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Tanks in Egypt unrest


geronimo

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I thought about a thread like this when I watched the news last night. Good photos. Can anyone explain the unit signs in the Abrams/M60 turret?

 

is one of the guys tied up from the neck and to the tank?

Edited by alejandro_
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I thought about a thread like this when I watched the news last night. Good photos. Can anyone explain the unit signs in the Abrams/M60 turret?

 

is one of the guys tied up from the neck and to the tank?

There just numbers and yeah, he's tied up. It's probably just so he doesn't go anywhere.

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I thought about a thread like this when I watched the news last night. Good photos. Can anyone explain the unit signs in the Abrams/M60 turret?

The colored shapes are unit markings, but seem to be a new pattern compared to the only reference about them that I know of, an article by Chris Weeks in "AFV News" Sep-Dec 2004. In the system when he wrote (based on observations in 1970's-early 2000's), the blue square on the M60 would have signified some unit under Army Operations Authority (HQ Cairo), as opposed to one of the field armies, but the guidon shaped things of overlapping colored triangles were not included in the table in his article. An upright green equilateral triangle would have been a unit under 3rd Army, but I don't know if the M1's sideways green triangle means the same thing. I assume the '2' in that triangle is also part of the unit marking.

 

How do we know the bigger numbers are vehicle serial numbers, rather than tactical numbers?

 

Re: mixture of M60A1 and M60A3 features on some tanks, many Egyptian M60's were still A1's when transferred and had A3 features added specifically for or by Egypt, besides those US Army A3's transferred which may have originally been A1's when built.

 

Joe

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Out of interest, is there any way of telling an egyptian army m1 that was built in the us from one built in egypt, or are they bolt for bolt copies?
The blowout panels on the roof, maybe? Those in the pictures appear to be the newer two-part panels, as opposed to the older three-part panels. I didn't see a wind sensor either, but maybe it was just folded down.

 

 

Shot

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Haven't seen a searchlight mounted over a gun in quite some time. That one looks like an an AN/VSS-3A or something adapted to an M60A3.

Is it even an A3? I suspect the CFE tanks spread throughout the Med and NATO, once they were up for grabs, and there were A1s and A3s available to all takers. I bet there were still a few plain M60s still in the old POMCUS warehouses that may have gone out. I can't imagine they'd want a SL for an A3.

 

Some excellent pics showing the turret cheek armor plus-ups of the later A3s.

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Is it even an A3? I suspect the CFE tanks spread throughout the Med and NATO, once they were up for grabs, and there were A1s and A3s available to all takers. I bet there were still a few plain M60s still in the old POMCUS warehouses that may have gone out. I can't imagine they'd want a SL for an A3.

 

Some excellent pics showing the turret cheek armor plus-ups of the later A3s.

 

 

It is, in fact, a composite vehicle with everything from old steel wheels to a (probable) Sheridan searchlight to (the latest major components) the late model turret with chin and ring protective overhang and the 4th generation hull with two horizontal lifting eyes. What with the hull and turret being later components, "M60A3" is a label of convenience.

 

Compare earlier lifting eye config on hull of vehicle pictured beneath it (which also has the earlier M60A1 turret ring design without the "collar" overhang)

Edited by Doug Kibbey
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The two in the pic with the APC appear to be - they have the straight-sided turret edge at the ring.

 

EDIT - DOH. Didn't see Doug's post.

Not sure what you mean.

 

 

These are the last production M60A1, delivered to the USMC in 1976-78. They went up for sale in 1993, unfortunately at the same time the CFE distr was ongoing, so I doubt there were many buyers.

 

Anyway, it is nice to see the M60s still soldiering on for another century.

Edited by Ken Estes
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Not much beyond apparently exposing my ignorance. I was under the impression that the chin bulge/ring skirt was an A3 feature.

No ignorance, please, it just shows that these improvements were spread around. I never had experience with the A3, so don't really know its ID points. I suppose the A3 line and the A1 line may have been intermingled at some point. You can't just throw a switch and have different hulls/turrets rolling off, or popping out of the molds.

 

The chin bulges seem to have grown as well over time. This factor also shows up in the wide variations in M60 weights, as these vary +/- 3-5% even with the same castings configurations.

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Interesting that Egyptian M-60A3s don't have side-skirts to protect its sides.

 

Also, I wonder if any protester might get burned by getting to close to the M1-A1 gas turbine exhaust.

 

I doubt anybody is going to be standing around near a running M1 tank. However, that very exhaust can be used for expedient non-lethal crowd control. I had a section sergeant do just that in Kosovo, describing how he backed up towards a crowd and pivot steered between them and a wall, pushing the crowd into more open ground and diluting their mass. Dismount peacekeepers were then able to continue disbursing them.

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Interesting that Egyptian M-60A3s don't have side-skirts to protect its sides.

 

Also, I wonder if any protester might get burned by getting to close to the M1-A1 gas turbine exhaust.

Nor are they fitted for reactive armor. This is still a third-world army and they are probably tier-ing their armor force, just as the Israelis once did. They can't afford to PIP their M60 fleet, otherwise, side skirts, upgraded engines and other features available from Turkish industry would be attractive, tantamount to the super-60s advertised by Teledyne in the late 80s. GDLS even has an M1 turret for the M60, as I recall, as offered to the Turks.

 

[edit to add] re BP above, the USMC did the same for crowd control with the four it operated at Mogadishu in 1991.

 

I think Egypt will go the way of Turkey, via army supervision [since Col. Nassar, after all], and we will forget the panicky media and blogging of Islamic revn sweeping across 1/4 of the world, dooming the US economy [??] and so forth in a week or so.

Edited by Ken Estes
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