The British Army's next generation of combat uniforms are to be made in China in an attempt to save money, Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) said late on Saturday.
A five-year contract worth ?50 million (US$91 million) to supply a range of military uniforms has been awarded to a firm based in Northern Ireland, an MoD spokeswoman said.
This company, Cooneen Watts and Stone, plans to sub-contract work for camouflage outfits to China.
"The contract for the main combat outfits worn by the UK armed forces has been sub-contracted to a company in China," she said.
Lawmakers from Prime Minister Tony Blair's ruling Labour Party have already queried the deal, saying it seemed strange given that Britain did not sell China armaments under a long-standing EU embargo.
"It seems a bit hypocritical to me that Britain will not supply weapons to China because of its human rights record but the government is asking it, a communist country, to supply our armed forces with uniforms. It is absurd," MP Lindsay Hoyle told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.
The new contract saves the Ministry of Defence ?23 million (US$41 million), the paper said.
Critics have also raised concerns about the conditions under which the uniforms might be produced.
An unnamed senior military officer told the newspaper that the deal was "laughable," and not only for human rights reasons.
"This sort of thing happened in the 1980s when combat clothing was purchased from a number of other countries in Asia," the officer said. "It was so bad that it had to be dumped after a year or two. It couldn't stand up to the arduous combat conditions and would routinely fall apart in wet weather. After a year or so, soldiers began buying their own combat uniforms."
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