On that topic: why Russian tanks are so vulnerable to these missiles and explode spectacularly [1]. Basically the canon auto-loads shells, and the shell storage is not in a different compartment than the turret.
The American Bradley stores rounds in a separate armored compartment behind the loader. If the compartment gets hit and the rounds cook off, the blast is redirected out the top of the tank away from the crew compartment which makes the vehicle much more survivable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Bradley: "The use of aluminum armor and the storage of large quantities of ammunition in the vehicle initially raised questions about its combat survivability."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams: "The M1 Abrams...introduced several innovative features, including a multifuel turbine engine, sophisticated Chobham composite armor, a computer fire control system, separate ammunition storage in a blow-out compartment"
In the Abrams shells are stored in a separate armoured compartment and are individually fed to the loader as needed. The loader might have a shell fed and in hand ready to reload the gun, so that's one shell in the compartment at the ready over the one loaded in the gun at any given time. There just isn't space for more shells lying around.
(In Russian, numeric determiners 2-4 place the noun in genitive singular and numeric determiners 5+ place the noun in genitive plural. One book, two of book, three of book, four of book, five of books.)
None of these articles seem to mention WHY the tanks are designed this way (although I admit I just searched for keywords).
As far as I know, it is because the current gen of Russian tanks were designed for how they envisioned WW3 40 years ago [1]. Basically the tanks would follow nuclear strikes, and making humans load the ammunition would make them die a lot quicker from radiation, so they made an autoloader.
The difference seems to be capacity of crew. With an autoloader crew is down to 3, Russians opt to have 4 crew and a cheaper per unit tank. To the Russian Army soldiers have always been expendable.
? Russian tanks are the ones with autoloaders and 3 crew... Of the modern NATO tanks only the French use autoloaders and 3 crew, US and German tanks are 4 crew.
Possibly that the higher number of crew & higher average effort means the internal resources can not last as long, and thus the NBC seal has to be broken sooner?
According to the wiki, an autoloader also improves smoke removal, which would also help maintain a safe NBC-isolated interior space.
It doesn't, the autoloader is right in the crew compartment (which is the whole problem with munition cook offs killing the crew and ejecting the turret). The thing that keeps NBC out while the breech is open for loading is positive air pressure inside the tank.
This argument only makes sense if the turret is entirely unmanned.
The article I read it in (in independent Polish press, cannot find it now) said physical exertion makes you more susceptible to radiation, and cited figures around the weight of shells which are apparently quite heavy.
I don't know if I buy that, I find it a lot more likely to be because russian tanks are significantly smaller than their western counter parts. I think it's a space saving measure.
The suggestion from this source[1] is that an autoloader makes the tank much smaller (harder to hit). He also claims being smaller makes them cheaper to produce. The intended use case was going to be somewhere in Europe, only 2-3 days from factory to front line. They were designed in an era before smart weapons. No amount of refactoring/refreshing on the current chassis is going to allow you to refactor out such a fundamental design choice.
It depends on who you watch - on Russian telegram channels there's also an endless supply of videos where Ukrainian stuff blows up by missile, drone or captured intact.
It's a large-scale conflict so one can cherry-pick enough footage to support any narrative.
The Ukrainian tanks are Russian made, so would have exactly the same vulnerability. But the Ukrainians being mostly on the defensive and vastly outnumbered, I don't know that they rely on them as much Russia does.
No, it's because they need money for new tactical missiles, and standoff weapons.
And because US marines conceded on the idea of fighting China amphibiously. Honestly, the idea to take, and hold those tiny islandlets in the South Sea by force landing is ridiculous.
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No tank, or just anything will "live" if being sent into a know killbox, and Russians keep doing that repeatedly. This is what's happening in Ukraine now. Literally this: a clueless battalion sized force wades into a killbox, gets annihilated to last few men, next day, another battalion is sent to exactly the same spot...
Russians could've easily lost as much with modern, or other kind of military hardware than tanks.
Most Russian tanks were disabled by artillery, and missiles, not in tank vs. tank battles. No tank in the world would survive a 40kg missile, or an artillery shell hitting its roof. So, the quality of hardware is irrelevant.
Most of Russian military hardware losses are not from battles, but from soldiers routing, and abandoning their vehicles, which are LATER destroyed, or captured.
What is really telling is extremely low quality is the Russian military leadership.
