Significance of the Al Khalid

vincelee said:

I'm afraid you've lost me. I was, first of all, talking about doctrine, not tanks. And I don't think I've ever labelled tanks as "defensive" or such.

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Actually i wasn't targeting your point of view as such but the implicit assertion everyone makes ...blah blah blah the Soviets were trying to attack the West...:coffee: . And that's right you have not said it.

FreeAsia2000 said:

I'm no expert on tank warfare but the way i read it during 1973 a few Israeli
tanks managed to ward off an invading syrian tank force which heavily
outnumbered them.

The americans then spoke to the Israeli soldiers involved and use this as
a basis to change their military doctrine against the warsaw pact in the early
1980's

The M1A1 was a result of this doctrine.

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The Isralis did not repelled a "huge" tank force. They merely defeated small columns but suffered as well. And saying the Israeli-Arab wars are fact of proof about a Soviet potential invasion then you must imediately consult a shrink. The Syrians advanced quite hastily and with some sucess but marked an "operational break" to "regroup and asses the situation". Things they actually never did. Further more the AA umbrella on wich the Syrian-Arab forces were had not sufficient assets to provide a cover. Wich actually led to a complete crack of the Arab forces..

oups double post

Red not Dead said:

The Isralis did not repelled a "huge" tank force. They merely defeated small columns but suffered as well. And saying the Israeli-Arab wars are fact of proof about a Soviet potential invasion then you must imediately consult a shrink. The Syrians advanced quite hastily and with some sucess but marked an "operational break" to "regroup and asses the situation". Things they actually never did. Further more the AA umbrella on wich the Syrian-Arab forces were had not sufficient assets to provide a cover. Wich actually led to a complete crack of the Arab forces..

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You misunderstood.
I never said anything about a Soviet potential invasion.

I said the Americans re-examined their tank doctrines after 1973 based
upon the Syria-Israel theatre.

Like I said, I'm no expert. I read the book ages ago

As previously mentioned (in other threads), the T-72 is an inexpensive mass-production MBT made for Soviet conscripts & export, while the T-64 was the real heavy hitter that was never exported. At the time US didn't have anything to counter the new Soviet armor, so they pushed the MBT-70 project, which later diversed into M1 and Leopard II MBT's.

Iraqi T-72's were poor copies of old Soviet export models, and cannot be comparred to the T-72's in late Soviet-era service or any modernized vairant today, such as the PT-91 series. Yes the T-72 is inferior to the M1, but they're of different generation and it's like saying F-15 is better than MiG-21.

I think most of us would agree that in modern combat, your tank force is better off being mobile than dug-in at some fixed position, waiting to be bombed. =/

p.s. a suggestion -- can we use "Israeli" instead of "Jew"? Israeli Druze (Arab) are required to serve in the IDF and hold pretty high ranks.

Origionally from vincelee

The Jews definitely did not use tanks as turrets, at least not consciously. If anything, the IDF used quite a bit of CAS/BAI on tanks. Also, the quality of Arabic military leaders is......not the best. Much better than the pesky Iraqi and the moronic Saudis over all, however.

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You dont have to be so offenive to the groups mentioned above.
If you dont agree with them then its upto u but generalising them in a common negative stereotype is wrong.

about the Jews or the Iraqis/Saudis?

I use "Jews" for Israel, as it IS a Jewish state. No offense intended there.

Now, as for the Iraqis and the Saudis...I think performance (or the lack of) should speak for themselves.

I think we're going slightly ff

The discussion is about the Al-Khalid remember...

Ok how effective are the al-khalid's AA measures ?

Mean Anti-air??? Well frankly it's as good (or worse) as in any tank which has 12.7 mm AA machinegun. You see the difference of different kind of machineguns isen't so big that it would make any difference. All AA machineguns nowdays are more just to irritate, confuse and jam lowflying aircrafts. Only theoretical change to actually hit something is when you suddenly see a hovering helicopter about to launch missiles towards you. And does you burst of fire make any difference? Well i guess it's all down to the actual situation, but in general, the AA machinegun is much more usefull against soft ground targets than shooting actual aircrafts...trust me, i've tryed to hit wiht NSV to small 1m x 1m targets and even when the gun and the targets were all static I still barely hit anything...so imagining to shoot from moving tank to moving ground attack plane....

Mobile forces generally use mobile gun-Missile carriages not ack-ack guns !!

Pakistan has Anza manpads and French Crotale missiles mounted on trucks .

India has SA-6 missiles on BMP-2 and Tungushka gun-missile carriages !!! Also India has got Igla manpads . Akash missiles are currently for testing only.