Actually gun barrels (and area immediately around them in the turret) on Western Pact tanks are one of their weak spots, easy to knock off, there's an urban myth (not necessarily all untrue) to the effect that you can shoot it off even with small arms fire if you unload on it from the side.
Here is a leopard tank with burn spots in Syria from some years back.
Of course as you can see burning Leopard tanks is nothing new, they burned before but it is the Abrams tank that has been destroyed in greatest numbers across the entire Middle East and in the Arab world, with dozens US military admitted losses of Abrams tanks which likely means hundreds destroyed in actuality.
It must be stated, again, that there is nothing wrong with western tanks.
Some self-styled military experts continue to claim , rather in the face of available evidence, that there is nothing wrong with with Western tanks; that maybe so but then again as our guest expert General Sokolowski (Retd) says there is nothing particularly right with them either.
On balance, they are obviously inferior to the old Soviet era Russian tanks and especially to newer Russian designs.
General Sokolowski says he could elaborate on that last statement of his but doing so will serve to make someone wiser and making people wiser for free is one thing General Sokolowski is trying to avoid in his daily life and especially in his professional career as an expert on military matters.
For as they say...
How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise
Also, our expert general Sokolowski says would like to point out that one should remember that old Soviet- and current Russian antitank weaponry has been designed specifically to target, and to be most effective against, NATO armor assets, including American British and German tanks and that’s what it’s now doing and that’s what it does best.
And as you have been seeing it is pretty effective. Where a t-64 tank might take three hits to kill, only one is enough to kill, for example, the giant British rust bucket that is the Challenger 2, with the Challenger being harder to miss too.
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Burned Leopard
Here’s a burned Leopard 2a4 tank.
What’s interesting is the crappy panzer was augmented with blocks of Kontakt 1 D3 old soviet reactive armor... didn’t help either
Achtung ! Panzer zerstoert!
Our expert in all things military, both practical and theoretical applications, Gen Sokolowski (retd), he say, The Germans are well known for building and using crappy tanks as they did in most of ww2, until they finally (but too late) succeeded in copying the Russian t34 as Panther V and it appears they are back to square one with the Leopard which is an irredeemably inferior tank for reasons too numerous to enumerate here, suffice it to say it has many weak points making it easy to knock out even using 30 mm bmp guns to the side or heavy machine gun fire or even modified cheap commercial drones as in the case at hand.
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Large numbers of German Leopard tanks, 2a4 and 2a6, have been destroyed or knocked outsince early June 2023 when they saw first attempted use, with scores OSINTed (though we don't report them all - too many to post about all of them), probably up to or over 100 units already.
The Fog of War & Ghanima Blog: Leopard Zerstoert: Here’s a knocked out Leopard tank, probably one of those killed earlier and already reported on here. Achtung ! Panzer zerstoert! A drone ...