The key here is to understand that losses do not come from 40kg missiles themselves, but from Russian generals knowingly sending their troops into ATGM, and artillery killboxes, and from Russian troops knowing their generals intentions, and acting accordingly (routing upon first battle damage)
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In the context of above, it's very clear that amphibious landing in the age of satellite reconnaissance, infrared optics, 100km artillery projectiles, and antiship missiles is not a smart way to wage war today
Rah. USMC austerity is fundamental to the corps, from what is supplied to individual Marines, all the way up to expenditures on larger tactical equipment, with the notable exception of the Osprey.
Something I've been thinking about is that with the emergence of weapons like the NLAW and Javelin, the Secret Service probably will have to rethink the security of the
US president.
Trophy and similar weapons work by sending a cloud shard of metal shards in the direction of the target. Given that a presidential convoy will often be in the presence of large amounts of civilians, using active defense system may mean shredding a couple dozen voters (possibly on live television). I can't imagine many politicians being very happy about that.
I think DIY weapons would be the more dangerous threat btw. A sharpened stick on one of those racing drones could rest on top of (say) a small shack until the target comes by, then strike extremely quickly.
It's not so much for when it actually happens, but publicly driving around in a car that will kill bystanders when attacked is still a no-no from a PR perspective. Just imagine how many attack ads you could create off that one thing alone.
No need for heavy weapons, a pistol or a rifle and a picked time will still get you a decent shot at anyone in government. It's almost as if they're not actually scared of the population they live with. Its not like the President / etc are actually all that important. The Government is more than them, and will live on and continue doing the objectionable stuff regardless.
Huh?! Have you seen the security detail of the US president? They're very afraid of their citizens – or at least of the occasional nutjob. And rightly so, as evidenced by the various assassination attempts in the last decades.
> Its not like the President / etc are actually all that important. The Government is more than them, and will live on and continue doing the objectionable stuff regardless.
The US president is a very important symbol and therefore a potential target, even though the whole of the US government consists of much more than just that one person.
What if we don't actually hear about assassinations of people making actual decisions or their relatives? Like most people still believe Anders Breivik killed a bunch of random kids on the island, while in fact, many of them were children of prominent politicians
I'm not sure the country of three hundred million guns needs advanced weapons. The President might be heavily secured, but as we saw on Jan 6 it's possible to overrun the security of Congress. Then there are all the various state buildings.
There are a lot of Americans who talk up the "right" to armed resistance against their government. There are also an alarmingly large number of mass shootings in America. It's almost surprising that these rarely overlap and you get people shooting up their school, university, a nightclub, or random people in Las Vegas rather than directed terrorism towards the actual government.
>On June 14, 2017, during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, Virginia, James Hodgkinson shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika. A ten-minute shootout took place between Hodgkinson and officers from the Capitol and Alexandria Police before officers shot Hodgkinson, who died from his wounds later that day at the George Washington University Hospital.[7][8] Scalise and Mika were taken to nearby hospitals where they underwent surgery.[9]
Hodgkinson was a left-wing political activist[10][11] from Belleville, Illinois, while Scalise was a Republican member of Congress. The Virginia Attorney General concluded Hodgkinson's attack was "an act of terrorism... fueled by rage against Republican legislators".[12] Scalise was the first sitting member of Congress to have been shot since Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011.[13]
In a 2021 report, the FBI classified the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism, and the perpetrator of the shooting as a "domestic violent extremist" with a "personalized violent ideology."
Unlike firearms, the critical and expensive part of these weapons is the round, not the launcher. And they're being used up at a huge rate.
What exactly is the worry scenario, that after the war is over the Ukranian state, newly forged in adversity, will immediately lose operational control over its units which will then decide they aren't imminently going to need these weapons for homeland defence, so they can sell them on the black market?
The gear is lying scattered on the ground everywhere. Total chaos - that's war. These weapons will be spirited away and sold to nefarious actors. Airlines, world leaders etc.
>but as we saw on Jan 6 it's possible to overrun the security of Congress
The Capitol Police, despite being both armed and trained to use their arms, inexplicably did not use their weapons until something like 90 minutes into the riot. The only fatality from the riot, one unarmed protester, was the result.
The Capitol Police is wholly under the control of Congress. Keep that in mind as you read this Time article <https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/>, which specifically discusses how leftist groups that also had planned protests at the Capitol that day were specifically told to stand down.
> That is an interesting approach, but I'm looking also for a statement from the Russian forces.
Search for "Pravda in English" and you'll find it. It may seem a bit detached from reality and insulting to anyone's intelligence but unlike Internet in Russia it's not censored.
That's more the state of Russian media. They're not even allowed to call this a war.
