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Increased Performance and Enhanced Service Life Solution for Leopard 2A4

Date: Issue 46 - September 2013

In recent years while the presence of the main battle tanks is widely discussed, it is assumed that the main battle tanks will serve in the inventory for 40-50 more years as armoured chivalries. Especially, the Gulf War and ongoing NATO operations at Afghanistan proved that tanks are indispensable at open field. Therefore, in today’s world, many countries are trying to increase the capabilities of their MBT fleet which stay in their army inventories. As a result of the recent operations, it is again seen that main battle tanks are indispensable as experienced in the real warfare conditions. Contrary to expectations, nowadays the area of usage of the main battle tanks is getting more common. Main battle tanks have also been deployed even in asymmetric warfare which is the main tactical approach of international peace missions.       

M60 and Leopard 1 MBTs in the inventory of the Turkish Land Forces were successfully modernized in the last decade.  With the experience gained in these projects, ASELSAN designed and developed all electronics, electro-optical and electro-mechanical subsystems of the ALTAY MBTs and integrated these systems to the prototype of the ALTAY MBT. In the design of the ASELSAN Systems, ASELSAN’s utmost priority was to develop systems having minimum Life Cycle Cost and maximum operational availability. The Systems which are developed for ALTAY MBT is integrated to Leopard 2A4 MBT and this prototype MBT is being tested under all battlefield conditions with the supervision of Turkish Armed Forces. Hardest scenarios like moving tank to moving target in APG/Sinus tracks were tested, extremely high first shot hit probabilities are achieved during the test. These firing trials show that the warfare performance of the new upgraded Leopard 2A4 is higher than the modern MBTs.