Well, Canada will go to the excellent Leopard II for their heavy armor requirements:
Canada has made a deal to upgrade its tank force. It will spend $575 million to lease twenty German Leopard 2A6 tanks for several years, for use in Afghanistan. It will also buy 100 used Leopard 2 tanks from the Netherlands.
Useful not only for high intensity combat, but useful for scaring the crap out of enemies on foot.
And with Canadians fighting at our side in Afghanistan against vicious enemies, the firepower and protection of these tanks will not go to waste.
As for the future, you never can tell what war you'll be involved in, so it is best to keep a full spectrum capability available.
As an aside, I first became aware of this issue not from any publication or news report, but from recent searches online from Canadian users who were searching for information on the 2A6 version and reached my site where I mentioned the tank as part of German reorganization. Ah, signals intelligence. An unanticipated benefit of having one's own site is seeing what people are searching for as an early indicator of what's up.
