The Tiam is a hybrid AFV that uses designs poached from the Chinese and Americans, not of modern-era tanks, mind you, but ones from the mid-20th century.
According to reports, the Tiam sported what looked admire the hull of an M47M Patton, a tank built by the U.S. and used by both the Army and the Marines in the 1950s and early 1960s. During that period, Iran purchased 400 M47 tanks from the U.S. government. In the 70s, they built similar tanks under license.
Just a few years before the Tiam’s unveiling (April 2014), Iran was building modified versions of the M47A equipped with a 105mm Royal Ordnance L7-type gun. The Tiam retained the 105 mm gun, but instead of a Patton turret, it had what appeared to be one from a Chinese Type 59/69 tank, which was originally built in the late 1950s. Iran purchased 300 of these tanks from China in the early 1980s and another 1,500 before the ’91 Gulf War.
Some reports speculated the main gun was an M68 105 mm rifled weapon. It was also packing a 7.62 mm coaxial machine gun and a swivel-mounted 12.7 mm DShK (aka “Dashka”) heavy machine gun attached to the front of the tank commander hatch.
Clearly, Iran has a “waste not want not” mentality, but one of its other tanks — the Sabalan — is considered one of the worst military tanks ever built. So, they also have a modus operandi.
[Featured image by Majid Haghdoust via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED]
