The Ministry of Defence is taking steps to increase the speed of Challenger 3 main battle tank deliveries, according to a recent written response from Maria Eagle MP.
In a parliamentary question, Rebecca Paul, Conservative MP for Reigate, asked what plans the Ministry of Defence has to help increase the speed of the delivery of Challenger 3 main battle tanks, particularly in the context of supply chain challenges.
In response, Eagle outlined that the Ministry is actively working with the supply chain to address any potential bottlenecks. “We are engaged with the supply chain and additional resources have been directed towards ensuring the materials required for Challenger 3 main battle tanks are available to meet the delivery timescales,” she said.
The initiative follows concerns that supply chain issues could delay the delivery of the upgraded tanks, which are intended to modernise the UK’s armoured capabilities.
The Challenger 3 is the British Army’s next-generation main battle tank, developed by Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land (RBSL), a joint venture between BAE Systems and Germany’s Rheinmetall. The programme involves upgrading 148 existing Challenger 2 tanks to the Challenger 3 standard, enhancing firepower, protection, and interoperability with NATO allies. Key upgrades include replacing the 120mm rifled gun with the NATO-standard Rheinmetall L55A1 120mm smoothbore cannon, enabling the use of advanced programmable munitions. Additional enhancements encompass a new turret, advanced thermal imaging sights, upgraded hydrogas suspension, improved engine cooling, and the integration of the Trophy active protection system and Elbit’s laser warning system.
The Challenger 3 programme has achieved significant milestones, with the first four prototypes delivered and four more in production. Trials are scheduled to continue through 2025, with initial operational capability (IOC) anticipated in 2027 and full operational capability (FOC) by 2030. The programme has faced challenges, including supply chain delays and budgetary constraints, leading to adjustments in the delivery timeline. Despite these hurdles, the UK Ministry of Defence remains committed to the programme, emphasising its importance in modernising the Army’s armoured capabilities and ensuring interoperability with NATO forces.
The Challenger 3 aims to address the limitations of its predecessor, the Challenger 2, by significantly upgrading lethality, survivability, and situational awareness. The new smoothbore cannon, along with enhanced targeting and protection systems, will allow the Challenger 3 to engage contemporary threats more effectively.
As good as they are there is going to be nowhere near as many as we need.
Atleast 300 would be lovely.
Brom, interesting to note that after the Cold War, MoD decided we needed to reduce our inventory to a mere 386 tanks, so that’s what was ordered.
“The Challenger 3 aims to address the limitations of its predecessor, the Challenger 2, by significantly upgrading lethality”
Then significantly downgrade the lethality again by ordering a handful.
All a tad pointless really….
Come on. We’ve got to upgrade at least 200 of the available vehicles so we could in theory deploy 3 armoured regiments. 148 tanks is like a Roman legion going to war with only one cohort.
It’s madness, mind numbingly stupid madness.
The maximum number of available extra hulls to convert is 50 to 60. Even if half are in good enough condition, an extra 25-30 C3 conversions could give you enough for a short conflict.
Zero stopping them fabricating new hulls from scratch, I with modern CAD/CAM it is not a costly exercise.
Rheinmetall have publicly stated they have the capability and willingness to build C3’s absolutely brand new from scratch , as many as ordered , and have offered to do so. Unfortunately at the moment that offer hasn’t been taken up….
Could we buy back whatever’s left of the 38 Omani Challenger 2s to increase numbers? They are replacing theirs with K2s anyway.
Others have said on here that new hulls are reportedly possible and have been offered.
Well let’s see what transpires, it’s already leaked that the KRH will remain an MBT Regiment and Ajax Regiments will be three, not four.
So a small expansion incoming or Regiments will drop to, what, Type 44?
I assumed reading the RAC announcement a few weeks ago that the tank regiments would go from 4 to 3 MBT squadrons in order to spread out the available 112 or so operational CR3’s across three rather than two regiments whilst the fourth squadron in each regiment would be re-equipped with Ajax – these being freed up by having only 3 rather than 4 Ajax equipped recon regiments. The remaining c.36 CR3’s will be needed for testing & trials, training (a squadron’s worth deployed to BATUS or OBJTA?), heavy maintenance/repairs and a small attrition reserve. So basically just a shuffling of the deckchairs (albeit probably a sensible one), with a zero net uplift in overall force levels. But that is just speculation, maybe SDR2025 will prove me wrong.
