Uh, the Leclerc was already a "child of the Cold War" over-expensive, over-ambitious program, all the worse coupled with French "let's do better than the Americans" defence policy... Which explains why French Leclercs are fewer and less equipped than the exported ones...
Now the DGA wants to make it stealth? I wonder (naively) if they have asked the tankers about this before... As JaM said, possibly they think there is a greater chance of having to fight off Soviet armored hordes than hunting down terrorists or insurgents anywhere (Bosnia, Kosovo, Ivory Coast, Afghanistan...). Or equally possibly they fear the insurgents can get their hands on some hi-tech hardware in significant quantities (like some US analysts do, mind you)...
I heard about this stealth AMX demonstrator before, and people working on the Leclerc (both designers and tankers) mostly agreed on something in the line of "fine, but how will the RAM coating behave when showered with mud, rocks, trees, ice, shell splinters, bouncing AT rounds, SA fire... A tank is no plane and has to be rugged enough to survive on the field, and stealth coatings tend to be fragile."
Re: Stealth Tanks?
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