Confronting the Armor Gap

Travelers alighting at Kabul airport shortly after the Soviet invasion have been greeted by a menacing spectacle: a line-up of one of the meanest looking, deadliest vehicles in the world's arsenal of armor. The vehicles are BMDs, a combination light tank and armored personnel carrier used by Soviet airborne divisions. The versatile, 8-ton vehicle is armed with a 73 mm gun, three machine guns and an antitank missile launcher, and carries a crew of five. Like all Soviet-armed vehicles--including the similar but slightly larger BMPs that are also being shipped to Afghanistan--the airtight BMDs can churn through clouds of nerve gas, impervious to biological, chemical and radiological warfare.

The massive Soviet deployment of armored vehicles in Afghanistan has pointed up a growing armor gap between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. The BMDS, BMPS and the Soviets' main battle tank, the T-12, are as good as, if not better than, any armored vehicle the U.S. presently has in use. The Pentagon is trying to surpass Soviet tank technology with the Chrysler-built XM1, which has had numerous problems with its gas-turbine engine. Only 110 of the 54-ton XMls are expected to be produced this year. Meanwhile, the U.S.S.R. currently has between 45,000 and 50,000 tanks in its arsenal, about five times as many as the U.S., and Soviet production is outdistancing American by about 6 to 1.

Warns Christopher Foss, British editor of the authoritative Jane's Armour and Artillery 1979-1980: "The armor gap is so great that the West is falling hopelessly behind in getting vehicles into the field." By 1987, the U.S. Army hopes to deploy 7,000 XM1 tanks to counter the threat of the 25,000 T-72s and tens of thousands of other armored vehicles the Soviets will have by that year. But the Pentagon's goals are at the mercy of congressional cutbacks and increased production costs. Meanwhile, the Soviets are developing a brand-new tank, the T-80, that is meant to surpass the XM1. According to U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Army Percy Pierre, a successor to the T-80 is probably already "on the drawing boards of one of the Soviet tank plants, where thousands of engineers spend their days doing nothing but designing tanks."

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