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>>19790 Video Embed related details on the majority of Iraqi "T-72s" that the Abrams faced. Blacktail isn't infallible but this video is pretty fair.
The Majority of capable tanks got taken out by aviation doing bombing strikes on the Highway of Death uncaringly killing military and civilian forces. The USA also dumped Anxiogenic chemicals - essentially psychedelic drugs that permanently fuck you up - all over the Iraqi Republic forces, lacking defense against this chemical attack.
The Iraqi tanks lost so quickly because they employed their tanks in a hull down static position, depriving them of their mobility which is exactly what you don't wanna do with modern MBTs, and just kept pouring more and more of the elite guard into the breach created by Desert Storm, effectively running into the fire instead of cutting them off like any sane post-WW2 general would do.
The idea of buried hull down wouldn't have been bad if they had organized it properly. they positioned them at the bottom of high places and were completely lax in manning their tanks. i remember reading about a m-2 Bradley driving right up to the tanks before they noticed, in DAYLIGHT. Sights or no sights, a lack of discipline makes ANY tactic worthless. Ironically the most effective tanks used by the Iraqis were the chinese knock-off T-62s, the type-69s that caused a lot of problems. Also T-72s were the go-to tank used by coalition forces that weren't the USA or Saudia Arabia and performed just as well.
The contemporary M-60A3s used by the Iranians were shredded by Saddam's T-72s in the previous conflict, which ironically contributed to their failure in The Gulf War, their barrels were worn out because the 2A62 cannon used by the export T-72s lacked both velocity and barrel life, which further reduced their power by the time the USA faced them. The Gulf War was the true debut of the Abrams, while the T-72s of the Iraqis were war-weary and crewed largely by glorified boy-scouts who had succeeded the recently retired veterans of the iran-iraq war. Even then the USA stalled for time until the M1A1s could be sent over, because the original M1 was too vulnerable.
In his book Inside the Great Tanks, military writer Hans Halberstadt quotes Marc Sehring of the Patton Tank Museum, Fort Knox, Kentucky,
“If the crews were equally well-trained (and that's really the key ingredient) the T-72 would probably have been the winner.” Remember, the T-72 was developed in the early 1970s while its main American rival in the Gulf War, the M1, was a whole new generation ahead of it. Add to that, that the Iraqi T 72s were stripped down, lacking some of its basic components such as the modern passive IR sights, an older autoloader and firing steel core penetrators decommissioned from soviet stockpiles in 1969 (the Gulf war was 1991) not to mention the fact that it used the non ATGM compatible 2A26 gun rather than the 2A46. These guns in turn had worn out their barrel life, in the Iraq-Iran war prior to that. In the 1982 Lebanon war, various types of Syrian T 72s faced the Merkava I, M48/M60 (equipped with Blazer ERA) and Centurion tanks, all its contemporaries. T 72 losses were miniscule with the IAF tanks getting destroyed at ranges beyond their own guns and failing to penetrate the Syrian tanks at all until the M111 sabot was put into service, and even then at ranges well within the T 72’s range fire. The only T 72s lost were from hits by TOW missiles at close ranges and 1 by tank fire from the side and that tank was only disabled and then sabotaged by its crew. The only genuine Syrian losses from tank-tank battle was their aging T 62s and T 55s.
Article on the reasons the "T-72" 'failed' in Iraq:
https://archive.ph/MsU0H An excellent article (P1) on every single variant of the T-72 and its abilities:
https://thesovietarmourblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/t-72-soviet-progeny.html If you like this thread I also suggest
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