Martineleca

To find Leopard 2 successor Spain faces limited options as MGCS excludes them, allies diverge https://en.defence-ua.com/industries/45m_to_find_leopard_2_successor_spain_faces_limited_options_as_mgcs_excludes_them_allies_diverge-17068.html

For a long time MGCS development appeared to be a convenient excuse for countries to maintain their procurement winter by not buying currently available equipment that may or may not become "obsolete" at some undefined point, but as the strategic situation changed rapidly and the project's horizon was pushed decades into the future it became untenable to continue this way.

Want and need seem to be two ever diverging matters, the late Secretary Rumsfeld had something to say about going to war with the army you have. Several European countries want MGCS, but as that's been delayed to 2040 and more tanks are needed right now the Leopard/Panther and the hybrids potentially based on them will have to fill that role out of necessity.

You'd expect that the UK would have sent the Jordanians the recently modernised Stillbrew Chieftain which was superior to the Khalid variant they were already using rather than the Challengers, was there not room at MOD Ashchurch for them?

Future of surplus Challenger 2 tanks remains undecided https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/future-of-surplus-challenger-2-tanks-remains-undecided/ - And it apparently can get worse...

I think too much resource had been invested in the Leclerc program to simply halt it on the cusp of entering production, same with the Challenger 2, issue is that both were limited to ~400 units bought domestically partly because there were still a lot of older tanks that could return to service if the need arose, in the UK's case it was near new Challenger 1s that had been battle tested. When most of those were systematically removed and with no new ones coming in the fleet melted away through sheer attrition and reached the paltry condition it is in today, but it occurred over a period of decades, had it been stated as a possibility early on it would have been a scandal.

This wasn't really a decision made on the spot immediately post-Cold War or even declared as a goal at that time though, I imagine any politician who suggested severely weakening the national armoured force in one fell swoop would have been investigated for collusion with a hostile foreign power. Lots of older modernised tanks were inactivated and still remained on stock in the big four West European militaries alongside the newly built ones, mass selling off or scrapping got underway in stages after the turn of the century.

Over three decades the AMX-30 had been produced an average of ~100 yearly, the AMX-40 design was finalised by 1985 so at a similar rate around 500-600 units could have entered service in the French Army until the early 1990s when the factory switches to Leclerc.

In some respects it represents the original specs of the Leopard 2 when they were still hoping to keep the weight under 50 tons, the difference mostly seems to be in passive protection. Even though they're supposedly quite similar, do you know how the spaced armour technology of the AMX 40 and Leo 2A0 differ?

Yup, the AMX 40 mostly fixed all that and added an excellent 120mm 55 calibre gun that was arguably superior to the original L/44, while still somewhat defficient in armour it likely would have been good enough to face up to its Soviet contemporaries. Also unlike the Leclerc it was actually ready for full production early on and a lot more units would have been built throughout the 1980s before budgets started getting slashed, those extra tanks could always have been upgraded later on...

In that case would it have been better to produce the AMX 40 for domestic use until all the issues with Leclerc were worked out? Kind of like West Germany didn't stop tank procurement because Kampfpanzer 70 program ended, they just ordered more Leo 1s until a more advanced design was finally ready.

It's a translation from the Leclerc on French Wiki, source is an article in Science et Vie, Special Issue no.157 The turn-of-the-century tank: heavily armored and super-powerful by Patrick Mercillon "In 1986, the EPC was named Leclerc, and the stated objective was 1 500 units, replacing the 1 200 AMX-30s and the remaining AMX-13s then in service. Faced with the numerical superiority of Warsaw Pact armor, the primary adversary, a Leclerc regiment was intended to be equivalent to three T-80 regiments or six T-72 regiments."

AMX-30 and Chieftain were able to score some export success in the face of heavy Patton series/Leopard competition at least in part because their own militaries bought them, that creates a positive image to prospective customers. Initially they were not as late to the 3rd Gen game as it eventually turned out, the Vickers 4 and AMX-40 while not quite on the level of Abrams/Leopard 2 still offered good performance at a lower price point and weight, one deal breaker was that if France or Britain did not have enough confidence to procure at least a few hundred of their respective model then how could they hope to secure truly large contracts offering solely export-spec tanks?

British armour technology was ahead of the game at a time when the US and West Germany were still working with regular steel spaced configurations, the plot was lost when development of brand new designs proceeded too slowly to take advantage of market conditions. The Vickers 4 prototype was ready by 1978 at which point the Abrams and Leopard 2 were already in pre-production, MBT 80 program despite it's name was still far from that stage. Would immediately ordering 300 or so Vickers 4 units to supplant the oldest Chieftains have created enough momentum to allow industry to weather the Shir-2 cancellation better and perhaps pick up a few foreign export deals while American and German factories were still mostly committed to supplying their national armies?

So was the MBT 80 or alternatively Vickers Valiant ever planned to completely supplant the combined 1000+ Chieftains and remaining Centurions still in service in the mid 1970s or was half the fleet expected to consist of modernised older tanks until at least the turn of the century?