Obviously Ukrainian news is also biased, but so far, it seems to be a lot more rooted in truth than anything from the Russian media. And Ukrainians do excel at grassroots propaganda in ways nobody in the west has ever done.
But many western media seem to be doing a pretty good job of distilling the truth from these reports. Not all obviously, but good journalism absolutely does exist.
The "bs from western media" was so accurate that I could pinpoint when the invasion would start, and I consequently left my home in Odessa in the evening on February 23rd, hours before the invasion started.
> I'm quite sure they assessed the risks before engaging.
I think it's pretty clear they didn't. They went in poorly prepared, many soldiers thought they were on exercise and had no idea what they were even doing in Ukraine, and recently it turned out a lot of Russian soldiers have radiation poisoning because they were digging trenches in radioactive soil at Chernobyl, because they'd never even heard of the Chernobyl disaster.
It appears Putin has been thoroughly misinformed by his intelligence service, people lie to their superiors because they don't date to deliver bad news, and Russian supplies have been crippled by corruption.
Unlike in Russia, there is no singular "media" in the west.
There are "western medias", plural, and you have the luxury of choosing your bias.
There are plenty of idiots in the west who will sell you re-furbished Russian propaganda, if that's what you want.
(Is CNN stupid? Yes, it is, it's the same crap hysterical entertainment-news it has always been, mostly laughable to non-Americans and Americans alike. But there's plenty to choose from if you don't like that)
There is no "general western media" in this era, because coverage is no longer centralized. There are dominant ideologies, which the "western media" reflects because the population has that bias already.
You can stare at CNN or MSNBC and see a bias, of course. They largely repeat Pentagon or White House talking points. But that is no longer where people get the bulk of their information.
Spend 20 minutes clicking the "wrong" links on YouTube and you'll get an entirely different bias. It should be obvious from the last two election cycles that people don't get their "news" from cable news anymore. They're deep in the bowels of social media and whoever manipulates that best. For better or for worse.
Sorry, it's you who comes across as ignorant. And elitist and smarmy. Talking about "the west" as if there's one block, when what we actually have is a highly divided society... Except there's one thing that's actually uniting us right now and that's almost universal disgust at Russian actions in Ukraine
EDIT: To add: is there a society-wide bias highlighting the ineptness and weakness of the Russian military? Probably inaccurately? Yes, quite likely, and it's probably dominant across the whole west. But why? Is it because propaganda? No, it's because we hope and wish this to be the case. I'm perfectly willing to admit that Russia is probably stronger and will "win" but goddamn it if I don't want to boost the narrative otherwise because I want them to lose so bad it hurts.
You can't justify the lack of commitment to truth with "its the bias of the population". First of all: its not. Its the bias of the media itself; however, the population often manifests much richer judgement than simply reducing this complicated struggle to "good vs evil".
And even if it was: the media should impartially cover events. It should not manipulate numbers in favor of cherry picked narratives.
edit replying your edit:
But then; again, we should not create media based in wishful thinking. Instead, media should be based in facts. It disappoints me very much that so many people just accepts this blatant propaganda and sell these as if they are true.
Good luck impartially covering world events, the mere action of choosing to talk about an event is already biased. There are more "events" in a day than you could cover in a year worth of journalism
I'm sorry about it's almost become a joke, anybody who uses this phrase: "The Media".
It used to be my fellow travelers on the radical left. Now it's nutcases on the far right. It betrays a simplistic propagandistic desire to create a singular "enemy" narrative to which one is righteously opposed, without having to get deep into the weeds to pick things apart.
It's pathetic and elitist "analysis". There is no singular "media". There is no singular narrative. People pick the poison that fits their ideological biases. In general the ideological biases they have are the ones that fill their stomachs and keep a roof over their head.
But be my guest, rant all you want about the western or "mainstream media". It won't help you convince anybody.
> provides basically different versions of the same content.
Well yeah, they provide opinions about facts. They all select subjects from a given pool of "content" (ie. world/local events) and spin it their way. It's not like some greater entity force them to talk about a restricted set of "content"
>Do you understand that what you are saying makes no sense? The general western media follows a coordinate coverage and provides basically different versions of the same content.
This is your authoritarian thinking, at least in Europe there are political parties that are kissing Putin's ass hard and deep, so there are groups that have media control that you can chose to follow. But even those can't pretend that the reality before their eyes is fake and instead try different tactics,
The Russian trol army is as pathetic as their real army, those destroyed tanks are real so you need some other bullshit excuse then west propaganda, I seen more competent trolls blaming NATO, Putin should ask you for a refund, then give you his favorite tea, really low quality trolling.
