re: #137 John Hughes

Leopard 1!
Pre Chieftain?
Effectively unarmoured?
Surely some mistake.

About the same time. The Leo One was introduced in 1965 and the Chieftan in 1967. They represent two opposite ends of MBT design schools in the 60’s. The German’s believed that HEAT rounds had made it impossible to fully armor a tank so that Firepower and Mobility were emphasized instead. The French AMX-30 was similar. The British emphasized very heavy Armor and Firepower at the expense of mobility. The US M-60 series was somewhere in-between. (The Russians were doing composite armor on the T-64 and T-72 and were a generation ahead at the time). Had NATO gone to war in the 75 ~ 80 timeframe with the older tanks… well, we were taught we had to kill 5 Soviet tanks before dying to slow them enough for REFORGER to work. I tend to think the German approach of defense in depth with highly mobile forces would have probably done that better than USAREUR or BAOR would have. We were counting on airpower, training and cohesion to make up for the lack of numbers.

The MBT-70 disaster and then western invention of composite armor at Chobham lead to both the M-1 and the Leopard 2 which changed the picture.