Leopard 2 A7HU Water Crossing Capabilities

Abstract

Bridges are vital to the success of a battle, allowing troops to advance and supplies to be transported. If they are destroyed, engineers must provide the necessary freedom of movement and manoeuvre for combat and logistic forces. The armoured personnel carriers, armoured fighting vehicles, bridge layers, recovery and towing vehicles, heavy bridging equipment, which are being procured into the Defence and Military Development Programme, are considerably heavier than the old Soviet-Russian vehicles of similar design. The Lynx family of fighting vehicles is non-floatable, has minimal fording capability and is comparable in weight to the T-72 medium tanks. The Leopard 2 A7HU tank has a higher mass than the capacity of the currently available ribbon bridge. Following a review of the currently available bridge sets, my paper proposes to increase the number of available assets and introduces some new types that could be integrated into the system to overcome the above problem.