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Planning ahead
April 5th, 2007 General

Now, I am no expert on Military technology beyond I think that planes and tanks are pretty cool. I also am not altogether surprised that the government seems to be moving towards buying or leasing new tanks. We could have a discussion on whether they are needed, but the force projection argument is reasonably compelling.

But what really surprises me is that when the Military was readying its current fleet of Leopard 1’s for deployment, that no one thought to check to see if the Air Condition units were working before they ended up in the desert.

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328 Comment from Lord Kitchener’s Own April 5, 2007, 11:45 am

From what I’ve read, it’s not so much that the airconditioning wasn’t working as that our old Leopards don’t HAVE air conditioning. So the “plan ahead” bit goes alll the way back to when we bought a bunch of tanks with no air conditioning!

But who could have guessed, I suppose, that trouble might pop up someday, somewhere HOT.

:-)

329 Comment from mbpowell April 5, 2007, 11:47 am

You are, of course, right.

It seems like retrofitting is possible, at least that was the suggestion in the press reports I’ve read. Still seems like something like this would have been on a checklist, no?

330 Comment from Green Assassin Brigade April 5, 2007, 1:50 pm

They were built by Germans and were adequate for Germany where we had them based for most of their service life. Their design goal was to slow down Soviet armour long enough for U.S. air power and/or theatre nukes to cripple the invaders. In battle in Germany their life span would have been counted in hours so A/C was not really an issue.

We only have 17 in Afganistan retro fit would take longer than having new/used ones shipped. They also were not designed to power a/c or have space to install it, this would be a big job and the tanks are near the end of their projected life span.

The choices are to bring home the troops, or buy what is needed to let them do the job.

Considering the Germans refuse to enter any actual combat they should just give us the tanks so we can make use of them.

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