Hi RB.
Funnily enough, although I read the same report as you I’d not given it that level of thought.
Makes sense to me?
Hi RB, trouble is 112 tanks is insufficient to equip three Type 44 regiments. 20 tanks short.
To be fair, It’s only been 20 years since CSP , you can’t rush these things.
“Tanks for the memories.”
We can only dream of a scenario whereby 500+ brand new Challenger 3’s are ordered with spare parts and the remaining Challenger 2’s sent to help Ukraine. But in the real world a slightly faster timeline of a small order seems to be the best we can hope for.
Yes, a small top up hopefully happens.
500 Tanks would need several new Regiments, which with no extra manpower isn’t happening.
And then all the requisite CSS to support them, like HET, and space around SPTA to house them.
Sad but true 500 I wish 🙏
Dream? sounds like a nightmare of an oversized army designed to fight a non existent threat with last century’s technology.
I think heavy armour has a place but everything points to it being a niche capability on the modern battlefield.
Like the battleships of old it’s increasingly vulnerable to cheap threats and its primary weapon system will always suffer from very limited range.
That is what i have been saying. The increase in indirect fires precision and its proliferation kills the tank as we know.
And yet both Ukraine and the Orcs want more tanks!
As always, as seen with airpower, it’s troops on the ground that hold territory, not airpower and not drones. And troops on the ground want armour. Tanks will evolve but won’t disappear any time soon.
And the royal navy still wanted more battleships in 1942, didn’t mean they were right.
Tanks are still useful they are just much more niche. Required in smaller numbers for more specific tasks. In direct fire and deep precision strike are more capable of taking on many roles with a reduced logistic foot print.
Agreed. All systems have their place.
The priority now remains, for me, the Royal Artillery, GBAD, Drones, and wider ISTAR.
That does not make infantry or armour obsolete.
Well that’s not true on either front Jim. The Royal Navy got delivery of it’s last Battleship of the War in August 1942, and deliberately rediverted construction efforts from the Lion Class to aircraft carriers. But also: Very worth remembering that the whole “Battleships where obsolete in WW2” is an American Pacific centric thing (even then the US did actually get solid use out of it’s Battleships in surface actions), and there is no shortage of engagements where the RN used it’s battleships to great effect. (In fact in the Atlantic more carriers where sunk at sea by Battleships than the reverse).
Also IDF doesn’t have a lower logisitcal burden than armour, in fact due to the ammunition hunger of IDF, it’s one of the most logistically intensive forms of warfare.
@ Dern yes indeed in the enclosed waters of the high north as well as the Atlantic just look at the cost a very small number of German heavy surface raiders managed to inflict as well as the lengths the RN had to go to destroy and hunt them down. Submarines could be destroyed or driven away by small escorts but a heavy surface raider needed multiple heavy surface combatants or a carrier group.
@Jonathan Also in the Med. arguably the most important Battle of the Mediterranean was Matapan where the Royal Navy Battle-line annihilated the Regia Marinas heavy cruiser force.
But yes, the list of surface engagements where RN Battleships made a big difference in the Atlantic, North Sea and Arctic is actually rather long. Weirdly, I also believe that more Aircraft Carriers where sunk at sea by Battleships in European Waters than Battleships where by Aircraft Carriers (Before someone says Taranto A) I said at sea, and B) the RN didn’t actually sink any Italian Battleships at Taranto, two of the three hit where back in service shortly and the third was still under repair when Italy surrendered.).
I can’t help thinking watching Ukraine war with all the Cope Cages , add on armour and the general close range of battle . That maybe a redesign is in order somewhere in between an ifv and a tank , something closer to 50 tons , 40mm or 50mm turret that is well protected and can even carry a few troops and just build regiments around these vehicles , with good modular capability and build lots of them
It needs capability of destroying the enemy with indirect fires otherwise as said above it will be increasingly niche.
The WW2 aircraft carrier was able to destroy the enemy at 10x the distance a battleship was and it was not too much expensive compared to a battleship.
