During the Cold War the nightmare of NATO was represented by the armored hordes that Moscow could move to the German plain and through the Gorizia threshold. The facts later showed that the Soviet armored vehicles were not those deadly machines that you could think of when they were paraded along the Red Square, but the armored numbers that the Warsaw Pact could deploy were impressive.
With the collapse of the Soviet Empire the design of new MBTs has come to a halt, until the advent of Putin, who resumed investing large sums in the sector. In the 2015 the T-14 ARMATA tank is presented to the public, a revolutionary tank in that it has the crew-less turret (capocarro, gunner and pilot They are housed in the front of the hull), and the heavy combat for infantry (HIFV) T-15 ARMATA (photo).
The T-15 has a combat weight of 50 tons, driven by a powertrain that can deliver a power between 1.200 and 1.500 Hp, in order to have similar performance to those of the T-14. Great attention is placed on the protection (in stark contrast with the traditional Russian doctrine) of the vehicle with the adoption of additional armor modules MALACHIT, which protect the two sides of the hull, while the hard-kill launchers of the AFGHANIT system are positioned above the hull on both sides.
In Italy, in recent times there has been a strong impulse to the development of rotates such as the CENTAURO II and the FRECCIA EVO. Certainly means that in their respective categories represent the state of the art, however they can never carry out the tasks of an MBT or an IFV, as their passive protection does not go beyond the ability to hold the shots of the automatic guns.
We have already talked about the ARIETE update in the previous articles, as regards the DARDO (photo) we continue to postpone any kind of decision by the Defense. In fact, the DPP (2018-2020 Multi-Year Planning Document) mentions, marginally, the development of an armored vehicle for troop transport which, as far as we know, should be designed from the FRECCIA EVO platform and built in cooperation with Greece and Slovakia .
The fact is that the Italian mechanized infantry departments an efficient IFV serves tomorrow, not in ten years (in the most optimistic forecasts). So for the immediate you could channel the few resources on a small batch of modern crawlers, in order to equip at least one Heavy Brigade, for example Aries, like the German PUMA or the Swedish CV90.
(photo: web / Army)
