by DAVID AXE

The Chinese army appears to have fielded a brand-new light tank suitable for mountain warfare. New photos depict the diminutive fighting vehicle, which China has reportedly dubbed “ZTQ,” trundling across rough terrain.

The ZTQ, which Beijing apparently developed in order to help defend China’s western land border, is impressive in a lot of ways—and not the least because the U.S. Army, the world’s leading ground combat force, tried and failed for years to acquire a similar vehicle.

More and more, Beijing is matching American military capabilities with new warships, stealth fighters and combat helicopters. The ZTQ represents one military niche where China has actually exceeded the Pentagon’s own accomplishments.

We don’t know much about the ZTQ aside from what we can glean from the few photos, which have circulated in China’s popular Internet military forums for a few years now.

In the early photos, which first appeared in 2011, someone had taken pains to partially obscure the tanks’ turrets with camouflage netting, perhaps in order to mask the exact layout of the vehicles’ armor protection.

Many of those early pics depict the ZTQs—which seem to pack 105-millimeter main guns—on train cars, apparently heading for China’s mountainous Tibet region. This according to the very attentive China Defense Blog, which routinely reposts the most interesting semi-official photos of Chinese weaponry.