T-62 MAIN BATTLE TANK 1965-2005 ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR STEVEN J ZALOGA received his BA in history from Union College and his MA from Columbia University. He has worked as an analyst in the aerospace industry for over two decades, covering missile systems and the international arms trade, and has served with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federal think-tank. He is the author of numerous books on military technology and military history, with an accent on the US Army in World War II as well as Russia and the former Soviet Union. TONY BRYAN is a freelance illustrator of many years' experience who lives and works in Dorset, UK. He initially qualified in Engineering and worked for a number of years in Military Research and Development, and has a keen interest in military hardware - armor, small arms, aircraft and ships.Tony has produced many illustrations for partworks, magazines and books, including a number of titles in the New Vanguard series. NEW VANGUARD • 158 T-62 MAIN BATTLE TANK 1965-2005 STEVEN J ZALOGA ILLUSTRATED BY TONY BRYAN First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Osprey Publishing, AUTHOR'S NOTE Midland House, West Way, Botley, Oxford, 0X2 OPH, UK The author would like to thank Stephen "Cookie" Sewell for his usual 44-02 23rd St, Suite 219, Long Island City, NY 11101, USA generous help on Russian tank history. Thanks also go to Wojciech Luczak, Barry Beldam, and friends in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine for E-mail: [email protected] help with the photos used here. © 2009 Osprey Publishing Ltd. EDITOR'S NOTE For ease of comparison between types, imperial measurements are All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private used almost exclusively throughout this book. 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FOR A CATALOG OF ALL BOOKS PUBLISHED BY OSPREY MILITARY AND AVIATION PLEASE CONTACT: Osprey Direct, c/o Random House Distribution Center, 400 Hahn Road, Westminster, MD 21157 E-mail: [email protected] Osprey Direct, The Book Service Ltd, Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester, Essex, C07 7DW E-mail: [email protected] www.ospreypublishing.com CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 THE FIREPOWER CONUNDRUM 4 THE KRUSHCHEV INITIATIVES 8 THE STOPGAP TANK 12 ON THE PATH TO T-72 17 SWAN-SONG OF THE MISSILE TANK 18 T-62 EVOLUTION 20 EXPORT BONANZA 30 INTO COMBAT 31 • The Golan Maelstrom • Third World Warrior • The Afghan Quagmire • Desert Storm FURTHER READING 47 INDEX 48 T-62 MAIN BATTLE TANK 1965-2005 INTRODUCTION The Cold War myth about Soviet tank development was that it was a rigorously rational process based on a careful assessment of tactical doctrine, force structure, and technology. It has since become apparent that it was as fraught with bureaucratic in-fighting, petty jealousies, and industrial squabbling as any program in NATO. The T-62 tank was a classic case of the political dimensions of Soviet tank development. The program stemmed from a combination of political interference from the Kremlin and the ambitions of a rising tank plant in the industrial hinterlands trying to establish itself as a legitimate player in the eyes of the Kremlin. Despite repeated attempts by the Moscow tank bureaucracy to squash the program, the T-62 became the vanguard of the Soviet tank force in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although not revolutionary in terms of armor or mobility, it pioneered the use of smooth-bore tank guns and potent new types of ammunition. It coincided with a major shift in Kremlin weapons export policy, and so the T-62 was exported in considerable numbers. This extensive export had consequences for the T-62's reputation since it played a central role in the 1973 Middle East war and the resulting controversies over the future of the tank on the modern battlefield. Even though it was superseded in Soviet service by the T-64A and T-72 in the mid-1970s, it remained in the Soviet Army in large numbers and was the backbone of Soviet tank units in the Afghanistan war. It is best known for its extensive combat use outside the Soviet Union, notably the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, the Gulf War of 1991, and dozens of smaller conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. The T-62 remains in service in significant numbers around the world. While it may be obsolete compared to state-of-the-art main battle tanks, its robust design and adequate firepower make it a formidable weapon in many regions of the world and it is likely to remain in service for many years to come. THE FIREPOWER CONUNDRUM By the late 1950s, the Soviet Army was facing a serious dilemma regarding future tank armament. Its medium tanks were armed with the D-10 100mm rifled tank gun, and its tank destroyer units were also equipped with towed and self-propelled 100mm guns. However, the effectiveness of these weapons was growing increasingly questionable owing to the thicker armor of NATO tanks. The D-10 tank gun could not reliably penetrate the frontal armor of 4 such tanks as the US Army's M48A2 and it was even less adequate when The T-62 had its moment of facing newer NATO types such as the US Army's M60 or the British Chieftain. glory as the spearhead of the Egyptian and Syrian forces in At the time, the two principal Soviet anti-tank projectiles were the the October 1973 Middle East kinetic energy APC (armor piercing capped) and the shaped-explosive HEAT war. Syrian tank losses were (high explosive anti-tank). The APC was a familiar