M60 Patton

This article is fucking 'Murican. Expect copious amounts of Freedom with an infrequent side of Awesome.

Yo dawg, I heard you liked turrets

"We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home."

– General George S. Patton, Jr.

The M60 was America's first officially designated Main Battle Tank (because all the tanks before it were classified as Light, Medium, or Heavy). The M60 is armed with a M68 105mm main cannon and two MGs, one .50 M2 on top and a .30 cal mounted coaxially with the main gun. Uniquely, the AA .50 cal is actually mounted in a little commander's turret on top of the actual turret, rather than just being bolted to a convenient peg. Its service life with the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps spanned nearly thirty years, with the Marines turning in their last Pattons after the Gulf War of 1990-1991. There are two versions of the venerable M60 in the rules of Team Yankee, the M60A1 and the M60A3. While the ever well supplied army gets the 1978 introduced M60A3 with thermal sights and the like, the marine corps makes good use of the M60A1. That said, the Battlefront model is the M60A3.

Unlike its successor, the M1 Abrams, the M60 Patton was not an all-new tank. It was instead a much improved development of the older M48 Patton, which had a more rounded hull and a 90mm main gun. It is not technically part of the Patton series of tanks; its official name, given in 1959, is "Tank, Combat, Full Tracked: 105-mm Gun, M60." The name "M60 Patton," much like the "M4 Sherman" of World War II, has been so commonly used that even Wikipedia it recognition in its article on this beast for years. As of the setting of "Team Yankee" in August 1985, the M60 Patton has aged, but can still kick ass with the best of them - much like Patton himself, back when he did all the stuff that got a whole line of tanks named in his honor.

In Team Yankee

USA

Valley forge, Custer's ranks, San Juan Hill and Patton's tanks, and the Army went rolling along...

Go ahead. Make my day.

First employed by American forces in the 1950s, the M60 Patton remains the mainstay of U.S. Army tankers in 1985 and is the sole main battle tank operated by the U.S. Marine Corps. Caught five years into the process of phasing its M60s out in favor of the newer and better M1 Abrams (introduced in 1980), the U.S. Army has waded into the fighting with a sizeable fleet of Pattons. The Marines, meanwhile, still having to make do with the second-hand stuff, will be enthusiastically destroying things that somebody else has to pay for, old tanks be damned. The M60 Patton may not be as good as it once was in 1985, but it's a workhorse and that's good enough.

Despite being a vastly different and considerably older design, the M60 Patton is basically armed with the same weapons systems as the older model Abrams (sans one .30cal) and can dish out the same damage. The M68 105mm Cannon has a ROF of 2 both moving and staying still, meaning the M60 can use its mobility while still being capable of engaging targets. The Laser Rangefinder rule allows the M60A3 to engage targets beyond 16 inches without adding +1 to your shooting rolls. The AT of 20 is more than enough to punch right through anything lighter than an MBT and stands a decent chance of damaging things like the T-72. With increasing amounts of Soviet armor available at frontal 18, you may decide to complement your tanks with a few ATGMs to reliably punch through a line of tanks.

On the defensive, however, the M60 comes up a bit short. The Patton has front armor 15, only one more than the T55AM2, which means that Soviet Tank guns will perforate it like an oversized balloon, to say nothing of ATGMs. The side armor is a similarly lackluster 8 (which is actually one less than a T55AM2 but still 2 better than the Chieftain), making it vulnerable even to some of the heavier autocannons. It gets worse, the M60 lacks any kind of additional protection, including Bazooka Skirts, so what you see is what you get on this thing. And coming as it does from the 1950s, the M60 Patton has no internal armor to shield the crew from an ammunition explosion, meaning that a hit on its 105mm shell storage will send the turret flying and kill everyone inside just as a similar hit would on a Warsaw Pact tank.

While players may look at the obsolete armor that the Patton boasts- it's got the same frontal armor points as a T-72M, for Chrissakes- and run back to the Abrams, consider the point costs. Even the base Abrams costs double that of a Patton, i.e. 8pts compared to 4, (to say nothing of an M1A1HC) meaning that a platoon of M1 tanks could translate to two platoons of M60s. With the effective doubling or more in firepower, players with a preference for damage or the ability to preserve their tanks using LOS blocking will find the Patton to be far more cost-effective.

U.S. Army and U.S. Marine tank units may take Patton Platoons ranging in size from 2 to 5. There is a lot to be said for buying two M60s instead of a single Abrams, although that does mean your NATO force suddenly gets expensive, model-wise. In the typical infantry heavy meta, players will often find they are a strictly better option than the Abrams with the spare points going for additional Mech Platoons or support instead.

TL;DR: Cheaper, decent tank, more fragile, but also more economical (for your list not your pocketbook).

Israel

Israel gets a Patton! Iran gets a Patton! Everybody gets a Patton!

The Isreali designation for the M60A1 is the Magach 6 and they have fiddled with it a bit. Instead of the giant commander's cupola, it's just a flat hatch with a 7.62mm machine gun. The .50 cal gets changed upgraded from a M85 to a M2 and mounted on the gun shield to be used in conjunction with the built-in coax machine gun.

