The T-62 and T-72 had non homogeneous armor, but the T-72 exports have that as welL on the glacis and conventional homogenous armor on the turret.
Kontak-5 was never exported outside the Soviet Union, so no the export T-72s never had it. Your thinking of much earlier variants of reactive armor.
The USSR was repeating their same strategy they made with Germany wit the T-34s.
You mean the strategy of outmaneuvering their enemy by rapidly pushing into their depths faster then they can react?
And
@ObssesedNuker the Iraqis had training but would battle sight the gun to 1,800 meters and it stayed like that.
Advanced features on Soviet tanks were pretty much ignored. Kenneth M. Pollack flat out says this in his book
Arabs at War. That the battle sights would be left like that is because they weren't bothering to
use the battle sights.
The Highway of Death in Iraq met the criteria for what the Soviets were thinking on that matter. The destruction of a division would be enough. It is similar to the destruction unleashed on Ukranian forces in the Donbas. That had to be at least one Iraqi division that was destroyed.
This is wrong on three counts. First, that the Highway of Death (a highly misleading term, as we shall see) was even able to happen was because the Iraqis command structure was intact. When the massive Coalition "left hook" was developing out in the desert, the general who was in its path actively
lied to the High Command about both the size of the forces he was facing, as well as the fact that his divisions were being completely wiped out. He ultimately fled his command post without bothering to inform his superiors that he'd been overrun. Since the Iraqi High Command weren't complete fools, and were well aware of their subordinate's propensity to twist the truth, they dispatched a tank division from their reserve to swing around the left flank and have a look for itself. It blundered straight into the oncoming Coalition juggernaut in the open desert and was annihilated.
At this point the Iraqi High Command realized the massive scope of the unfolding disaster, and immediately (as in within hours) ordered the complete withdrawal from Kuwait as well as the commitment of the Republican Guard to hold the left flank for long enough for the rest of the army to escape. This the IRGC did, with some heroics and at great cost. The thing to remember is that the Coalition plan was actually for a grand envelopment of the Iraqi army in Kuwait. The decisive issuance of the order to withdraw up Highway 80 as well as the commitment of the IRGC prevented Schwarzkopf's trap from closing fast enough and allowed the Iraqis to avoid a catastrophic defeat which would likely have cost Saddam his country in the ensuing revolts (revolts he was instead able to suppress with the very army which had escaped intact). That the Iraqi High Command was able to receive such information and issue such orders pretty clearly shows that it's command structure had weathered the preceding air campaign intact. When the Iraqi High Command
was out of touch and behind the times, this was usually because subordinate commands would simply not pass accurate and timely information up the chain and not because of the effects of the coalition air campaign.
Secondly, and rather more to your point, while the 5 kilometer stretch of the "highway of death" in picture may look like some vast massacre, when set against the actual amount of military equipment the Iraqis possessed the actual number of vehicles destroyed is actually quite modest. Total vehicles neutralized are said to have been between 1,500 and 2,000 and almost all of them were commandeered civilian cars, trucks and buses for the infantry divisions... and most were not destroyed at all, but abandoned. I have never seen an accurate count of the number of destroyed AFVs within that number, but the numbers tossed around are quite low in military terms - in the dozens. Based on that, the number of actual military support vehicles is likely a few hundred at most. For comparison, a proper mechanized division contains ~500-1,000 AFVs and another ~2,000-2,500 support vehicles. In human terms, the number of casualties are estimated to be ~800-1,000 men. A division, any division, generally disposes of between ~10-20,000 men. 10% manpower casualties, at most, isn't even regarded as enough to declare a division combat ineffective even in the otherwise casualty averse US military. And this is ignoring that the casualties were spread out across several divisions instead of being confined to one: it's estimated that there were 70-80,000 Iraqi troops fleeing down that road. The wide angle shots of the Highway of Death certainly looks impressive to a layman, but most laymen do not realize just how large modern mechanized military formations actually are.
Thirdly, Ukrainian forces in the Donbass during that 2014 battle were not routed by Russian air forces using precision guided munitions but by Russian ground forces utilizing superior maneuverability and firepower of their heavy armor and mobile artillery.