The fire control system (FCS) of the Belgian Leopard 1A5BE tanks that were supposed to be delivered to Ukraine has a problem. The German military corporation Rheinmetall has purchased 50 Leopard 1 tanks from Belgium. Of them, Rheinmetall plans to deliver 30 of them to Kyiv.
An observer for the American journal Forbes named David Axe reports that the 1A5BE variant tanks have the Belgian-developed SABCA fire control system (FCS) installed in them. However, to achieve a level of accuracy marginally superior to that of the conventional German system, Belgium was required to pay additional costs and a price for uniqueness.
According to the observer, the SABCA system requires specialised care and technological support, but these resources appear to be in short supply. The author states that there are already indications that the one-of-a-kind SABCA systems installed on the fifty Leopard 1A5BE tanks Rheinmetall purchased from OIP Land Systems in Belgium are in poor condition.
According to Axe, there is a simple explanation for why Berlin intends to deliver only 30 of the 50 tanks to Ukraine. Berlin intends to dismantle 20 tanks to obtain spare parts for repairing the remaining 30 tanks. The author strongly believes that this cannibalisation was designed specifically for the sake of the fire control systems.
According to him, however, the faults occurring with the fire control system are not the most severe difficulty for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The relatively thin steel armour is a far more significant cause for concern. The observer concludes that it has a maximum thickness of only 70 millimetres, so it cannot give solid protection against anything more powerful than the Russian heavy machine gun.
The Leopard 1 MBT was manufactured in Germany between 1965 and 1984. It was used by the armies of the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Australia, and Italy up to the middle of the 1980s.
