LONDON — Anglo-German armored vehicle-maker Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land has signed a deal with the British Defence Ministry to upgrade Challenger 2 main battle tanks. The £800 million (U.S. $1 In the UK armed forces, there were 3,985 pieces of Combat Equipment at 1 April 2020, consisting of: 979 Armoured Personnel Carriers. 1,814 Protected Mobility Vehicles. 1,192 Armoured Fighting British Army Challenger 2 tanks on exercise in Oman, 2018. Ben Birchall - PA Images // Getty Images The U.K. has had tanks for more than a century, and in fact invented the concept of the tank as Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land has been awarded an £800 million ($1.13 billion) contract to upgrade the British Army’s Challenger 2 main battle tank fleet. The upgrade of 148 Cold War-era Challengers is part of the UK military’s restructuring plan to reduce the number of tanks from the current 227 to 148. The plan also calls for shedding the Video posted online shows what appears to be the Challenger 2 nearly destroyed – the first to have been destroyed in the conflict, after the UK donated 14 to Ukraine in March. The Government plans to deploy British Challenger 2 tanks to Poland so Warsaw can send some of its own Soviet-era, T-72 tanks across the border to the Ukrainian army. Britain initially supplied 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine and then doubled that number to 28. A battlefield video circulating online appears to show the destruction of a British Challenger 2 A Challenger 2 with a dozer blade. British Army photo. Anticipating a Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian forces have dug in along the 600-mile front line stretching from Kherson in southern RKXv.

how many challenger 2 tanks does the uk have