It can enhance a Leopard 2A4’s protection, but only to a point. In other words, the place where a Leopard 2A4 most would benefit from add-on armor is the same place where explosive armor might inflict nearly as much damage as it prevents. It also happens that the Leopard 2A4’s thinnest armor is on its turret top. And ERA can impede sensitive equipment such as sights-and even damage this equipment when the armor explodes.Īs it happens, sights tend to be concentrated on the top of a tank’s turret. It’s less effective against non-explosive tungsten penetrators. It’s not for no reason that Turkey rushed to add reactive armor to its own Leopard 2A4s after losing several of the tanks in fighting in Syria in 2016.īut note: explosive reactive armor works best against high-explosive rounds. That’s less protection than, say, a newer American M-1A1 or German Leopard 2A6 enjoys.Īdding explosive reactive armor could boost a Leopard 2A4’s protection to the equivalent of around a thousand millimeters of steel wherever the ERA blocks are attached. Its steel and tungsten armor in some places offers the same protection as 800 millimeters of steel. Thus a T-62M tank with 150 millimeters of steel armor became a T-62MV with 150 millimeters of steel protection plus the equivalent of another hundred or so millimeters of steel thanks to the addition of ERA. The Soviet Union developed explosive reactive armor in the 1960s as an expedient: a way cheaply and effectively to enhance the protection of existing tanks. The outgoing blast can help to deflect the incoming blast, destroying the armor but hopefully sparing the vehicle it’s attached it. The armor-literally slices of plastic explosives sandwiched inside a metal container-explodes outward when struck by enemy fire. It’s clear why the Ukrainian army would want to add reactive armor to as many as its Leopard 2A4s as it can.
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