People's Liberation Army (PLA): News

Unfortunate... but it happens.

That was flat water... they obviously didn't have the trim vane set properly or perhaps the bilge pumps were not doing their job and got swamped... but everyone sitting on top in life jackets is standard procedure because this happens...

Light tanks are not cheap tanks... they just don't weigh as much.

The Sprut tank is not about making a tank that is affordable to make in huge numbers to use with expensive normal weight tanks... it is intended for amphibious and airborne roles.

The sensors and equipment and gun are probably as expensive as any fitted to a standard weight tank.

The Sprut is the best thing they could drop out the back of a plane, if used in place of a proper tank it would do very poorly.

It also would not exist if they could drop proper MBTs out of thier planes like they do in computer games.

The purpose of light tanks is a tank that can operate where standard full weight tanks can't go, so it would never face enemy tanks in combat unless something went terribly wrong.

It does have a full power tank gun so it should be able to take out modern tanks, but so could missiles.

In effect what should be happening is that this light tank will be providing direct fire fire power in situations where the enemy has no or little armour...

For instance in an air drop without armour the paratroopers would need to land very near to their objective... which means lots of planes shot down because the airfield or HQ they are trying to attack and capture will more likely have air defence than ground defence being in the enemy rear.

With armour the force can be dropped in the middle of no where... where the chances of enemy formations in strength will be zero... so a nice unopposed landing... climb on board your vehicles and drive at high speed for an hour to your objective and attack it with a ground force they will not be expecting or prepared for...

Capture the airfield and start landing heavy armour and supplies and start building armoured divisions that then head from the middle of nowhere in the enemy rear to attack the enemy forces on the front line... from behind.... taking out their rear areas and HQs and comms centres on the way...

The other use would be in soft marshy areas where you need something that floats... which HATO equivalent IFV or tank would it need to go up against that can also operate on such terrain?

Which means whether fighting third world or first world enemies it will be direct fire HE platform destroying enemy hard points out to about 11km with 125mm HE shells.

The main problem is gun elevation which is about 30 degrees up and down so in the mountains, these vehicles will be mobile but their gun elevation limits probably mean an artillery vehicle like a Hosta with a 120mm gun/mortar or a 2S1M with a 122mm gun probably make more sense most of the time.