China's Deadly Type 99 Tank vs. Russia's T-90 and America's M-1 Abrams: Who Wins?Sebastien Roblin
September 26, 2016
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/chinas-deadly-type-99-tank-vs-russias-t-90-americas-m-1-17836China has a lot of tanks. Like, eight to nine thousand of them.
Who else would bother to maintain such a ridiculous number?
The United States. And Russia. (Note that such counts include vehicles in storage and reserve. The numbers for tanks in operational units are lower in every case).
However, the majority of Beijing’s tanks are old designs, particularly Type 59 and 69 tanks more or less directly copied from the 50s-era Soviet T-54 tank. Such is their profligacy that I once had the pleasure of bumping into one in a children’s playground in Tianjin serving the needs of the (young) people.
However, China’s top of the line tank, the Type 99, has commanded healthy respect from international observers, even though it has never been exported, nor used in combat. The reason is simple: the reported performance parameters are equal to many top Western designs, and the Type 99 also packs a few unique tricks of its own.
Today we’ll look at how the Type 99 stacks up to two important contemporaries, the American M1A2 Abrams and the Russian T-90A tank....
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/chinas-deadly-type-99-tank-vs-russias-t-90-americas-m-1-17836
