Pakistan Builds A Tank The Chief Executive recently unveiled a Pakistan built tank that is to be the mainstay of the Pakistan Army Armored Corp for probably the next 25 years. The Al-Khalid is a medium size tank that has been under development for the last 9 years. Needless to say, the technology of tank production is heavily borrowed from the Chinese.
Tanks have been the backbone of modern war since the last year of World War I, when British and French tanks broke the stalemate of trench warfare. Every ambitious army has wanted the latest and most powerful version. In the Second World War, the Germans fielded the Panther and Tiger tanks, which were superior to any other. The US had the Sherman, which was thin skinned and undergunned compared to the Germans, but the US strategy was one of overwhelming numbers. Sherman tanks rarely challenged Germans face to face, and usually relied on aircraft or artillery to blast the Germans out of the way. After the Second World War the US army decided to always field the best tank in the world.
That best tank now is the American M-1 Abrams, which is a very complex and effective machine. It has an extremely powerful cannon combined with a very tough special composite armor that makes the tank hard to kill with a frontal shot. As far as I know, not a single Abrams was destroyed by the Iraqis in the Gulf War, which is an incredible performance. The biggest advantage the Abrams has is its ability to accurately hit enemy tanks at extremely long range. Over open ground, such as a desert battlefield, it can engage and destroy just about any other tank in the world before its opposite can get close enough to fire. This range advantage comes from the optics and fire control systems that the Russians have never been able to match. In the October 1973 War in the Middle East, US built Israeli tanks carved up the Russian built Arab tanks. Israelis tanks destroyed 9 Arab tanks for each one they lost to Arab tank fire. It was the anti-tank missiles that the Egyptian and the Syrian infantry used that accounted for the vast majority of destroyed Israeli tanks.
The main disadvantage of tanks has always been their weight and fuel needs. The Abrams gets one mile out of three gallons of fuel and weighs over 60 tons. Even with all that weight, its armor is mostly to the front, and all tanks are very vulnerable to air attack or rear and side shots. With that weight, the tanks can't be used in areas where they would bog down such as marshy land. They are too big to maneuver through dense forests or jungles, and pretty much can't enter a mountainous terrain. These limits kept the Russians from using tanks very effectively against the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. In land that is criss-crossed with rivers and canals, the bridges must be able to support the weight of the tanks. On the other hand, dry hard terrain like the Middle East battlefields are perfect for tanks. Without matching Israel's tank forces in capability and not just numbers, the Arab states will always lose a full-scale war.
Pakistan does need some tanks in their army and it is better that Pakistan builds its own rather than rely on imports. In a war situation, if spare parts, ammunition, and replacements must be obtained from a foreign country, then Pakistan will be at the mercy of that power. The marshy lands along the southern edge of the border with India are unsuitable for tanks, as are the mountains of Kashmir. In Sindh, the Thar Desert is decent tank country, but both Pakistan and India lack the logistics to supply a large armored thrust through that inhospitable patch of land. That leaves Punjab as the only area where Pakistani and Indian tanks are likely to ever clash. Punjab, with its flat land criss-crossed by rivers and canals, is decent tank country, but very heavy tanks will bog down, and the rather poor bridges can't support 60 ton vehicles.
The Al-Khalid, at 47 tons, is probably a decent tank for the Punjabi battlefield. General Musharraf claims that its 125-millimetre gun and fire control system are among the best in the world, but that may be just puffery. India has been trying to build an indigenous tank for 25 years and came up with the Arjun. However, this tank was rejected by the Indian Army as too heavy at 58 tons and would bog down in likely combat terrain.
Pakistan will learn how to build tanks even better in the future, and may some day be a major arms supplier of advanced weapons. These exports could be a significant source of foreign exchange earnings. Now if Pakistan could just learn how to make a decent car, that would be even more impressive.
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