Warnings over Russia's new tank Armata

[Skybird]

I got used to see news snippets dripping down the internet wires, how advance dit is and how good and technologically superior. Especially when such news is coming from Russian sources it seems almost natural to label it all as propaganda.

However, some weeks ago I got some input form a German source indicating that the German intel services are deeply concerned about the advanced capabilities of this tank, and now the British Telegraph joins the chorus and quotes from a British secret internal paper that paints this tanks a squite superior to anything NATO currently could field, labelling it as the most decisive technological improvement in tank design since 50 years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016...an-super-tank/

I do not know whether it really is that superior and NATO is lost, but the derogatory mocking about it as just another of those "Russian toy tanks" I have never shared. I think this tank is dangerous, and very much so, and I am not certain that Leopard 2 or Abrams or Challenger 2 or K2 or Type- 90 or Merkava could stop or keep up with it. It looks a bit like when the T-72 was shocking NATO with its capability to take the Leopard-1 - often claimed to be the best tank of its era - out of the equation.

The internal document, written by a senior Army intelligence officer, states: “Without hyperbole, Armata represents the most revolutionary step change in tank design in the last half century.”
(...)
The paper also raises concern over the Scout, a light armoured fighting vehicle due to be introduced for British forces from next year. “In a familiar story of measure and countermeasure, the intelligence assumptions that informed the procurement of Scout as a superior battle-winning platform may now be open to question.”
The document says that on top of the Armata tank, Russia is adding “six additional armoured vehicles to the stable”, including a heavy infantry fighting vehicle and a self-propelled artillery system.
The intelligence report, which it stresses should “not be interpreted as an official MoD statement”, also raises the spectre of far superior Russian tank numbers, with plans to build 120 Armata tanks a year from 2018.
It points out Russia already has a fleet of 2,500 tanks with a reserve of 12,500, which is “35 times the size of the fleet in the British Army”.
“With such numbers, decisive effect is credibly achievable and losses are less important,” says the document.

However, also this:

Lord West of Spithead, a former First Sea Lord, said he was “very concerned” about Russian rearmament. “At the moment, their economy is a war economy,” he said. “They have got the GDP of Italy and they are trying to spend the same on defence as America. What they are doing is unsupportable and when something is unsupportable, then anything could happen.”

But when Europe can live on tick, and America could just print money as it needs it - why should the Russians feel stopped from doing something similiar? Currently, btw, they are buying physical Gold like crazy, since several years already.

I have seen videos of its internal cockpit. That thing is modern. Ultra-modern, and it has something that one needs to get used to to find in Russian tanks: space. It has an advanced level of automatization and sensors. Active defences that greatly reduce NATO's efficiency against tanks. Especially in the defensive area it looks superior to western tanks, including German, Israeli and American designs.

I say: watch out for this thing. It looks ugly, but it could be a game changer.