bullet-shaped projectile, substantial and many tanks and it was fitted with a thin ballistic cap covering the blunt penetrator captured by Israel were later transferred to NATO countries because a blunt penetrator provided better penetration than a sleek for technical evaluation like un-capped penetrator. By the mid-1950s, the APC round was obsolete this T-62 Model 1972 in French because it was too heavy and therefore incapable of being accelerated to hands. (Author) sufficient speeds to deal with the increasing amounts of tank frontal armor. A smaller, lighter, and faster projectile was needed. One type of high- velocity penetrator already in use was the APDS (armor piercing discarding sabot) which had first been widely used on the British 17pdr Firefly in late 1944. This projectile used a sub-caliber, hard-metal penetrator typically made from tungsten carbide that was encased in a light-metal sabot. When fired, the sabot petals peeled away from the core projectile. This allowed large-caliber tank guns to fire a small, very high-velocity projectile. The early APDS rounds had excellent penetration but poor accuracy, as slight perturbations in the peeling of the sabot petals could adversely affect accuracy. As a result, Soviet tanks in the late 1950s lacked a 100mm APDS projectile. This problem was gradually overcome by the 1960s. There were several other methods to increase the speed, and therefore the penetration power, of kinetic-energy projectiles. A traditional method was to increase the length of the gun tube, since this allowed the propellant to act on the projectile for a longer period of time and thereby increase its initial muzzle velocity. Guns could also be designed using improved metallurgical techniques that would permit higher chamber pressures. These higher chamber pressures could be attained both by increasing the volume of propellant as well as using a more energetic propellant. The premier Soviet tank gun design bureau, General F. F. Petrov's OKB-9 at the Uralmash plant in Perm, was designing the next generation 100mm gun, the D-54, that employed all these techniques. The old D-10 had a length of L/56 while the new D-54 had a length of L/62; the D- 10 APC round had an initial muzzle velocity of 900m/s while BM-8 the D-54 with its new APDS projectile offered l,015m/s. Most importantly, the D-54 had a reasonable chance of penetrating typical NATO frontal armor of the period at typical combat ranges while the D-10 did not. BM-6 The alternative to kinetic- energy ammunition was the HEAT projectile. This used a high-explosive warhead shaped around a metal cone. On impact, the shaped explosive crushed the metal cone into a hypersonic ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^1 stream of metal particles which had prodigious penetrating power against armored plate. Shaped-charge anti-tank warheads had been This drawing summarizes the three approaches in Soviet widely used on infantry anti-tank rockets such as the German Panzerfaust and anti-armor projectiles in the US bazooka in World War II. They were slow in coming to rifled tank guns for early 1960s. To the left is the two reasons. To begin with, mechanical impact fuses of the type available in 100mm BM-8 APDS, which World War II were too slow to detonate the shaped-charge warhead in time; the consisted of a sub-caliber tungsten penetrator inside cone was crushed during impact and before the fuse could detonate the a sabot. The darker section is high-explosive charge. So HEAT warheads could be used in slow, low-velocity the sabot. In the center is the cannons such as howitzers, but not in high-velocity tank guns. This problem 115mm BM-6 APFSDS which was overcome after the war with the advent of piezo-electric impact fuses. consisted of a steel long-rod penetrator inside a sabot. At The second problem was that rifled tank guns, unlike infantry rockets, the right is the 115mm BK-4M imparted a spin to the HEAT projectile that degraded the penetrating power of HEAT shown in cross section the hypersonic particle stream by as much as half. Even though early HEAT to expose its shaped-charge warheads were not well suited to tank guns in the mid-1950s, they were warhead; its fins are shown here deployed as they would extremely useful in other applications such as the emerging technology of appear after firing. anti-tank missiles. The missiles did not spin, and could use larger-diameter warheads than typical tank guns, giving them excellent penetration against contemporary tank armor. As a result, both the Soviet and NATO armies examined the use of missiles either as a replacement for tank guns or as a supplement for tank guns during this period. Besides the missile alternative, several technological solutions were being examined to adapt HEAT warheads for tank guns. The new French 105mm smooth-bore tank gun adopted on the AMX-30 introduced a slip ring into the projectile design to minimize the spinning. Another approach was the use of pop-out fins at the rear of the projectile, which was the path chosen by the Soviet and US armies by the early 1960s. 6 By the mid-1950s, the Soviet Army had two medium-tank programs under way, the evolutionary T-55 design being undertaken by V. N. Kartsev's design bureau at the Uralvagon plant in Nizhni-Tagil, and the next- generation Obiekt 430 tank being developed by A. A. Morozov's KB-60 bureau in Kharkov. Both design bureaus shared a common ancestry: Morozov's bureau had relocated from Kharkov to Nizhni-Tagil in 1941 because of the German invasion, and returned to Kharkov after the war. It left an engineering team in Nizhni-Tagil