In the west we have access to all the media, from pretty much everybody. I don't follow it much these days, but for example Al Jazeera was a useful source during the Gulf War. You can still get RT if you want to, and their reporting is actually covered in western media too. Back when I was a student in the 80s you used to be able to get the English Language edition of Pravda at a local news agents.
Extreme summary, blame me if I missed something obviously important - unsupported tanks will die to infantry or artillery and have done so since shortly after the inception of the tank. Tanks are actually pretty cheap compared to replacing a human, it costs quite a lot to raise a modern human. The tank role still exists, but ratios of tanks to other fighting vehicles may change.
I think people vastly underestimate the importance of infantry support. A single soldier with an ATGM can take out a tank, but a single soldier with a gun can take out that single soldier and their ATGM.
It's easy to forget that reality isn't a third-person shooter. When you're sitting in a steel box with an engine in the back and a cannon on the top, situational awareness will inevitably suffer to some degree, and no amount of cameras will completely offset that.
>I think people vastly underestimate the importance of infantry support
Do you now what's funny? Even RTS videogames like the Command and Conquer series or Star-Craft made this point clear early in our childhoods.
Tanks will be eaten alive by hoards of cheap disposable units, so you always had to support them with anti-infantry units if you wanted them to be useful in battle.
In the modern day, humans are not necessarily "cheap disposable units." At least for the US, it is not politically feasible to have 50,000-100,000 people die in a war anymore. 4,431 US soldiers were killed in Iraq. The calculus has changed and now dollars are cheaper than lives.
To what degree do you think that Russia's losses in Afghanistan led to the fall of the Soviet Union?
Since 1945, Russia hasn't shown that it can accept a war of mass casualties without political fallout. Russian military doctrine may say that it can, but Putin would be unwise to assume so.
Siege tanks are grouped with marines and firebats for protection, Marines and medics run with medics for assistance. Have your infantry out front. Move to a location, plant your troops, put your tanks in siege mode, rain hellfire down upon aerial defenses and approaching units so your Battlecruisers can come in with their Vulture and Wraith support to decimate a base.
It takes a village. You know, to destroy the other guys village. But still. Villages.
The Javelin can kill tanks from what distance, up to four kilometers? (Officially, less so, but the Ukrainians seem to be pulling off more distant hits than what the vendor documentation says.)
No realistic amount of infantry support can shield you against weapons with such a huge range. An entire army could, but that is obviously too much.
The point is that a soldier with a Javelin is a much less visible target than a big vehicle. Even if he runs just 40 meters away between the firing of the missile and its impact, any return fire aimed at the original site will likely miss him. And there can be a hundred of such Javelin-equipped soldiers in range.
But there may be cheaper and better models one day. This war has shown that ATGMs, MANPADs and their ilk have a huge potential, which means that a lot of countries and companies are going to pour resources into R&D. This usually means an overall improvement in capabilities and possibly a reduced price tag.
As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse. Russia still cannot do that, but for rich Western countries, it is an absolutely realistic option.
Have you ever humped a combat load? It sucks. You’re rolling out with 40 lbs of stuff hanging off you before we even talk sustainment.
Javelin has gotta be 40-50 lbs. Add that on. Want an extra missile? Add another 30 or so.
Now suppose you don’t run into any armor, this is why every infantryman doesn’t/won’t carry one. Maybe 1 per squad, if we want to be super aggressive maybe 1 per fireteam. But that’s now a machine gun they’ve left out, what if they really needed more suppression?
It’s a trade off and humans aren’t capable of bringing all the nice to haves to every fight. This is why there won’t be hundreds in a company.
Most of the weight is in the missiles themselves at 35 lbs (15.9kg) the targeting unit is only 14 lbs (6.4kg). So for defensive scenarios or preset ambushes the missiles could be brought in via vehicle and prestaged.
Not to go in circles here, so the ultimate point here is same as the article: there have and will continue to be a threat / counter threat environment and will continue to evolve.
What we are witnessing from Russia is not how armor should be employed. Armor is not suddenly obsoleted due to tech that’s been out for decades. That take is probably overly simplistic and wrong.
Only 14lbs for the CLU. That's HEAVY. Someone still needs to hump that around, plus the missiles. Plus all the battle rattle gear. The Army did away with the 11H MOS, so now everyone is either an 11B or 11C. Stuff gets heavy, and rarely gets lighter.
>>>But there may be cheaper and better models one day.
And when that "one day" comes around, the tank engineers will have outfitted every vehicle with Trophy-style active protection systems AND laser anti-missile/anti-drone remote weapons stations on the turrets.
