Recovery Vehicles
Transporters are merely for the carriage of tanks. It's not their function to recover a damaged, broken-down or bogged-down tank. Specialist armoured recovery vehicles are used for this, which may have powerful winches or even cranes. Tanks are usually deployed in groups, with groups of transporters to support them. Recovery vehicles are more complex and more expensive to build than transporters, so a handful of recovery vehicles need be supplied to support a troop of transporters.
For similar reasons, tank transporters are rarely armoured to recover tanks under fire, although tracked recovery vehicles frequently are. A rare few have been, such as the "Dragon Wagon" of World War Two.
In peacetime a main battle tank design will often be produced alongside a tracked armoured recovery vehicle based on the same chassis, so as to have a recovery vehicle available with adequate weight and power for that generation of tanks. In wartime it's more usual to recycle the previous generation of tanks as recovery tanks, so as to extend their useful life without using valuable production.
Read more about this topic: Tank Transporter
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