It has a Brutal gun which forces re-rolls on passed infantry saves, and could fire smoke if needed. Unfortunately, it drops 1 ROF while moving on the main cannon and has the Accurate special rule: terrible for maneuver warfare, but excellent at fighting in a defensive position. The gun's penetration is identical to the Merkava, so take the Magach 6 if you want maximum firepower. The Magach costs (around) half of the Merkava 2, so the trade-off is very similar to that between the Patton and the Abrams.

If you are firing at infantry, the Magach can throw out 3-6 MG shots depending on range and whether you moved. The .50 is Anti Helo, so you can put up one shot at 5+ FP.

Iran

Yes, this file is shit, as soon as I get Oil Wars I will upload a better one

A well worn hand-me-down from the USA pre-1979 revolution, in Iranian service these tanks fall between the Chieftain and T-62 both in points and tactics-wise. These have none of the fancy trimmings that US M60s get, with no stabiliser or laser rangefinder and Anti-tank dropping to 18 (I guess the arms embargo meant Iran needed to make its own sub-par ammunition). Then again, these tanks cost a mere 2 points each, literally half of the US version, so expect to see these babies spammed to death.

FP 18 isn't going to get through any of the NATO MBTs like Abrams or Leo 2s from the front, but these guys are the cheapest MBT in the game to get ROF 2: perfect against Leo 1 spam lists. No other tank can be quite as cost-efficient as these boys when used correctly. Their armour stands a good chance of deflecting Leo AT 19 guns, while they will auto-pen a Leo 1 at any range. Ironically, as "PACT" you probably want to be defensive if you are facing large numbers of cheap(ish) NATO tanks, which used to be the meta. Halted ROF 2 and Accurate lean towards a static playstyle, so avoid moving if you can. Post them up in cover and let them get to work against light armour. Their cross value of 2+ will be your friend if you ever decide to move.

The Iranian M60 excels as a cheap long-ranged support weapon that will trade well into anything other than top tier tanks like the Leo 2, Abrams or T-64. As Iran you will struggle with these tanks anyway, so consider bringing a horde of T-62s or allied T-72s. M60s could be used in a pinch at rushing for flank shots, but this isn't recommended. They are weak against heavy armour, and suffer from their small unit size, meaning they can't really absorb losses like T-72 blocks. However, morale and remount 3+ will (hopefully) keep your formations in the fight for longer, as all of your tank crews have Allah's blessing and the key to heaven.

They can be taken as a "group" of 3. Yep, that's it. One size. An Iranian M60 company can take 2-3 groups, with 1-2 tanks in its HQ, and an optional Mechanized group. Iranians get no options in how to build their formations.

IRL

An M60 in central Germany

The M60 Patton is essentially a dressed-up version of the older M48 Patton, developed in response to the T-54A after the Brits got to examine one up close during the Hungarian Revolution. This led to replacing the WWII-era 90mm cannon on the M48 with a 105mm cannon to match against the Soviets' 100mm guns. They could've just put the same cannon and updated systems on the M48, and in the 1970s did that, calling that version the M48A5, but creating a new tank that isn't really new is more the U.S. Army's thing, you see.

The main reason for getting a new designation is that the M60 was supposed to be innovative, early designs planned on using composite armor and a combination gun and missile launcher (as seen on the Sheridan) mounted in a strange looking low profile turret called the Starship; ultimately pretty much all of these experimental features flopped in one way or another and so by the time the tank was fit for combat it was basically just back to where it started, an M48 with a bigger gun. With the elimination of the Light, Medium, and Heavy Tank classifications, the M60 became America's first Main Battle Tank. The M60 had been used throughout most of the Cold War until the introduction of the M1 Abrams that replaced it. The M60A1 which the Marine Corps used (and uses in the game) originally hit production in 1962, without a stabilized gun. In 1973 the M60A1 received an Add On Stabilizer (AOS), increasing its effectiveness, and the ancient Browning .30 caliber coaxial MG replaced with the M73 in 7.62mm NATO. This is the version of the M60 we see in Team Yankee with the US Marine Corps.

IRL a number of active-duty Army units got the semi-experimental M60A2, which only remained in service between 1975 and 1981. The M60A2, whose crews called it the "Starship" due to the, for the time, extreme complexity and sophistication of the fire-control system for a low-velocity, short-range 152mm gun/launcher, which had available for it both a conventional 152mm HEAT round and the world's first through-the-gun-tube ATGM, the Ford Aerospace MGM-152 Shillelagh, the same main armament as the M551 Sheridan light tank that was used from Vietnam until Desert Storm. 1970s bleeding-edge technology was fragile and finicky and had lots of downtime, and the through-the-gun-tube missile launcher, commonplace though they are worldwide today, was enormously audacious for the disco era and the technology of the era was just not up to the challenge of bringing the designers' dreams into the real world, in the sense that the missile system was expensive and unreliable, and due to the limitations of the guidance system could not be aimed at targets within 730m, which was held by some to be beyond the maximum effective range of the unguided HEAT rounds available for the gun, though a 1980s fire control package with laser rangefinder and ballistic computer could have addressed that shortcoming. It is ironic that in the present day it'd be cheap and trivial to give the "Starship" and the Sheridan the same thermal vision, laser rangefinder, and computerized fire control suite 21st Century MBTs get, and create for it a laser-guided or fire-and-forget 152mm through-the-gun-tube long range tandem-charge top-attack antitank missile for the M60A2 and Sheridan and it'd actually work as advertised, and the Sheridan in particular would be more viable in 2020 than it was in 1964. Be that as it may, in the late 1970s the M60A2 was widely regarded as a failed experiment. By the spring of 1981 all remaining M60A2s were converted to the M60A3 standard.

