Now some armor and other miscellaneous stuff.
Unit 12, Type 69-II. It should be rearmed with weapon 71 or 72, the D-10T (all the pictures show it with the 100mm rifled gun not the 105mm). Its availability date should be anticipated to 1983 (according to SIPRI arms trade registers) and extended to at least 2015 or the end. An X2 radio code would be also a nice change.
If the tons of pictures I have seen are an indication this tank was the workhorse of the iraqi army and was extremely common. It is still in use in limited numbers (a few tens give or take). On the other hand it is questionable that many, if any, Type 69-I were aquired. Supposedly the 100mm smoothbore variant was not very succesful and was not made in large numbers and as far the iraqis were concerned it would have required a separate ammo supply.And while I have seen zillions of Type 69-II, I never spotted a Type 69-I.
Unit 618 at a minimum and maybe even 11 should be replaced with the corrected Type 69-II.
The M60s.
Iraq is supposed to receive a significan (600-700) shipment of M60 later this year. Supplier is likely to be Greece. Tanks will be of the M60A1 Rise and M60A3 TTS varieties. So far however Iraq has never operated the type, the few M60s captured in the 80's were just parked somewhere. Therefore I suggest the following:
1) Unit 9 to reclassed as medium tank.
2) Units 9-10-37 to have availability dates starting from the second half of 2008
Some sources for this
http://defensenews.com/story.php?F=2681008&C=landwar
http://www.longwarjournal.org/oob/index.php
Re: Iraq errors report
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