Something doesn’t sit well with me regarding the Karrar tank.
If you look at articles prior to announcement of Karrar tank, there was a battle between IRGC vs Army. It was rather quick and most may have missed it.
A high ranking Army General said something along the lines of Iran plans to upgrade its tanks and purchase T-90 from Russia. Supposedly some Iranian militias/IRGC in Syria used T-90s in syria as a test and were impressed by it in the battlefield.
Anyway then less than week or so later an IRGC official completely exposes the commander and says Iran doesn’t need T-90 and no plans to buy it and Iran can build a tank even better.
That same Army General is rebuked and embarrassed and comes back shortly after proclaiming that Iran doesn’t need T-90 that it can make its own.
Sometime after that the Karrar project is unveiled.
My question here is, it is doubtful that an high ranking Army general would not know that Iran is working on karrar tank. Such a project doesn’t just happen overnight. So then why go out there and pubically say they will buy T-90?
Very strange. My theory is if Karrar tank sees the light of day that Russia has had a back door deal with a iran on PARTIAL tech transfer of T-90 tech. Because Karrar isn’t an exact copy of T-90 but shares a lot of similarities. Either that or Iran learned to reverse engineer most of it in the few years it was in Syrian service.
Really tough to say, just peculiar how it all played out.
Anyway with mechanized armour, Iran places a very low priority on upgrading that arsenal. It will be a last phase type thing because the threat of land invasion is so low and even if land invasion happens wether Iran has Lepoard 2 or T-72 or T-90 it won’t make much of a difference if US establishes air superiority in iranian skies. So again low priority.
I like the Iran route of upgrading T-72 tanks to Karrar standard if possible. Why waste perfectly good tanks. Karrar is not built to be a “next gen” tank for the next 20 years. It’s a stop gap till something better is developed.