>>>As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse.
Interesting that you mention night vision. We used to swear by equipping our infantry with IR lasers as well, for pinpoint accuracy during night combat. Now that more of our adversaries are using night vision, we are swinging back towards NOT using IR lasers because the active emission is just like the old Murphy's Law adage: "tracers point both ways".
Do you know what you call 100 Javelin equipped soldiers in a group? A target rich environment. The paper/rock/scissors idea would have mortars ranging down on that group in a flash. Try running away while humping 45lbs of gear while under mortar fire.
In no way can 100 men cover several square kilometers of terrain in anything close to an effective manner. That's roughly a company sized unit, and they "might" be able to have a 800m frontage, but that depends on how they're equipped. If they're light infantry with limited transportation, not a chance.
The tank would need to actually find the ATGM team though. It's relatively easy to detect a tank in the vicinity - they're loud and big. It's a bit tougher to spot a couple of guys in a bush (or in a ditch, or behind a wall, or in a thicket, or any number of hiding places)
I guess my dumb question is: with a Ukraine-style conflict where there’s a ton of ATGMs floating around, do even properly-supported tanks actually provide net value or do they just soak up friendly infantry resources that could be devoted to other things? The range on modern ATGMs is huge, measured in KMs - seems like you’d need a ton of infantry support to keep from getting picked off. If your enemy doesn’t have ATGMs, sure, a tank can provide a lot of value - but it seems like a safe assumption that a modern adversary will have them. Does the value equation still work?
$4M tanks are defeated by a $40K NLAW. Much like cuirassiers cavalry who were rendered obsolete by muskets becoming rifles with increased penetration, it's not because tanks don't works, it's because it's so cheap to kill one and so expensive to make one.
Until very recently, 2 guys hiding in a bush couldn't kill a tank, you needed a predator drone, an helicopter or some other advanced system requiring heavy logistics. Now behind every bush and every road corner is a potential enemy able to defeat you. With >90% kill ratio for javelins, the tanks needs to be lucky for weeks on end to survive, and the ATGM needs to be lucky only once.
Correction: A guy hiding in a bush wasn't able to reliably defeat tanks before.
Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper when there is a physical limit on the armor+weight+cost+logistical support equation for tanks.
I would be wary of those numbers. There is a heavy selection bias, as we don't see the videos where the AT weapons fails, where the operator gets shot, etc.
We'll have better information once the fog of war lifts.
Not sure I agree the $8.9M cost of an M1 Abrams is 'cheap'
And you don't just have the cost of the tank - there's also the cost of all the logistics needed to get the tank to the battlefield, no matter where it is in the world - and then to feed it a constant supply of fuel, ammo, spare parts and repair.
War is terrible for people. I want to state that because sometimes people fixate on technical systems.
Tanks are expensive, missiles that can defeat tanks are cheap. But the question is, what is a replacement good for a tank? What fills the role? What is the role?
Does it take a platoon to replace a tank?
The lifetime value of a human is only going up. Most soldiers go on to take jobs and contribute to the economy of a nation.
You could think of a tank saving the lives of the 3 people inside it, or the lives of the 10 or 20 people it would take to fill the role if the tank was not available. You could think of the days, hours, or minutes of fighting it might save, which might translate to many more lives saved.
Also consider the political cost of loss of life.
I don't think it is AT ALL clear how to evaluate the relative costs here. One would have to consider the mission at hand and the value of that mission.
Now I'm really curious what the cost of a modern U.S. soldier is. Recruitment and acquisition, training, outfitting, salary, food, etc. And if you build a tank once then you can park it in a warehouse nearly in perpetuity, whereas I expect humans require much more upkeep to retain skills and replace from turnover.
I'm guessing the total lifetime cost of a trained soldier is less than $8.9M but I wouldn't be suprised to find that the figures are comparable in the end.
People conclude that tanks (sometimes, armour in general) are obsolete because the most modern anti-tank weapons defeat exactly the 70s tanks they were designed to defeat in the 90s. If anything, when someone makes this point, it tells you they are clueless.
It's not that simple though, If you fired a a few Javelins against an Abrams with a Trophy system you'd still be at risk from one of the multiple shots over time. And even if the rounds don't cook off, if the EFP goes through the crew compartment, everyone is toast from blast wounds.
I think the main gun on an MBT will be replaced by rocket systems on smaller lighter, faster vehicles like the Boxer CRV family.
Edit just to add,
The secrets out that the idea behind Javelin and NLAW is sound. Expect there to be a proliferation of reasonably cheap weapons in this category being developed and built by everyone.
