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Originally Posted by Imp 
Perhaps because seems quite a strange army looking at its MBT certainly not pitched against Russia it would struggle against forces in the Balkans area. There is a nice SP ATGM but the infantry dont get many & indeed decent RPGs are a bit thin on the ground.
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In the Cold War I believe the italian army was expected to deal with with was what left of a mainly hungarian force after they had knocked out Austria (we had some thread there which detailed how the hungarians were expecting to be essentially massacred in Austria); which to say not much in all likelihood. Yugoslavia could have been an other enemy, at least theoretically.
So we are speaking about mostly 2nd line forces with upgraded
T-55s and vanilla T-72s at most.
Nowadays we doing coalition warfare/peacekeeping on a shoestring budget; the Ariete and available antitank weapons are good enough for such scenarios. There is not need to match late Abrams or Leopard and doing so would be an useless extravaganza which would rob some more pressing need. For example there are some plans to build an heavy APC, such a thing would be more useful than some uber APFSDS.
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Just want to say thanks for this & other input Marcello it has been an intresting exercise playing these what ifs out.