Seems reasonable to me he’d see it that way. Dad helped run their airline for a while. It all came about because he hired a kid out of UC Berkeley in 1958 that was a crack engineer, an Egyptian. The guy to this day is a close family friend.
Anyways, after he’d flown the slipstick for a while in United engineering, he went back to Egypt to help run Egyptair. Oh, I forgot to mention, he was (is) married to the grand daughter of the last Egyptian king.
I’ll bet your buddy the Colonel was a relative…
Today, that Battalion is probably equiped with the locally produced M1A2 Abrams. [bnghead]
I always ID 'd those flash cards as M48, M60, T62, PT76 etc., etc. The flasher usually had no idea and my response was that in he current (and past) ‘world economy’, it was tough to tell who was who beyond the basic Soviet/Russian by the equipment he was in.
Back in the day (Soviet Cold War era), knowing what tank or AFV was in front of you helped identify what unit was in front of you. Whether it was Poles in their T-55As, East Germans in T-72A or Soviets in T-72Bs would help the intel channels as to which echelon from their order of battle was coming up. Soviet style warfare was a very regimented formation.
Using doctrinal templates and knowing what their order of battle was (which units belonged to what larger units) was helpful in determining where the main body was, where the command and control nodes would doctrinally be located and where their lines of communication (supply routes, ammo caches, etc.) would probably be located (adjusted for terrain variations).
Every little bit of information helps the higher HQs develop the bigger picture.