Speaking of the M60A3, it was introduced in 1978 and stayed in service in Army National Guard units until 2005. It was the good old M60A1 with the 1975 RISE enhancements, plus true passive thermal night vision sights for the commander and gunner replacing the distinctive enormous infrared spotlight bolted on top of the turret you see on M60s, M60A1s, and M48s, a laser rangefinder, and the same terrifyingly lethal and efficient computerized fire control suite as early M1 Abrams tanks.

There were plans in the 1980s for further enhancements to keep the M60 in service longer due to teething problems with the earliest M1A1 tanks with the Rheinmetall 120mm smoothbore gun. Ideas for the hypothetical M60A4 ranged from shoehorning a 120mm gun into the turret--theoretically impossible, but Thailand and Turkey now field the M60T variant cobbled together for them by Elbit in Israel--to a variant with a smoothbore 105mm gun that could use the same ammunition but get higher velocities, to a variant with explosive reactive armor tiles, which remains in service in Israel with reserve units, who call it the Mag'ach 7.

Even after that, the M60 stayed for a while, proving itself more than viable against Iraqi T-55s, Type 69s and T-72s during operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, though that may have had more to do with crew proficiency than the vehicles themselves. The US finally retired its last M60s in 2005, and the M278 Combat Engineer Vehicle (a repurposed M60) is still soldiering on with the US Army Reserve and Army National Guard forces. Many armies still use them, namely Turkey and the Republic of China (Taiwan), along with Israel. The still-serving M60s have been modified and updated in a wide variety of ways; one version comes with 25mm auto cannons in place of the M2 machine gun and a 120mm cannons. Very lightly modified units are serving in the Syria conflict with better success than more advanced Leopard 2 tanks, though it should be noted that air superiority, artillery fire and near constant drone overwatch help a lot on this count.

Armor was around 130-200mm of RHA if memory serves, and it was PLANNED to have "Siliceous Cored Armor, but... Some were eventually fitted with explosive reactive armor tiles on the front and sides of the turret and the front of the hull; first seen in Israeli service during the 1982 Lebanon dust-up, by the late 1980s it was also being fielded extensively on American vehicles which went on to perform quite satisfactorily during the Gulf War. Since Israeli usage was already widespread by Team Yankee's 1985 start date we can expect that future expansions will eventually feature that variant as was done for the T-64, and given that AFVs that didn't see service until well into the 90s (not to mention numerous experimental AFVs) are already playable it's likely this option will also extend to American forces (most importantly it offers Battlefront Miniatures the opportunity to earn some additional profit).

The M60 would have been unquestionably the American workhorse tank if World War III had broken out in 1985. It might have been old, and based closely on the even older M48, but it was still a potent threat for the Warsaw Pact forces. The U.S. Marine Corps had not received any M1 tanks yet in 1985, and neither had the U.S. Army Reserve or the Army National Guard. The M60 would have been the one doing most of the work, even if the Abrams was newer and has gotten so much more hype in the years since.

Israeli Forces in Team Yankee
Tanks:	Merkava - M60 Patton
Transports:	M113 Armored Personnel Carrier
Troops:	IDF Infantry Platoon
Artillery:	M109 Howitzer -M106 Heavy Mortar Carrier -M125 Mortar Carrier
Anti-Aircraft:	M163 VADS - ZSU 23-4 Shilka - M48 Chaparral - Redeye SAM Platoon
Tank Hunters:	Pereh - M150 TOW - Jeep TOW
Recon:	M113 Recce - Jeep Recce
Aircraft:	AH-1 Cobra Attack Helicopter - A4 Skyhawk

Iranian Forces in Team Yankee
Tanks:	T-55 - T-62 - M60 Patton - Chieftain
Transports:	M113 Armored Personnel Carrier - BTR-60 - BMP-1
Troops:	Iranian Mechanized Platoon - Basij Infantry Company
Artillery:	M109 Howitzer - BM-21 Hail - M125 81mm
Anti-Aircraft:	ZSU 23-4 Shilka - ZSU-57-2 - SA-8 Gecko
Tank Hunters:	Jeep TOW - Jeep 106mm Recoilless - M113 106mm Recoilless
Recon:	Scorpion
Aircraft:	AH-1 Cobra Attack Helicopter
Soviet Support:	SU-25 Frogfoot