The English language must be terribly confusing to people trying to learn it. Are we talking guards made of mud, something like China's famous clay warriors, or are they guarding mud. If the latter, why guard at all, given effectively unlimited supplies? And that's over an above the now not so obvious, if running across the term without knowing tanks or having an image to work from, guarding against mud? Weighty questions, to be sure. Now, if you want to talk mudbugs, I'm there! Shall need beer, though.
Dozza,
This is turning into quite an education for me. During my Hughes days one of my first assignments was to figure out how the Russians could render WASP, a brilliant swarm antitank missile which used active MMW guidance, useless. One of the things we came up with was using track guards to hide the telltale track reflections, especially when moving. Back then, the Russian tank force, as we saw it, was T-62s and T-55s, neither of which had skirts. The T-64, which did, was never seen in public back then, was never paraded. The US learned of the T-64 in the late 1970s, and there wasn't even a CIA report on the T-64B until October of 1984. In fact, we had no sighting of the T-64B until 1980. In my entire career in military aerospace I never saw a single CIA document. They had lots of control markings which kept them out of defense contractor hands. What I saw came out of DIA or Army Intelligence.
This hiding the tracks concept may (note conditional) explain the embedded metal fibers in the T90 series track skirts and, presumably, the mud guards. The Russians were the world leader in MMW systems, and the US was trying desperately to catch up. The T-72 , which started with gill armor, was officially accepted as a State approved weapon in 1973. Interestingly, the Wiki has a link to BFC's T-72: Balkans on Fire. I don't know, having never seen anything on the matter at all in terms of more than cursory info, when the Russians switched from straight rubber (what we thought when we saw them), to the current material. But then, the US didn't have a single T-72 to examine until after the SU collapsed in 1989.
