Stealth Tanks?

Pergite · #1 August 30th, 2005, 07:22 AM

Last time i checked France didnt have any plans to fight any AQ insurgents. Especially not with tanks anyway.

PlasmaKrab · #2 August 30th, 2005, 07:45 AM

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."

JaM · #3 August 30th, 2005, 08:00 AM

exactly

JaM · #4 August 30th, 2005, 08:10 AM

French are really funny. They develop 3rd gen tank from 1970, but came with nothing, then they change plans to 4th gen tank, to this day it has 10-11 versions becouse it is not what they thought it would be (superior in every aspect to American equivalent), and now they come with stealth tanks... i think that if they develop one, it will be after 40-50 years and by then it will be totaly obsolete, and they will allways have AMX-30...

PlasmaKrab · #5 August 30th, 2005, 08:28 AM

As I said, this is mainly because of the policy (dating back to De Gaulle) saying that [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/MusicalNote.gif[/img]"small though we are, we can still do better than these arrogant American imperialists and take market shares / political influence that they won't have"[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/MusicalNote.gif[/img]. As a result, French procurment programs run happily over budgets and deadlines (the French generally are no friends to these

), and though generally pretty interesting all in all, end up in service some ten years too late to make any difference. In the mid 90s the Leclerc would have been astounding (early hunter-killer, fast, agile, light, evolutive...), but by now there are many equals on the market and on the field.