| The GAU-8 could not kill T-72s, which entered service during its development cycle. Everyone fawns over it, but the GAU-8 only had moderate penetrating abilities against T-62s, less against the T-64. In order to "kill" a T-62, the A-10 had to approach it from very specific directions, at very specific angles of attack. The Soviets knew this so they co-located anti-aircraft artillery with their armor units and any A-10 making a gun run on a tank would have been flying through a hail of anti-aircraft fire. In order to penetrate a thin sliver of armor on the sides of the T-62, an A-10 pilot HAD to fire from from the side of the tank at "1500 feet away, at 3 degrees of dive, at 320 knots". The Soviets knew this, too. What direction do you think the barrels of the ZSU-23-4 self-propelled radar-guided anti-aircraft vehicles were pointed, when moving in formation with T-62s? The PGU-14/B depleted-uranium armor piercing round, the most "anti-tank" bullet the GAU-8 fires, can penetrate 55mm of armor at 1,220 meters and 75mm at 300 meters. There are very few parts of the T-72 that have armor thinner than 75mm. Also, those penetration figures are for steel. Very rapidly after the introduction of the A-10, the Soviet Union started outfitting all of its main battle tanks with composite armor and additional external armor. So at best if you pepper a tank with a full magazine of PGU-14/B fired from a GAU-8 you're probably hoping to break its track, poke a hole in an external fuel tank, or puncture its main gun-- not destroy it. Crews inside modern main battle tanks would probably hardly notice being hit by fire from a GAU-8. Here is the "A-10 Coloring Book", written by cold war A-10 pilots as a training aid covering how to shoot at T-62. T-62s were only vulnerable from the rear, and thin (hard to hit) slivers along the sides. https://imgur.com/gallery/fd4sK The T-64 was harder to kill, and the T-72 almost impossible. Due to anti-aircraft assets being closely-coupled to Soviet tank formations it was predicted that every single A-10 pilot would be dead two weeks into a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union, and this was 40 years ago. |