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The Armory Article 13 - The Chieftain MBT

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Published on January 21, 2025

Welcome back to The Armory. After a winter break (I hope everyone is having a good New Year) we are back with a new entry – this time on the British Chieftain MBT. The Chieftain is featured in our new release - Armored Brigade II.

Armored Brigade II is a Cold War strategy game that allows you to fight out Company and Battalion sized actions from 1965-1991. The map sizes are really something to behold, going up to as large as 15x15 kilometers.

Armored Brigade II is currently out on the Matrix store and is on track for a Q1 release this year on Steam.

Starting off I would like to thank the sources I had for this article. tank-afv.com provided an excellent article that gave a comprehensive rundown of the characteristics of the vehicle, and has some excellent photographs of the tank through its many decades of service. Ospreay Publishing's Chieftain Main Battle Tank 1965-2003 was also a wonderful tool to help get familiar with this fighting vehicle.

So as usual, lets start with a little context. During the Second World War advancements in mechanical engineering and metallurgy had allowed for the tank to rapidly advance in terms of protection, firepower, and size. Interwar designs had been limited by small pre-war budgets and a simple lack of adequate combat experience to know what a tank really needed to be. With World War II, the major belligerents funneled massive amounts of money and resources to rapidly build tank fleets of larger and larger vehicles.

For example, at the start of the war the British were still using tanks like the Light Mk VI - a vehicle armed only with machine guns, protected by a maximum armor thickness of 14 millimeters, and weighing about 5 tons.

The Mark 6 Light is a fairly archetypal interwar design - under gunned and under armored

By the end of the war the British Cromwell weighed a comparatively whopping 27 tons, had a maximum hull thickness of 64mm’s of armor, and a 75mm main gun.

A Churchill inspecting a Cromwell

Improvements in combustion engines also meant that these new, heavier tanks were not as slow as you would think. The Cromwell was designed as a cruiser tank and could manage around 40km/h on roads. The far heavier 50 ton Centurion and 55 ton Chieftain could do 34.6km/h and 40km/h respectively. While these were not fast compared to Soviet or other NATO country designs – these speeds help highlight just how rapidly suspensions, transmissions, and engines were improving in the post-war period.

The Centurion - a 1945 design that straddled the line between a World War II medium and a Cold War MBT

World War II did not allow for a lot of time to stop and complete new and novel designs. High-intensity warfare usually requires iteration more than the creation of a completely new platform. The British had a winning design in the post-war period with Centurion, a tank that combined firepower, protection, and maneuverability in one package (it was a tad slow but nobodies perfect). This heralded the start of the era of MBT’s, or Main Battle Tanks.

A brief sideshow in the Cold War - the American M103 heavy tank...

Heavy tanks were gradually discarded by most nations for being too slow and limited in their maneuvers, while light tanks were usually kept as a tool for aggressive reconnaissance or air mobile units. MBT’s would fill out most nation’s armored fleets – a tank that would be a substantial investment of resources and be capable enough to fulfill multiple combat roles competently.

... and British Conqueror heavy tank

So here enters Chieftain. In the early 1950’s the British were already thinking about replacing Centurion. Centurion was a good vehicle but also very much a World War II era design. The British wanted a new tank that could destroy massed Soviet heavy armor. The 1950’s saw experimentation as liquid propellant, new ammunition like APDS, and a new 120mm gun were all proffered as ways to counter frontal sloped armor.

Chieftain is a hodgepodge of differing design ideas rolled into a single package. The hull is partially based off of a salvaged IS2 found in West Germany. The 120mm gun is based on early Cold War heavy tank designs like Conqueror and the American M103. To simplify logistics, the engine is designed to accept multiple different fuel types, which also increases the weight of the vehicle and reduces overall performance. This multi-fuel engine would prove to be the most problematic legacy of the Chieftains design.

A Dutch Chieftain on maneuvers

Like most tanks, introduction was a long and slow process of ironing out numerous teething problems. While introduced in the mid 1960’s, Chieftain continued to have reliability problems with its engine all the way into the the end of it's service in the 1990's. Adopting the multi-fuel engine had increased complexity and reduced engine power, leading to a slower vehicle. Attempting to get more power out of the engine lead into a vicious cycle of further decreased reliability.

A Chieftain set up for transport on the Mighty Antar

Despite a shoddy engine, Chieftain was a huge success in terms of protection and firepower. Looking at the definitive production model of the Chieftain – the Mark 5 – the front of the hull has a thickness of 120mm with the turret at 390mm. The front of the vehicle is also heavily sloped, you will be hard-pressed to find a 90° angle to shoot at from the front of Chieftain. This means that the frontal glacis of the tank has an effective thickness of something like 388mm of rolled homogeneous steel. The driver’s position is also heavily reclined when his hatch is closed – with the heavily sloped armor this is essential to make adequate space in the interior of the vehicle.

Chieftains on parade in west Berlin

Firepower is of course excellent with a rifled 120mm gun. One thing to keep in mind is that the silver bullet – APFSDS – does not come into service until late in the Cold War. For the most part Chieftains will either be firing HESH or APDS. For a mid cold-war vehicle the ranging system is also relatively simple – early Chieftain models rely entirely on a 12.7mm coax to range with tracer fire. Once the Mark 5 is introduced this is replaced with a new laser rangefinder which improves target acquisition time and the main gun’s effective range.

Chieftains in Canada - the Chieftain was widely exported to countries like Iran and Iraq

So how do you use the Chieftain in Armored Brigade II? If your playing as the British there is a good chance you will be defending yourselves against a tidal wave of Soviet BMP’s and T-72’s/64’s/54’s. If that is the case then the slowness of the Chieftain is somewhat mitigated as you only need to be fast enough to occupy a good defensive position.

Our column advances - it's a slow tank so control of road networks is extra crucial

The turret of the Chieftain is a very tough nut to crack – this is good for a defender. The first thing you ought to do is look for hull-down positions to fight from. These are mainly ridges and hills where you can get the turret above a rise andconceal the hull of the vehicle. From there you can fight with only the turret exposed – which is by far the most heavily armored part of the vehicle.

Our tanks come under air attack - even Rapier air defenses don't prevent losses

The British also organize their armor differently from the Americans or Soviets. British tank squadrons come in four sections of three vehicles each plus two company command vehicles. This totals fourteen tanks in a company. This does give you four distinct maneuver units in the squadron which certainly helps with flexibility, but does reduce the overall staying power of your average platoon. On a Cold War battlefield full of artillery and ATGM’s, a little extra spacing and flexibility is not a bad thing.

We reach our objective on our left flank - the top of a crest with beautiful lines of fire

In my personal experience the big killer of Chieftains is not Soviet armor, but the rest of the combined arms package. Whether it’s SU-25’s with tank-killing munitions or massed artillery fire, the Soviet army can and will knock out vehicles if you don’t reposition frequently. This is where the sluggishness of the Chieftain hurts, rapidly moving your forces can be a pain when your limited to 40km/h on roads and even less cross-country.

And on the right flank, we hold off a Soviet advance - the Chieftains thick armor gives it excellent survivability in direct engagements

And so to summarize the Chieftain, it’s surprising how good it is when so much of what went into it was flawed, compromised, or lifted from earlier failed concepts. A gun from an obsolete heavy tank, a hull partially based on the IS-2, and an engine that is just not adequate all rolled into a package that still makes me go “I might prefer this to an M60”. The last generation of tank that really doubled down on rifled guns and thick steel armor before the triumph of smooth-bore APFSDS ammunition and composite armor.

It’s just a shame the engine is a bit shit.

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