September 3, 2020
Will the British Army Retire the Tank After 105 Years?
London has already cut its number of tanks and hasn't upgraded many of them for twenty years.
by Peter Suciu
It was 104 years ago this month that the British military first used “tanks†in battle, and that came just a year after Winston Churchill established the Landships Committee, which oversaw the development of the original tanks. The goal of this small committee first was to oversee the development of large wheeled “landships†that were estimated to weigh as much as 300 tons and could roll over any terrain.
The idea proved to be too ambitious and the actual first tank—dubbed “Little Willie†as a joke mocking Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II—was far smaller than the massive landships originally envisioned and it was even unarmed. It actually took more than a year for the eventual MkI tanks to be refined. In an effort to hide exactly what the military was building, the vehicles were called “tanks†to suggest a container to transport fresh water to the front. In December 1915, the codeword “tank†was officially adopted, and the Landships Committee officially became the Tank Supply Committee.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/will-british-army-retire-tank-after-105-years-168297
