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Italy puts $5.9 billion toward a new main battle tank
(defence-blog.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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My question is "how many different tanks do we need"? Shouldn't the EU have just one, or possibly two MBTs? Why duplicate all the efforts and maintain different setups?
The US has one MBT.
The US is one country. I guess Italy would rather pump that money into their own industry. Just like most other members.
That's my point. We should work as one entity, not necessarily one country, but at least stop wasting resources with everyone doing their own thing. We have SEVENTEEN different types of tanks in Europe.
When it comes to these things we should think of ourselves as EU first, country second, or we won't make it in the might-makes-right future that the US is trying to shape.
This actually seems like a step closer to that future, doesn't it? Most of the EU operates some variant of the Leopard, especially as the old Soviet and other Eastern Bloc ones age out and get replaced. This project with Italy is to be a variant of the successor to the Leopard, rather than a totally independent design like Italy's current tanks. Hungary is doing a variant of this too, and France has signed up to collaborate on a tank with Rheinmetall (although the fighter program that collapsed makes this specific case less promising in my eyes). It seems like a general coalescence around the German designs
The US is one country with a single military doctrine.
Europe is multiple countries who provide a military doctrine that best suits them.
It's pretty unclear what a tank does in a drone war, anyway.
Traditionally, armour was/is designed to move fast, and hit more lightly armed targets before they can react. Now, it's not fast, relative to the battlefield around it. Something like an APC or self-propelled howitzer might still have a role, but an MBT is designed with a very narrow use case in mind.