Chances are that the French knew this too and may have been one reason for their desire to win the contract, even at the expense of their own armed forces. Nothing ensures future business like making sure the competition goes bust in the mean time.

By going with GD, the UK has chosen the least developed vehicle, which may give them the most scope to make UK-specific alterations (or c0ck it up more severely), plus one that will be built and maintained within the UK. It's also buying in to one of the most successful line of armoured vehicles in the world over the past forty years or so. There may well be scope for export sales as well.

According to the MOD media release on their web site this is a 'provisional selection' for the Utility type of FRES, there are 4 other types, and most types will have various sub-types.  So forget any notion that 'UK has selected THE FRES vehicle'.  The conditionality appears to be based on satisfactory 'risk reduction'. I'd agree that picking the least mature design may offer the best scope for getting something close to UK needs, bearing in mind that some reports have stated that none of the 3 vehicles evaluated met UK requirements.

 

GDs web site also says some interesting things, notably that it's entirely a Mowag design from Switzerland and does not contain anything that makes it subject to export control by US authorities.  I'd suggest that Mowag will work quite hard to accomodate UK requirements with the already appointed system integrator companies hopefully providing good guidnace and FRES system level engineering. You can be sure of one thing, the chance of influencing Nexter in any significant way was close to nil and MoD was more than smart enough to recognise this.  The fact that the French were offering an early 120 French Army version vehicles tends to suggest that Nexter 'didn't geddit'.

I am pretty happy with the decision, it's a good vehicle, pretty capable, and likely to fit most of the British-specific requirements. It will be interesting to see what the final variants will be, e.g. the replacement for Scimitar (etc...) in the armoured recon role - a cannon armed version (30mm Bushmaster?), or a larger gun, e.g. a low pressure 105mm!

 

One thing I would definitely want to get now would be a much larger fleet of vehicle transport ships, more akin to the American Bob Hope class, i.e. much bigger than the current Point class RoRos. This would at least allow the UK to deploy sufficient vehicles for a Brigade sized task force (I think the American sealift ships carry something like 6-900 large vehicles!). Lets get real, the air-portable aspect is unlikely to be used for strategic movement, it is more likely to be tactical movement, since we simply don't have the air-transport assets for large scale airlift. On the other hand, we could certainly move a troop or two of these vehicles, which might come in handy!

FRES Recce is going to have the same 40mm CTWS of the Warrior upgrade, possibly the same turret.

FRES direct fire support isn't fixed yet, but as it's supposed to be a light tank, a low pressure 105mm would be an idiotic decision. 120mm low recoil would be far more sensible.