The last American heavy tank was the M-103, which was built only in small numbers and used primarily by the Marine Corps.

The army with more tanks isn’t necessarily the more powerful army.The United States had been heading in this direction since the end of World War II, but a diehard faction still insisted on the heavy tank. By contrast, a direct hit by a 120-millimeter armor-piercing shell on any medium-weight armored vehicle is likely to obliterate the target.Īll this is to say that simple numbers don’t tell a complete story.

It’s not even clear that a TAM could destroy a Challenger 2 with a direct hit on its frontal armor. In a direct fight, a TAM brigade is unlikely to pose much of a danger to a Challenger 2 brigade.Īfter all, the armor on the Challenger 2 is “among the best in the world,” according to U.K. The Challenger 2 boasts a 120-millimeter gun. The Argentine tank is armed with a 105-millimeter gun. The TAM weighs just 30 tons, compared to the Challenger 2’s 62 tons. “Our country cannot even reach the Falkland Islands with combat-equipped military personnel,” Argentine newspaper La Nacion reported in 2016.īut let’s imagine Argentine and British tanks somehow could meet in battle. Four decades after the Falklands War, Argentina lacks the transport and logistical capacity to deploy and sustain heavy forces over long distances and spans of time. Today the roughly 200 TAMs equip two brigades.

Around the time of the war, the Argentine army was in the process of reequipping its armored brigades with locally-made Tanque Argentino Mediano tanks. During the 1982 Falklands War, British forces crossed thousands of miles of open ocean, engaged and soundly defeated an Argentine force. Earlier, in 2014, a regiment of 48 Challenger 2s deployed to Poland for one of the biggest British war games in recent memory.Īs recently as 2016, the California think-tank RAND concluded that the British army was “capable of sustaining a deployed armored brigade indefinitely, even if many of the details regarding how remain unknown.” In Western armies, an armored brigade might possess a hundred or more tanks. Most recently in October 2018, 5,500 British troops with 180 armored vehicles including eight Challenger 2s deployed to Oman for a combined-arms war game. Once deployed, tankers train for high-intensity warfare alongside infantry, artillery and air power.

And perhaps more importantly, the British armed forces still practice deploying the tanks over long distance aboard the British fleet’s amphibious and transport ships. But for all their flaws, the Challenger 2s are effective tanks.

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