The secret has been out for 40+ years. The Sagger decimated Israeli tanks in the Sinai in 1973 until the IDF started using combined arms tactics. The TOW (and to a much lesser extent, the Dragon) gave NATO the ability to blunt a potential Soviet invasion of Europe. The Hellfire (and to a lesser extent, the TOW) dominated Iraq during the Desert Storm, and during the Iraq invasion in 2003. The Javelin itself is almost 30 years old in design.
The only reason we're hearing so much talk about the Javelin/NLAW is because of cheap cellphone videos capturing so much of the war in Ukraine. (And extremely poor Russian tactics...)
You can't sum up highly complex topics in one sentence? Shit! ;-)
On a more serious note, I would have counted the Russians in the group of competent armies. Maybe they were during the cold war, Afghanistan is not really a good measure. Maybe they were not, no way to ever find out. All being said, I'm happy that we never found out so far. Because one thing is sure, finding out involves turning whatever region is used to find out into a war zone.
I grew up a military brat, and have studied this shit for years. While I never thought the Russians (or Soviets) were 10ft tall, I never in a million years thought they would be this utterly incompetent. I have some Estonian friends who were concerned about Russia steamrolling them before NATO could really respond (they joke that Russia considers Estonia a suburb of St. Petersburg). And I always empathized with them. No strategic depth, minimal forces, ethnic Russians in the Baltics who could be used by Putin as a casus belli. And NATO seemed sclerotic and weak.
Now? I think that NATO could easily handle almost anything Russia could throw at it, short of nukes.
It really is amazing how poorly they've performed. And the BTG concept has been utterly disproven as a brittle, unsustainable force.
I don't think you get much sustainability using guided rocket systems. You need something to shoot at suspected targets in bushes, windows and stuff and expensive rockets wont do. You will run out of them. Dumb ammo is plenty.
The Russian tank with the most losses in Ukraine is the T-72B3 obr.2016. This is the most recent variant of the T-72 that the Russians use (and started production in 2016) and has the same armour as the T-90MS which started production in 2017.
The only more advanced tank Russia has is the T-14, but it likely has less then 20 of those and due to the sanctions wont be able to make anymore, so its unlikely to be fielded in Ukraine.
While the names of the Russian tanks deployed in Ukraine sound like the gear we grew up fearing during the Cold War (T-72/T-80 etc), they really aren't the same anymore than the M1 is still the same as first deployed in 1980.
For example, the T-72B3M Obr. 2016 is a thoroughly modern tank, though obviously based on the T-72. Modern fire-control, modern vision equipment, solid ERA, good cannon.
Where it is failing is in how it's being used, even ignoring the lack of appropriate infantry/artillery support. This is a tank that has thermal day/night sights (not IR spotlights). It should be able to see someone lurking with an NLAW or RPG, but they are continually being sniped.
So why? Well, perhaps the thermal sights suck, or were stripped out at depot by some corrupt quartermaster. Or perhaps the crews are so poorly trained they can't take advantage of them. Or perhaps a lot of the ATGM kills we see are abandoned vehicles that are just getting destroyed.
Also, during the 2014 Donbass war, the UA lost roughly 400 MBTs, the majority of which were lost to mortars and artillery, not ATGMs. We see the videos of the Javelin/NlAW strikes, but we don't see hardly as much artillery. Artillery is the king of war...
Most of this we won't know until the conflict has quieted down, and after action reports are gathered.
Tanks aren't obsolete by any means, but the reasons for the high losses are multivariate, a nd not due to old armor being destroyed by "modern" (30 year old Javelin) anti-tank weapons.
Look at the former Yugoslavian countries. The German right-wing terror group "NSU" is suspected to have used weapons from that area [1], the Charlie Hebdo and Paris terrorists did the same [2].
It is entirely reasonable that, similar to the aftermath of the 90s wars, weapons from Ukraine will turn up in every major conflict zone - especially because the current supply from the Balkan is all 30 years old decrepit shit, whereas Ukraine (rightfully) got the very best of the best of Western weaponry.
The stuff the NSU was using can be bought either at Munich main train station (if you know who and how to ask) or just across the Polish border. They used a single Makarov, mostly. And those were basically available for a 5 DM back when the Soviets retreated from the former DDR.
Don't get why you're being downvoted - as a half-Croat I completely understand your point (for the non-Balkan people: former Yugoslavia is your to-go source if you need any kind of weapon if you can't get one legally, there is an enormous amount of stuff from the 90s wars floating around).
