Over 20 years of its trade in the international arms market, Russia’s Rosoboronexport weaponry exporter has supplied over 3,000 tanks and armored vehicles abroad, including artillery, engineer and other weapon systems and military equipment.
“The equipment designed by the Russian school of tank building, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, receives acclaim of foreign specialists every year. The latest products from companies of Rostec corporation such as Armata and T-90MS MBTs, BMPT Terminator tank support fighting vehicles, Sprut-SDM1 light amphibious tanks, TOS-1A heavy flamethrower systems, Msta-S self-propelled howitzers, a broad lineup of engineer vehicles based on tank chassis and many other domestic armored vehicles, are in high demand around the world. In a number of countries, armored units equipped predominantly with Russian vehicles became the backbone of the national armed forces,” Alexander Mikheev, Rosoboronexport CEO, said.
Today, more than 40 countries are actively operating not only state-of-the-art Russian armored vehicles, but even those supplied decades ago by the USSR. Moreover, over the past 20 years, more than half of these countries have signed major contracts with Rosoboronexport for the supply of new batches of armored vehicles or the modernization of their tank fleets to radically increase the operational readiness and fighting capacity of their armies.
According to the corporate website of the weaponry exporter, the key features of the Russian armored vehicles are high operational effectiveness and capability to handle a wide range of tasks, ease of use, automation of operations and control, increased mobility, good crew protection, operability in the widest range of geographic and climatic conditions, from polar ice to the equator, reliability, platform and component commonality, their high maintainability on the battlefield, compliance with the claimed performance characteristics.
Success in exporting Russian armored vehicles is also due to the quality training of foreign specialists, setting up joint venture productions abroad, and carrying out various R&D projects for foreign customers.
Foreign customers pay great attention to the preliminary evaluation of equipment before making a decision on its procurement. So, the tests of T-90 tanks in the Thar Desert and the Arabian sands became an effective advertising for these vehicles. As a result, a plant was built in India for the licensed production of T-90S MBTs and a number of countries adopted them for service.
Over 100 years, the tank building industry in Russia has evolved in a unique way, becoming a nationwide plant academy, in the shops of which an engineering idea is translated into advanced military equipment. The best achievements of science and the unique century-old experience of using tanks have been implemented today in the Armata universal combat platform, hardy to be matched in the foreseeable future. The delivery of vehicles based on this platform abroad is the future of the world tank building industry. Currently, the world tank export market is dominated by T-72, T-80 and T-90 MBTs, which have received a state-of-the-art configuration as a result of Russian modernization.
“An immense amount of research and technological groundwork and colossal capacities of Russian heavy engineering enterprises, which include tank building industry, the latest production processes, from armor plate welding and rolling to delicate integration of high-tech digital equipment into multi-ton hulls — all this ensures Russia’s leadership in this segment of the world arms market. This success has been achieved thanks to the talents and conscientious work of hundreds of thousands of people working in design bureaus, operating machines, producing steel, and assembling powerful combat vehicles. Only cohesive teams can achieve such overwhelming results,” Alexander Mikheev stressed.