that became a separate design bureau in its own right. Morozov's bureau was regarded by the tank bureaucracy in Moscow as the inheritors of the Soviet medium-tank tradition with the lineage of the T-34, T-44, and T-54. The less established Nizhni-Tagil team was the young upstart, given less demanding tasks such as the evolution of the T-54 A into the modestly improved T-55. Even if Nizhni-Tagil had fewer resources than Kharkov, it had nearly as much ambition, not only because of the Kartsev design bureau but also the associated Uralvagon plant which had been the Soviet Union's largest tank manufacturer during World War II and a major railroad manufacturer as well. The plant director, Ivan V. Okunev, used his connections in Moscow to try to add resources to the plant's tank programs. Rivalry between Kharkov and Nizhni-Tagil gained momentum through the 1950s and reached a head in the 1960s and 1970s over the issue of the next-generation tank. Even though the Kharkov bureau was assigned the task of developing the next-generation tank, Kartsev's bureau at Uralvagon was authorized to The new U-5TS 115mm smooth-bore gun adopted develop the Obiekt 140 design to examine new directions in tank development. on the T-62 appears fairly This project was largely inspired by new NATO tanks such as the US Army's conventional from this photo M48 Patton, which used an elegant cast hull. The Obiekt 140 also served as of the breech block. Among its Nizhni-Tagil's test-bed for the next-generation D-54 smooth-bore 100mm gun. innovations was an automated shell-casing ejector, which can While the Obiekt 140 offered better hull design and better firepower than the be seen to the left in this view T-54 A, it had a troublesome powertrain and the program was quietly terminated. inside a T-62. (Author) THE KHRUSHCHEV INITIATIVES Alongside the Obiekt 140, the Uralvagon bureau was also starting to examine missile-armed tanks. The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, was an ardent advocate of missiles, arguing that they would render conventional weapons obsolete. Khrushchev saw missiles as a revolution in warfare, much as the "jeune ecole" had seen torpedo boats and submarines at the turn of the century. Khrushchev believed that small missile-armed vessels would doom the large cruisers and battleships favored by Soviet admirals, and that missile- armed tanks would doom the heavy gun-armed tanks favored by the Soviet Army. Khrushchev prodded the head of the tank industry to push in the direction of missile-armed tanks, and in the late 1950s he ordered the heavy- tank programs to be cancelled in favor of missile-armed tanks, even though the technology had not yet matured. The missile-tank program began in earnest in 1956, with very little enthusiasm from the tank-design bureaus who regarded the idea as half-baked and the technology as far too raw and untested. Nevertheless, the designers knew better than to argue with the Kremlin and full-scale programs were started at all the main tank centers including Uralvagon. The Uralvagon missile tank was designated as Obiekt 150 and consisted of a chassis evolved from that of the new T-55 tank, armed with the new 2K4 Drakon (Dragon) missile system. The Obiekt 150 hull design required a lengthened chassis compared to the T-55 because of the larger volume required for missile stowage. A preliminary Uralvagon design for the Obiekt 150 was approved at the end of 1957. The missile system was assigned to A. A. Raspletin's KB-1 GKRE (Design Bureau 1 of the State Radio-Electronics Industry) and to the TsKB-14 in Izhevsk for the missile propulsion. At this point, KB-1 was fairly obscure, but would go on to become Almaz, the premier Soviet air-defense missile-development organization responsible for the legendary S-75 (SA-2 Guideline) and today's S-300P (SA-10 Grumble). The Drakon missile represented one of the most sophisticated missile designs of its day, using a semi-automatic command-to-line-sight guidance system via a radio-command link. This was a considerable challenge due to the need to package a robust guidance system in a relatively small missile in an age before integrated circuits. On the positive side, the large-diameter shaped-charge warhead was capable of penetrating 500mm of armor, about double that of typical tank guns using kinetic-energy penetrators. Initial launch tests of the 3M7 Drakon missile started late in 1958 but the missile T-62 MODEL 1962, SOVIET 20TH GUARDS ARMY, OPERATION DANUBE, PRAGUE, AUGUST 1968 Prior to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Warsaw Pact tank units received instructions to paint a white cross over the roofs of their vehicles as an air identification marking to avoid confusion with Czechoslovak tanks. This was a standard Soviet air identification marking, widely used since the 1930s and indeed the same one adopted for the assault on Berlin in April 1945. This tank is typical of Cold War patterns in overall camouflage green {zashchitniiyzeleno), an extremely dark green when new; a US match is FS 34098. Tactical markings usually included a three-digit tactical number variously called the boevoy nomer (combat number) or bortovoy takticheskiy nomer (side tactical number). The Soviet Army intentionally avoided a standardized system and encouraged variation between divisions for counter-intelligence reasons. Generally, the three numbers indicated battalion, company, and individual tank, but a common alternative was to use the first number to indicate the company within a regiment, and the next two numbers sequentially as the tanks within the company.