Saudis buying Al-Khalid Tanks from Pakistan

Look like saudi's going to get some Al-khalid tanks they will be quite decent medium tanks.

Official sources told AFP that Saudi Arabia, which has longstanding defense ties with Pakistan, was interested in buying Pakistan-made Al-Khalid tanks and this would be part of his discussions here.

uk.news.yahoo.com...

some info on the Al-khalid:
www.sinodefence.com...
www.globalsecurity.org...


Saudi arabia seem's to be buying more and more non-american weapons from the looks of it. First they started to eye Rafales and Eurofighters now different medium tanks and also different APC's they have been seeking weapons from non-american sources.

Any body also noticed this trend. I think it's becuase every time america sell's weapons to Saud it always has strings attached like the f-15 "peace sun" they purchased america told them in which parts of saudi arabia they could use them and they wearnt allowed to bring them near the borders of saudi arabi which brings them in range of Israel.

Saudi's have 315 Abrams MBTs, so yes, it is rather interesting to see them buy a T90 based tank.

Probably just got tired of paying up the nose for maintenance and parts. Does not matter how great a weapon is if you can't push it out of the gate because some turbine compressor is on some boat with eta of a month or two.

Egyptians have 777 M1A1s and they're still buying, all while modernizing 200 T-62s, so go figure.

Note that the Al-Khalid also known as Type-90 has nothing to do with the Russian T-90S tanks.
It is an offshoot of the Chinese tank program(which later cumulated in the Type 98 Tank) to develop an MBT to counter the Russian T-72 tanks.
Hence the connection is more chinese and more of the T-72 type rather than Russian and of the T-90 type.