Gulf also found that their Challenger tanks lacked vital spare parts.