The following looks at 10 of the most sophisticated tanks used today. Advanced armor, high-tech sensors and communication equipment, improved engines and cutting edge weaponry all make this piece of military equipment one of the most sophisticated on the battlefield. In 100 years, the tank has come a long way. The result is that the tank became an integral part of the massive arms export market, serviced primarily by the United States and Russia who last year alone sold a combined $56 billion in military equipment. Additionally, tank makers found that a market developed as other countries came looking to buy tanks of their own. Tank guns got larger, armor thicker and engines more powerful. Since World War One the competition over tank design has focused on the three main characteristics of firepower, protection and mobility.

Like all weapons of war, the introduction of the tank to the battlefield led to an arms race as each nation worked to get the upper hand over the other. Nonetheless, the tank was here to stay and these weapons indicated a new direction in thinking when it came to how nations built and used their armies over the coming decades.

Powered by tractor engines and equipped with around a half inch of armor and a variety of machine guns and cannons, these early tanks were slow, lumbering machines which could often be as dangerous to their own crew as they were to the enemy. By 1918, the first tank-vs-tank battle occurred between the British and the Germans. It was developed as a weapon which could cross No-Man’s Land, crush the fields of barbed wire and break through the enemy’s trenches – the whole time well protected from enemy machine gun fire and shrapnel.

The tank first arrived on the battlefield in 1916 when it was deployed by the British Army against the Germans in World War One.

America's most modern tank