Alex is talking pretty much gumpf at this point, the issues with IDF (and with desiging armour for anything more than IDF) has been explained to him many times by people who know better than him, but he ignores that.
Anyway, the issue with an IFV/tank hybrid is you still need to carry a section in the vehicle for it to be managable as a combined fighting platform, at which point youre kind of just building a very heavy IFV.
Infact the Israeli Merkava With its rear access doors is essential designed as a combination IFV/MBT/command post/ambulance and self propelled artillery.. remove its ammunition storage is removable and rear area configurable to either carry 4 stretchers, 10 dismounts or act as a command vehicle.. it’s even got a 60mm mortar for indirect fire support. They have now actually taken all their MK2s out of storage removed the fogging compartment/turret and turned them into tracked APCs with the armour of a 60ton MBT… the Israelis are a bit bonkers around MBT design.. but they have more experience of armoured warfare than anyone else in the post war age so….
Merkava might not be optimized against the top western tanks but it’s good enough to counter their degraded export versions or Russian derived tanks… it’s best suited, IMO, for asymmetric wars, which are probably the most common ones now, don’t know when the next big Tanks vs. Tanks engagement will be if at all
Jim, don’t worry. We will never have an oversized army. It’s been cut once or twice a decade since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Jim, I have never heard criticism of a tank’s main armament having limited range. Where does that thought come from?
The key thing is to outrange an enemy tank and we have always manged to do that.
It would be great, but unfortunately the army isn’t set up for that kind of structure, and it would require a fundamental rebuild of the entire force, which just isn’t going to happen.
Reading that it’s not that the delivery speed is quicker it’s just to keep on the schedule that exists!
And meanwhile the archaic power pack
Soldiers on and on and on.
1977 technology in a 2025 MBT: not really something to shout from the rooftops!
Let us hope the defence review gives at least one easy deterrent win and that is actually keeping 3 MBT regiments and KRH keep their tanks..
It would mean to retain 3 type 56 regiments they would need around 210+ challenger 3s ( 168 for the regiments, 18 as an attritional reserve 10% in the maintenance pool then some for the training establishment).
In the end it’s one cheap and easy things they can do that will help deter Russia, Putin does look at heavy brigades and MBT regiments and this would communicate a deterrent to him directly..
After all challenger 3s are 5.5 million a pop ( which is insanely cheap) and the Regiment is actually still in place as it’s still not converted as far as I’m aware.. so that’s essentially cost neuralish while they they stay with challenge 2 and only a 300million investment to move to challenge 3 ( when you thing building an Abram’s regiment would be 1.5 billion.. puts it into how much of a bargain it is.. personally I would be building every challenge 3 I could at that price point).
Even if Rheinmetal wouldn’t make a profit at 5.5m£ per tank beyond the initial 148, it would be worth spulring a little extra for the third regiment IMO. The bigger issue would be getting the additional enablers, especially the fires and additional battalion of boxers needed to field a third brigade.
CS CCS… in the end the army needs another heavy brigades worth and 1.5 infantry brigades worth of CS,CSS regiments if it’s going to have the min requirement of 6 deployable brigades ( 3 heavy, 1 mec, 1 light role/protected, 1 airmobile)
Have to ask whether the defence commitments that we may enter into in the ‘EU reset’ are driving an SDR agenda for a more substantial UK armoured contribution.
A pitiful amount of them makes it all a bit pointless…….
If we don’t buy other tanks ( we won’t) we need to be up at 300+ min
The army needs:
3 type 56 regiments total 168
An attritional reserve 18
A maintaince pool of 18-20
Training establishment 18
So around 220.. 210 min
Waste of time and money
Why didn’t they just buy he Korean/German/American tanks
Because an all up brand new MBT from the US or Korea is 20-25 million a tank and a challenger 3 is 5.5 million a tank… essentially challenger 3 is buy one get 4 free. Challenger 3 is profoundly cheap.. insane cheap.. a type 56 regiment of Abrams would cost 1.4 billion a type 56 regiment of challenger 3 costs .3 billion
It sounded she said to meet timescales, nothing about speeding anything up.