Despite all frequent discussions in recent years, the main battle tanks shall continue their "modern armoured knight" tasks by remaining 40-50 years more in the inventories of the armed forces. Especially the gulf wars and NATO operations being conducted in Afghanistan have proven once more the vitality and prerequisite of such tanks in open terrain. In view of this, many countries have recently been in search of the capacity / capability increase of the tanks taking part in the inventories of their armed forces. For example, the American main battle tanks together with Canadian main battle tanks served in the region during Afghanistan operations occurred short while ago. As per the operations realized in 2006, the main battle tanks were once more evaluated as indispensable under actual conflict conditions and Canada initiated studies to procure newer main battle tanks for its armed forces’ inventory after 2007, though it had previously decided to make reduction in its tank inventory. On the contrary of the expectations, the main battle tank’s field of use has also become prevalent recently. The main battle tanks were initiated to be used at asymmetric conflict environment, which is the major tactical approach of international peace tasks. The operations realized by UN and NATO troops in the Balkan States can be shown as an example on this. In addition, the operations of Western countries in the Middle East are the other example where main battle tanks are used in urban operations.

The modernization of M60 and Leopard 1 tanks taking part in the inventory of our country was successfully realized during the last decade. Participating successfully in both modernization programmes, Aselsan has developed all main Electronic, Electro-Optic and Electro-Mechanical Sub-Systems of Altay tank through the experience gained in such studies and the integration of these systems with Altay tank’s first prototype has been performed. The maximum performance as well as minimum logistic costs and maximum operational availability have been taken as the major design criteria in the development of such sub-systems. The testing of all these sub-systems developed to make Altay’s performance over the rest of the tanks in the world was initiated 1,5 years ago by integrating them on a Leopard 2A4 tank before the integration with the first prototype of Altay tank.