Published: Wednesday, 30 December 2015 09:16

Poland will start the modernization of its Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks in 2018.

The Polish Defense Ministry signed a contract to modernise 128 Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks used by the Polish army. Poland’s original set of 128 Leopard 2A4 tanks were bought and transferred in the mid-2000s. Poland also purchased a total of 105 Leopard 2A5.
     
In October 2015, Poland’s Armament Inspectorate has received three offers to upgrade the country’s Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks. Turkey’s Aselsan and Germany’s Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann are the three bidders.

In total 142 MBTs will be modernized, with a prototype scheduled for production in 2018.

Rumors have Poland looking for a final configuration that’s similar to Canada’s new Leopard 2A6Ms. That would reshape and strengthen the armor structure to 2A5 levels and beyond, upgrade the sights and communications, beef up the internal climate control to handle hot environments like Afghanistan, add extra mine blast protection underneath, and provide points to fit engineering utilities like dozer blades and mine clearance rollers.

The modernisation programme will start in 2018 and will mostly be conducted by Polish companies, although one of key partners in the deal is German defence-technology company Rheinmetall.

General Adam Duda, the head of the Polish military inspectorate said that the project is of essential strategic value for the Polish army and will significantly increase the tanks’ performance as well as the safety of Polish soldiers on the battlefield.

Besides the modernisation of the tanks, cooperation between partners is being tightened to ensure full functionality of the tanks and faster repairs in the future.

The Leopard 2A4 is a German-made main battle tank designed and manufactured by the Company Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, the successor of the main battle tank Leopard 1.

The Leopard 2A4 is armed with a 120 mm smoothbore gun which has been developed by Rheinmetall and fires two types of ammunition, APFSDS-T and HEAT-MP-T. The APFSDS-T has an effective range of over 2,000 m and the HEAT-MP-T has a high degree of effectiveness against both soft and hard targets.