In the end we are at a trade-off situation: Either we don't send weapons to Ukraine and let Putin take over, raze the country and genocide off the population (they are already setting up "filtration camps" and forcibly relocating Ukrainians to Siberia [1]), and risk that the Baltic states or Poland becomes the next target for Putin. Or we send weapons to Ukraine, blow the invasion forces to pieces, and risk that the weapons will be sold off later on to the highest bidders.
Personally I prefer the latter: no one should be forced to live under Putin's dictatorship and the post-WW2 world order was explicitly created to condemn Nazi-style landgrab operations. If the price of that will be that some ammo gets diverted off to some other warlord, that's bad but acceptable because the alternative is so much worse.
Good point, I just thought on the impact of the weapons in overall low-level criminality or regional conflicts, but I guess if enough Stingers [1] spill around it could have serious consequences on the safety of air travel all around.
The IFF system of the Stinger weapon system is surprisingly robust, and non-trivial to circumvent. It essentially prevents you from locking on to any vehicle equipped with an IFF transmitter (meaning if you point a western-made Stinger at a western commercial aircraft, it won't let you fire at it). As such, I doubt there will be any significant impact from "unsecured" Stinger systems floating around, though that does not negate similar consequences from non-IFF-equipped weapon systems.
Question: how many Anti-Tank-Guided-Missile systems are used in street crime, robberies, domestic violence, or accidents involving civilians, per year?
Good essay. I would like to have seen a little history of Soviet/Pact/Russian thought besides American and Israeli. After all the Soviet Army was probably the most all in on tanks in the Cold War.
The truly obsolete weapons platform is the $1.2 trillion manned F-35 program. A multi-role fighter that is too expensive to fly in this new combat space and cannot survive the multitude of anti-air missiles. The drone air war is a numbers game and unmanned fighters are both cheaper and have better operational specs.
Finland also just recently signed a deal for 64 F35s after several years of research and comparing alternatives. I'm fairly confident that if there was some significant problem, they would have picked something else.
No offense but there's a huge difference between tiny Finland and pretty small Alaska and the giant Canadian North. Finland has a large border shared with Russia but it's nothing compared to the massive mostly undefended coastline along the arctic ocean that Canada shares with Russia. An absolutely potentially huge operating theatre.
It might need a landing parachute on short or icy runways. The other concerns mentioned is that stealth is compromised with drop tanks which are needed for range. There might be other concerns?
Are there any air superiority combat drones operational yet? I won't argue that it seems likely that manned dogfights are going to die eventually, but that moment also seems at least a decade away. Until then a F-35 with long range missiles seems to be one of the more lethal things in the air today, even if it is rather expensive. NATO has like 20x the defense budget compared to Russia though, so it's fine not to have the cheapest weapons available.
F-35 unit prices are not high and keep getting lower due to the sheer scale of production. Many 4.5 gen fighters are actually more expensive yet less capable than the F-35. Most anti-F-35 arguments are "informed" by the likes of Pierre Sprey.
Which systems are out there that are actually comparable to the JSF? Both the Eurofighter and the Rafale are one gen older (not sure if that actually matters that much so). Which leaves the Russian and Chinese planes, for which cost is hard to come by.
It's extremely difficult to evaluate RCS by looking visually at an aircraft. Who would have thought that the F-117 would be stealthy? And the reason the F-35 only has one engine is because it has a much higher thrust than the RD-93 on the FC31. This increase in thrust "might" increase its IR signature, and neither has any IR shielding like on the F-22.
Could you expand on this? I'm struggling to imagine a realistic scenario where visual confirmation of a target would be a requirement. I also don't see why an F-35 is at a major disadvantage inside visual range of a target. (FYI Visual range is farther than short range air to air missiles and much farther than gun range.)
Roughly, because the stealthier an aircraft is the less maneuverable it an be. Also, you need ammunition for a dog fight, which is mostly carried on the wings negating any stealth characteristics. And large internal bays make an aircraft less maneuverable.
The AIM-54 Phoenix was used 2 times with exactly zero kills, because of ID concerns[1]. You don't just go around firing missiles to radar tracks you can't identify.
[1] by the US, Iran has used it more with more success.
The article you linked makes it sound like sensor and rocketry failures on some platforms that were retired 15 years ago, nothing to do with a general fear of BVR missile use. Also I believe the willingness to engage unidentified radar tracks has more to do with the nature of the conflict. I doubt the same restraint would be shown in a war against a near peer foe.
The point was not the zero kills, the point is that the US navy decided to use them in only two occasions.
