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If Rheinmetall can do this within the contract sum it is about £5.5m each, considering that will include all the non-recurring engineering design costs and documentation etc. So maybe not a bad deal in finance terms. A broad range of improvements should put it in the A list
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OK, so 150 is not a large number, a couple of large regiments if we go Type 74 perhaps, or maybe a return to Type 44 for the magic three. Regardless, it limits our deployable force size, fair enough, a trade off
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Were there other options, of course, tender the whole lot, see what decent deals are out there, Leopard or M1 being the obvious candidates, or even look at getting rid of heavy armour altogether. There are always alternatives
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A wholesale swap from Challenger to Leopard or Abrams would not be simple, training courses, safety cases, ECM, engineering variants, driver training vehicles, supply chains and logistics.
Don't forget these additional costs, they ADD UP BIGLY
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Don't forget these additional costs, they ADD UP BIGLY
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Also, I think there is an important element of image, the country that invented the tank to defeat the Germans getting rid of their own to buy German tanks a hundred years later, come on!
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So although there might have been many good alternatives, were there compelling alternatives that would have been cheaper in the totality of a budget under pressure?
I genuinely don't know
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I genuinely don't know
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It will be interesting what the Army does with the non-upgraded vehicles, which APS will be integrated and when/if, and of course, how it will be employed without Warrior, whether we will train Army Reserve on them, and many other yet to be answered questions
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Against the prevailing view, I don't actually think this is an altogether bad idea, we can pick holes and present alternatives, of course. But this seems to me to be a pragmatic way of buying time before whatever comes next comes into view
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