Pakistan Buys 282 Refurbished T 55 Tanks from Serbia

Pakistan Buys 282 Refurbished T 55 Tanks from Serbia

    It's interesting and surprising from the Pakistani side that they invested into vintage T 55 tanks along with old APC and field guns from Serbia, but those are very well upgraded by the Serbians before hand overing to Pakistan. The upgrades includes Armour protection, new Generation Explosive reactive Armour added along with digital controls systems added in the Upgrade. makes them safer against  RPG's and heavy machine gun rounds.

The T 55 is a Medium Tank 36 Tons of weight, using a 100mm Main gun along with a 12.7mm for anti personnel usage, which shows good for mobility and good for asymmetrical warfare, where Pakistan suffering since decades. actually Pakistan need a good small arms to protect themselves from it's Terrorists. here T 55 is a good option because it's reliable against terrorists attacks and available in low cost both in procurement and maintenance. most of the fights fought by the Pakistan is  with their own Jihadi's.

        The Pakistanis went for Cheap Tanks rather than good APC and Infantry fighting Vehicle's which is not good against such Heavily armed militants, even they have good number of APC's named Talha which is not good against those Terrorists, usually they were easy targets to the terrorists.

     These Tanks were good in Mobility due to lower weight, with the ERA Armour It can be deployed in Battlegrounds, and It's more than good against the modern IFV's, But it's not a real threat to India when it's deployed to near border. but good for Ambushes only.

                    Pakistan is not known for Keeping good numbers of Main battle Tank, they have some less than thousand Modern Battle Tanks, nearly 300 Brand new T 80 from Ukraine, and some Pakistani Chinese Made Al Khalid MBT's.

             Mean Time India Have triple amount of Modern MBT's, and two new programs to increase the numbers. more than 300 Arjuns are under operational, nearly 1000 of MK 2 version planned, more than 1000 of T 90 in Operational. and 2500 modernized T 72 Ajeya Tanks.

                  But looks like The Pakistanis need a good numbers of MBT's o confront against the Indian Forces, mostly all of these Indian Tanks will be deployed along the Indo Pakistani Border, makes the Pakistani's pinned downed if war broken out. Pakistani's have no other options but increase the numbers of Battle Tank.

               Even if it is looked like Those T 55 procurement only for attacks against terrorist, but they frequently uses the Air power to defeat the Terrorists. but there is no way using those Tanks against Terrorists, because they easily can ambush if it was used in the Urban warfare. even though those terrorists uses huge size of IED's to break those Tanks from bottom end,

                The Pakistanis has the only option to Stop the Indian flotilla of Tanks by using latest generation Anti tank missiles, but the problem is no one ready to supply most sophisticated fire and forget Anti tank missiles to Pakistan. the Pakistanis uses the Chinese made  variant of HJ 8 Anti Tank missiles, which is good against older generation Tanks, The Modern Tanks comes with more defensive options from Armour upgrades to active protection system. also those HJ 8 uses the wire guidance which makes the Handler keep an eye of the target till the missile strike the Tank. which is not a good option in modern battlefields.

    But India also have the same wire guided missiles, but they have two other projects for fire and forget types, one is through procurement the Spike missile variants from Israel, another is home made Nag missile.