In 2006, Canada Deployed Leopard 1A5 Tanks To Break Up Taliban Ambushes. Ukraine, Take Note.

Canadian Leopard C2 tanks conduct a road move at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan.

In 2003, the Canadian government made the controversial decision to remove from service all 66 of the Canadian army’s Leopard C2 tanks—local variants of the German-designed Leopard 1A5.

Three years later in September 2006, a Canadian force riding in wheeled light armored vehicles blundered into a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province.

Intersecting rocket- and gunfire laced the vehicles. Of the 50 Canadians in the fight, four were killed and at least 10 were wounded. The outgunned Canadians called in a NATO warplane, but the crew accidentally dropped a thousand-pound bomb practically on top of the same troops it was supposed to be saving.

The defeat in Kandahar prompted the government in Ottawa to reverse its tank decision. The Canadian army quickly flew 20 of the 40-ton Leopards to Afghanistan along with four armored recovery vehicles and four armored engineering vehicles.

The 28-vehicle contingent stayed in Afghanistan for five years, eventually swapping some of the first-generation Leopards for newer Leopard 2A6s. The Canadian contingent in Afghanistan put its tanks to good use, rolling through ambushes to blast Taliban strongpoints. “We kicked the shit out of those fuckers,” one veteran tank crewman wrote.

In five years of hard fighting, three C2s were destroyed and another 15 were damaged. The Taliban’s 82-millimeter recoilless rifles were a major threat.

The Afghanistan war underscored the strengths of the 1980s-vintage Leopard 1A5. The four-crew tank boasts excellent firepower in the form of a stabilized L7 105-millimeter main gun aimed by world-class fire-controls including decent day-night optics.

The L7 is compatible with a special “squash” round that works really, really well against buildings. Most other tank guns can’t fire the round.

Equally importantly, the Leopard 1A5—a.k.a., the Leopard 2C—is flexible. Its hull includes attachment points for minerollers, mineplows and dozer blades. A standard Leopard 2A6 doesn’t have the same attachment points.

So the Leopard 1A5 can double as an engineering and assault vehicle: clearing minefields, breaching earthen berms, smashing holes in walls. The newer Leopard 2A6 can’t do these things—unless an army modifies it, as the Canadian army eventually did.

At the same time, the Leopard 1A5 has clear disadvantages. Its rifled 105-millimeter gun, while accurate and compatible with a wide array of ammunition types, lacks the raw penetrating power of the larger 120-millimeter smoothbore gun that arms every Leopard 2 model.

More importantly, the Leopard 1A5 is thinly armored. The steel armor along its frontal arc is just 70 millimeters thick. That’s a tenth of the protection on the latest Leopard 2s. It’s telling that Canadian crews in Afghanistan grew to fear the Taliban’s antiquated recoilless rifles.

The Leopard 1A5’s thin armor make it unsuitable for combined-arms operations alongside infantry fighting vehicles on open terrain. A Leopard 1 wouldn’t last long in a complex, direct assault through enemy tank- and missile-fire.

All this matters in 2023 because a Dutch-German-Danish consortium has pledged at least 100—and potentially more than 200—old Leopard 1A5s to Ukraine’s war effort.

Once the first batch of 100 Leopard 1s arrives in Ukraine between this June and early 2024, it should be the most numerous Western-style tank in Ukrainian service. The Ukrainians need to figure out how to use the old tanks.

The Canadians’ experience with the first-generation Leopard is a reminder that the tank works really well as an urban assault vehicle. A close fight among buildings leverages the Leopard 1A5’s firepower and mitigates its lack of armor protection—by keeping it out of the line of sight of the enemy’s own tanks and anti-tank missile teams.

Moreover, it’s on rubble-strewn city streets that a Leopard 1’s many hull attachments—in particular, its dozer blade—are particularly useful.

And that squash round the Leopard 1’s L7 gun fires—it’s like firing a giant shotgun across a room.

A high-explosive squash head round is filled with a gooey plastic explosive that, on impact with a surface, flattens before exploding. The explosive’s disk shape creates shrapnel-like fragments called “spall” on the opposite side of the surface.

The problem with a HESH round is that it needs to spin in order to spread out its explosive. It needs a rifled gun. But almost all latest-generation tanks—the British Challenger 2 is the only big exception—have smoothbore guns that work really well with certain armor-piercing rounds but don’t work at all with squash rounds.

The Leopard 1A5 practically is begging to do in Ukraine what the nearly identical Leopard 2C did in Afghanistan: break up ambushes by enemy infantry, bust down walls and shotgun strongpoints so friendly infantry can press their attack.