T-72

The T-72 is a Soviet main battle tank introduced into service in 1971, developed in parallel with the more expensive T-64 but designed for cheaper mass production, featuring a 125mm smoothbore main gun fed by an automatic loading carousel that eliminated the need for a dedicated human loader and allowed a reduced three-man crew, along with composite armor protection and a low, heavily sloped silhouette characteristic of postwar Soviet tank design. It became one of the most widely produced and exported main battle tanks of the Cold War era, manufactured in the Soviet Union and under license in countries including Czechoslovakia, Poland, India and the former Yugoslavia, and fielded by dozens of countries' armed forces around the world. The T-72 and its many variants and derivatives have seen extensive combat across numerous conflicts from the 1980s through the twenty-first century, including the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, the Yugoslav wars and the Russian invasion of Ukraine beginning in 2022, giving it one of the longest and most geographically widespread combat records of any Cold War-era tank design.