Editing T-72M (section)

==IRL==
[[File:T-72M Photo.jpg|right|300px|thumb|Mine plough? Nein, panzer bayonet genosse!]]
The T-72 family of tanks has a bewildering number of subvariants, including no less than three models named "T-72M". In the west it's often believed that the T-72M is a "monkey model", a cheap and downgraded variant the Soviet Union exported while keeping all the good tanks for themselves. This isn't really the case, but it always took a few years for the most modern tanks to reach export to the Warsaw Pact, and a few more years to get exported outside Europe. In Team Yankee, the Soviet Union is running around with T-72As from 1983 while the Warsaw Pact and Iraq has to make do with copies of the T-72 Ural-1 from 1978 upgraded with T-72A internals. In Team Yankee this shows up as 1 less front armour and anti tank on the main gun. (The latter from extremely strict export restrictions on ammunition, which never let anyone have anything better than late 70s ammunition.) Iraqi T-72Ms actually were downgraded, but the only change from the WaPa T-72M is having a cheaper and simpler NBC protection system. It's not like anyone's going to use NBC weapons in the Middle East, right?

The T-72M, like the Soviet T-72A, features an automatic loading system, reducing the crew requirement to three. By early 80s standards it has a powerful main gun, thick armour, and a not half-bad computerized gunnery system. Absolutely no internal protection whatsoever against ammunition explosions means that the crew will almost certainly be killed if a shot penetrates the armor of the main hull. This happened a ''lot'' to men of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard during both the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the most modern US munitions could slice right through all but the best armoured tanks in the world. The soldiers of the Warsaw Pact were better-trained, better led, and ''far'' more motivated than the armored crews of Saddam Hussein's paper tiger, however, so as lethal as a T-72M could be to its own crew, it posed no small threat to its enemies in the West in the mid-1980s. Something else to remember: in 2003, the original T-72M was hopelessly obsolete. In 1985, it was in its prime and NATO soldiers had good reason to be afraid of it, especially if they weren't riding around in a 40-something-ton war machine. Anything lighter than another MBT would have gotten its clock righteously cleaned by the T-72M if they didn't manage to destroy it first.

East Germany's T-72Ms were either scrapped or given away when West Germany took over in 1990, but Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia all held onto their T-72Ms and are still using them as of 2019.

The actual model of the T-72M used in Team Yankee is an East German T-72M which has been fiddled with a bit, Wiki claims with Rubber Skirts, Smoke grenades and 16 additional millimeters of armor.

[[Category:Vehicles]]