![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() From 1963-1967 an initial batch of M60 hulls were converted into AVLBs at the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama. The M60 was the last in the lineage of Cold War-series Patton tanks stretching back to the mid-1940s. Why Ukraine got bridge-laying Pattons instead of Abrams However, with planning and rehearsals, the engineers managed to build the bridge, cross the tanks, and then pack up the bridge in less than in an hour. This article from the 1990s describes the challenges an Army engineers faced arranging a crossing for Marine M1A1 tanks in an exercise in Korea. Unfortunately, those all were designed to accommodate 50-60 ton tanks, not better armored 60-75 ton Western main battle tanks Ukraine is receiving.Įven M60 AVLBs equipped with 70-ton class bridge have to observe restrictions for M1 tanks, including reducing gap-crossing distance to 15 meters, forbidding stopping or turning while on the bridge, and using stabilizing pins, cribbing and approach ramps to reduce stress on the bridge. Kyiv’s forces also captured 16 truck-based TMM-3 bridge layers from Russia bearing 10.5-meter segments that can be linked together, and has received nine of 16 Bibers (“Beavers”) from Germany based on the fast but lightly armored Leopard 1 tank also entering Ukrainian service, that can lay 22-meter long bridges. Ukraine began 2022 with a few dozen AVLBs based on the Soviet T-55 tanks (the MT-55 and MTU-20) and T-72 (the MTU-72). Ukraine is also notorious for its extremely muddy Spring and Fall weather ( rasputitsa), and thus bridging over theoretically traversable shallow waters and mud can spare valuable heavy armored vehicles from bogging down, taking them out of the fight as surely (if not as permanently) as an anti-tank missile. Rivers, marshes and trench warfare have substantially shaped Russia’s invasion begun in 2022. And thanks to being, well, tanks, they were more likely than engineers riding soft-skin trucks to survive artillery fire directed at a fording point. While AVLB bridges can’t span larger rivers, they did, and still do enable tank and mechanized infantry to hop across smaller tributaries, or over broken spans of bridges in a matter of minutes, retaining the momentum of their advance, and potentially bypassing well-defended bridge crossings. Why the Leopard 2 Is Such a Badass Tank. ![]()
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