The T-55 is closely related to the WWII-era T-34, which was a great tank in its day. It has a high mobility and survivability and low ground pressure, meaning that it can move well over desert terrain or rough tundra. It’s a highly mobile tank, at least for its day and its era. But it still uses conventional sights and it doesn’t have any heat signature equipment, which makes it a little bit of a throw back.

The last time the T-55 was really effective was in the Korean War era. When you’re in a field of battle against Coalition forces in M1A1 Abrams, or the Challenger 2, any of those tanks will take it apart quite easily. The Soviet tanks have a homogenous, rolled steel, old fashioned armor, whereas the Challenger 2 tanks feature composite armor that’s just about impossible to defeat with the kinds of munitions that are available to the T-55-series tanks. Of all the Coalition tanks, Challenger 2 probably has the best armor. It’s really hard to get a disabling hit on it, and even if you do, there’s a built-in fire suppression system that immediately chokes out any fire that started inside the tank.

Challenger is also probably twice as mobile as the T-55, with its turbine engine that uses a variety of fuels. The computer sighting system, with laser infrared and trajectory calculations and stabilization systems, allow you to fire on the run. So these modern tanks can be moving at 50 miles per hour through broken terrain and still accurately fire their weapon. The T-55, like any old-style tank, has to fire and move; fire and move.

The thing about the old Soviet equipment is they could make a lot of it, and they could make it pretty cheap. The Ts were built to operate en masse. The old Communist theory was that victory would come by the sheer might of industrial output. In the ideal scenario, there would be this whole cloud of T-55s against four or five Challengers. The idea behind the Soviet-style tanks is to outmaneuver by sheer numbers, but of course, this situation will never come to be in Iraq.

The British soldiers would have probably outmaneuvered the Iraqis no matter what their armament. Western tank troops—even more than infantry units—still employ various changes in formation to confront the enemy on the battlefield. There’s no question that the soldiers that manned the Challengers had the edge. They were dealing with the same number of tanks against them, but the quality of the men and the equipment was unparalleled, thankfully. Because it was a really important feat to beat the insurgents here and it was super-important to blow up the enemy’s tanks.

If the tanks got away, they could have been dug in somewhere, anywhere, at a later time. They enemy knows they’re inferior to what’s coming after them, so it would make sense to put their tanks in hold-down positions and set them up in stationary ambushes or booby traps. There are a lot of things a creative defensive strategist could do with the T-55s, like developing an ambush strategy in an urban confrontation. You take those tanks and pull them into a shelled-out building, then wait for the Coalition to turn down a street and open fire. As ineffective as these old tanks might be against your superior armor, they’re still super-effective against any troops you might have running around trying to knock on doors in the cities. So you reduce the assets, just as you reduce the enemy.