Mark Urban

And it has a very powerful gun on it.

I think it's got something like, on the front,

three times the thickness of armor of a Tiger tank.

The gun itself has two and a half times the penetrating ability.

And yet that whole package is 10 tons lighter than a Tiger tank.

So you can see in the course of 20 years from the end of the war, how technological advance allows the Soviet Union to produce this tank, the T-64, which advances in all those different aspects,

predictably enough, had all sorts of teething problems because it embraced so many new technologies.

But you can achieve the same thing, or indeed a much better tank in terms of speed, armour thickness, penetrating ability of its gun, in a smaller and lighter package.

Yes, absolutely.

And I think one of the things you see from the Sinai battles is when we eventually get to this question of does the tank have a future, is that just as Monty discovered in World War II, the desert is a sort of unique place.

I mean, Rommel calls it the only place where armoured forces can be used to their full potential.

You know, why is that?

Well, you can see a long way off.

And if you've got better sighting and guns than the other side, you can open fire first and

There are very few rivers and things that are going to result in your tanks getting bogged or stuck or think, oh, no, we have to take this bridge at this point in order to be able to move forward, all that sort of stuff.

So the desert proves to be extremely important.

But the other thing, of course, one sees in 73.

So in 73, when they mount their initial counterattack against the Egyptians on the Suez Canal, having been surprised, the Israelis have a disaster.

And they have an armored division basically mauled by anti-tank missiles.

The Egyptians very smartly take the Israeli forward positions and then move forward hundreds of anti-tank missile teams, which caused huge casualties to the Israeli tanks early on.