British troops in Afghanistan were sent a defective batch of ammunition, and were forced to borrow rounds from Canadian and American troops, the defence ministry confirmed on Thursday.
"Three months ago, there was a single defective batch of 0.5 ammunition," a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) told AFP.
"Some ammunition was borrowed from the Americans and Canadians for the short time it took to be replaced. At present, there are no problems with 0.5 ammunition or any other kind of rounds in theatre," she said.
The comments were in response to a report in The Daily Telegraph which alleged that a platoon from the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment refused to go out on patrol until the problem was resolved.
According to the newspaper, the ammunition is thought to be from either Pakistan or the Czech Republic, where a round costs 60 US cents (46 euro cents).
British, Canadian or American ammunition costs about 1.50 dollars, meaning cheaper ammunition would likely have saved thousands of pounds, given the number of rounds fired.
"The ammo we had was rubbish," the newspaper quoted an unnamed parachute regiment officer involved in the fighting as saying.
"It just kept jamming. At one point, we refused to go out because it was so bad. Eventually we managed to scrounge some Canadian rounds," he said.
"If we had not got that ammo we would certainly have lost a lot of people."
In response to the allegations of weapons malfunctioning, the spokeswoman for the MoD told AFP that "southern Afghanistan has extremely hot and dusty conditions which can sometimes interfere with the moving parts of a weapon."
"It would be misleading to blame this on defective ammunition."
The Telegraph reported that senior technical officers tested five different batches of ammunition, all of which were found to be defective.