And it was high time too – in the second half of the 1970s, the AMX-30 tank was badly outperformed by the newest Soviet designs.Īs was customary at the time, the French first tried a joint project with West Germany. For example, at one point, a high-tech helicopter was preferred to an armored vehicle, but, amongst other things, due to truly enormous costs tied to anything aviation-related, the French finally decided on a tank that would just blow the Soviet competition out of the water. But where the other nations failed and eventually turned towards a more affordable solution, the French continued on until the program’s successful conclusion.Īs you can see, the program was initially very vaguely defined and various discussions about multiple combat platforms took more than a decade. France wasn’t the only NATO country to think this way – this is how the MBT-70/KPz-70 program came to be as well. The French pondered this question and came up with a concept called EPC.ĮPC stands for “Engin Principal de Combat” – a “Main Combat Vehicle.” It was a program to develop a machine (not necessarily a tank at first) that would be very expensive but also packed with cutting edge technology that would allow its operator to defeat a large number of enemy armored vehicles.
The vast manpower resources of the Red Army allowed the Soviets to potentially soak up losses the French would never be able to afford. Those reports painted a very bleak picture because, the way the French saw it, they’d be quite outgunned in an all-out showdown with the Soviet Union, even with the military might of the United States and West Germany on their side. The AMX-30 was, of course, a very conventional tank and even though the French were quite happy with it, they were also aware of the NATO intelligence reports about the high quality of Soviet MBTs. We are, of course, talking about the iconic French Char Leclerc.Įven though the Leclerc MBT is still one of the most modern tanks around, its beginnings can be traced back to the time when the first AMX-30 tanks were rolling off the assembly lines – the 1960s. Today, we are finally getting to the MBT everyone’s been waiting for – or, rather, its prototype.
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