The disengagement of Chinese and Indian border troops at Pangong Tso has made Type 99A main battle tank a star weapon, but this has also brought a new question about Type 15 light tank of China to the surface.
Type 99A main battle tank uses a 150HB-2 turbocharged inter-cooled diesel engine, which belongs to the same large model as the MTU tank engine on the old German Leopard 2 tank. China has made independent improvements after introducing the civilian version of the latter.
However, Mao Ming, the chief designer of Type 99A tank, revealed in an interview in 2015 that the reliability of Type 99A tank was “relatively poor”, with oil and water leakage, loose plugs and other problems, which was “still far behind the international advanced level”.
According to a previous CCTV report, during the rehearsal of the National Day Parade in 1999, Type 99A tanks broke down many times, and its failure rate was as high as 210 times. Its reliability was significantly lower than other equipment, and its failure rate was more than twice that of other tracked vehicles.
According to analysis, similar problems also continued to China’s VT-4 main battle tank for export, which caused its poor performance in its first tests in Pakistan. It was not until later in Thailand’s tests that the reliability problem was proved resolved, and after that, the VT-4 tank was successfully exported to Pakistan too.
In the last standoff between India and China, China initially deployed 88A tanks to the front line, and then type 99A main battle tanks showed up and several of them were deployed to the front line of the standoff almost overnight, which played a key role in ending the standoff by taking advantage of the Indian T-72M1 tanks.
This time Type 99A tanks of China military came and went freely on the plateau and appear to have solved long-standing reliability problems and have very powerful powertrains. In contrast, the Indian T-90 tanks deployed to the Galwan Valley area were not considered suitable for plateau operations and were not present on the standoff line.
However, this may not be good news for China’s Type 15 light tanks. To make up for the power problems that heavy tanks may have in plateau areas, China previously developed the Type 15 light tank specifically for the Tibetan Plateau, with the highlight of being able to maintain high mobility in plateau environments, but in the past standoff, it could not even face the Indian T-72 tank alone at rest, so much so that it needed the 88A and 99A tanks to come to its aid.
As China gradually solves its heavy tank power problems, the disadvantages of the Type 15 tank, which weighs only 35 tons and has a barrel of only 105mm, come to the fore, including thin armor and insufficient firepower, in addition to its lack of application scenarios in other parts of China, making it look redundant for the Chinese military.
