The BBC has confirmed that an Iraqi bomb has got through the armour of a Challenger tank for the first time.
– quite why the BBC are able to confirm this, since they don’t operate the tanks, escapes me. Perhaps they’re using ‘confirmed’ in the same way as that other lazy BBC-ism, “the BBC has learned”, when of course the BBC’s job is to report, rather than to toot it’s own trumpet at every opportunity, even during news bulletins it seems.
Moreover, a roadside bomb capable of defeating the armour of a Challenger II tank is not your average roadside bomb – it must be a sophisticated shaped-charge device, difficult to design and difficult to manufacture without sophisticated equipment, so is almost certainly not an ‘Iraqi bomb’. It’s much more likely to be an Iranian bomb, but in the absence of proof, the BBC would be more accurate to describe it as a ‘bomb in Iraq’ rather than an ‘Iraqi bomb’.