How Nato Will Upgrade Its Tanks To Keep Pace With Russia
The MBT Advanced Technology Demonstrator, seen in this new video, takes a widely available older tank design and upgrades it with a host of new tech.
The tank in the video is an upgraded Leopard 2A4. (Ignore the annoying quick cuts at first-they go away after a while.) The -A4 was the most manufactured of the Leopard 2 series of tanks, with 2,570 built for Germany and the Netherlands between 1985 and 1992. After the Cold War ended, many A4s were sold off to other NATO countries including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey, where they still serve today.
In other words, there are a lot of A4s out there that could use upgrades- and upgrades are on NATO's mind, with the recent introduction of Russia's brand-new T-14 Armata tank. The teaser video is short on details, but a few things stand out.
The tank armor appears to be modular, so individual sections can be replaced after sustaining battle damage. Although there's no obvious "hard-kill" active protection system against anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, this report by The National Interest says such a system will definitely make it onto upgraded Leopard 2 tanks.
The tank is studded with cameras, giving the crew much greater situational awareness. The tall, coffee can-sized cylinder on top of the turret appears to be a commander's independent thermal viewer, allowing the commander to scan the battlefield at night and through smoke, and line up targets for the gunner who has his own thermal viewer.
The demonstrator's turret is enormous, much larger than the A4 turret, with the overhang on the opposite side of the gun having grown the most. This is likely to cope with carrying larger main gun rounds, and also to act as a counterweight on the other side of the turret to a long, heavy main gun barrel.
Interestingly, that's exactly what the MBT Demonstrator doesn't have: a long barrel. It appears to have a standard 120-millimeter L44 caliber tank gun. (The 44 refers to the length of the barrel, which is the diameter times 44. That makes 5,280 millimeters, or 17 feet, 4 inches.) That the barrel is 17 feet long and still looks puny gives an idea of just how big the turret is. Rheinmetall is currently working on a 130-millimeter tank gun it will unveil this summer.
Russia's recent aggression in the Crimea and intimidation campaigns from Scandinavia to the Black Sea have NATO spooked, and looking to upgrade their tank arsenals. Whatever new tech makes it onto the MBT Demonstrator will almost certainly be retrofitted to existing European (and Canadian) tank fleets.
