MBTs-The Present & the Future

The tank must be built first and foremost to be suited to the type of war an army is prepared to fight

- MAJOR GENERAL ATANU K. PATTANAIK (RETD)

A PICTURE IS WORTH A thousand words, so they say. As the Tank Man (nickname of an unidentified Chinese man) stood in front of a column of Type 59 tanks rumbling down the Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 5, 1989, it demonstrated two things to the world. While on one hand it showed the indomitable courage of a lone man willing to face up to an authoritarian one-party communist regime, on the other, the column of frontline battle tanks displayed the majesty and power of the sovereign.

Introduction

Over a hundred years ago, on September 15, 1916, the battle of Flers-Courcelette witnessed the arrival of first British battle tanks crawling onto the entrenched Germans. The tank was invented to break the stalemate of trench warfare on World War I's European battlefields. Later, the successes of the Panzer divisions during the first two years of World War II led the major armies to reorganise most of their tanks into similar formations; this resulted in a dramatic increase in production. Notwithstanding pathbreaking advancements in frontline stealth aircraft, drones and supersonic missiles, tanks continue to be the dominant system in land warfare ever since as the battlefields of Ukraine demonstrate.

Design Philosophies