In the case of the US involved conflicts it was working with allies and fighters lacking modern IFF that made the likelihood of friendly fire or collateral losses unacceptable to them.
It's a matter of acceptable risks. The AIM-54 was designed with a world war III in mind, employed in the middle of the ocean in closed airspaces were unidentified contacts could be treated as hostile with minimum political consequences.
The point I was making is here is an example of a time a major force decided not to use their prime BVR missile because of target identification concerns.
As a counter example, the US has continued to use the BVR AIM-120 even after accidentally shooting down one of their own helicopters in an IFF failure. [1]
In the particular case the missile was used after visual identification [1].
> The two F-15s now initiated a visual identification (VID) pass of the contact.
> Wickson's VID pass was conducted at a speed of about 450 knots (520 mph; 830 km/h), 500 feet (150 m) above and 1,000 feet (300 m) to the left of the helicopters.
Now I am not saying there is no room for BVR, ofcourse there is. The 2 tracks in formation coming from Russian airspace pinging you with their Russian military radars are definitely Russian fighters. But there are also a lot of times where there has to be a visual id.
A military jet with it's radars turned off is almost impossible to tell apart from a civilian jet based on radar data alone, and everyone errs on the side of caution, of course the side of caution occasionally is to fire first and id later[2][3].
You are right that regardless of the reasons for phasing out AIM-7, there are reasons to take a look at your target before firing at it. I suppose I was only thinking about "hot war" scenarios, not police actions in civilian airspace.
> A military jet with it's radars turned off is almost impossible to tell apart from a civilian jet based on radar data alone
The F35 can identify the type (and multiple times the model) of a specific aircraft in passive mode. Forget in active radar mode.
The Phoenix was never the prime BVR for the US. It was a niche weapon for the USN, to combat the Backfire/Bear threat. Even for the USN, it wasn't the prime; the AIM-7 Sparrow was the primary AAM carried. Tomcats rarely carried Phoenix except when qualifying. It was too heavy, and the F-14 couldn't bring back all 6 to the carrier due to weight. If the Tomcat had stuck around longer, the AMRAAM would have been qual'd for it, and the Tomcat would probably have lost out to it.
And the reason it wasn't used much wasn't just ID issues, but cost. It was supremely expensive, in limited stocks. Why use it against an Su-22 in the Gulf of Sidra? Or waste it over Iraq?
IRST can help, but it's like viewing the world through a straw. It works best when cued by other systems. I'm unaware of any telephoto systems in use since the F-14 was retired (obviously excluding the few airframes Iran might still be using).
Unaided pilot vision is unlikely to spot a target at 22 miles without some type of guidance.
True overall, (although don't discount the effect of a pair of binoculars in the cockpit) but in this case we're talking about intercepting a radar target for visual confirmation. If you have a radar track, by definition you would have the type of guidance you need to put other sensors on target.
There was not a lot of air-to-air combat between near-peer air forces going on in the last decades, was there? What little air combat we had was between top notch fighters and crew, supported by AWACS and all the fancy stuff that comes with it, against badly trained and coordinated almost obsolete fighters. Anti-air systems were the main concern.
> Are there any air superiority combat drones operational yet?
From what I have seen reported every major player is working on "loyal wingmen".
Autonomous drones that would fly along manned aircraft. That way you supposedly get the best of both worlds, the situational awareness and judgement of a human along the expendability of a drone.
Yes I know everyone wants such drones, but AFAIK nobody has them other than a few prototypes. Developing a prototype far enough to get to an fully operational platform (including things like logistics, training the operators and mechanics, developing doctrines, etc etc etc) can take decades.
The F-35 is fine. It's designed to be a replacement to the F-16 with a good level of stealth. NO fighter is 100% immune to SAMs, but the F-35 can survive on the modern battlefield against S300/S400 etc just fine. It would be cleaning up in Ukraine right now as long as the airbases it flew from were protected.
And what "unmanned fighters" are out there right now? Some low performance drones? Sure. But unmanned fighters that can engage in A2A combat are non-existent. Most current drones have the performance of a Cessna 172.
How many AA missiles does an F-35 hold, 10? 20 Cessnas would certainly be able to take down a lone F-35 in favourable conditions. Quantity has a quality of it's own.
This is ridiculous. A Cessna 172 might be able to suicide into a parked F-35, but the idea that 20 would be able to engage it in a dogfight and win just shows a complete lack of aerospace knowledge.
Dogfighting is a thing of the past. 20 Cessnas approaching from different directions, with decently ranged AA missiles ( which is the point of the discussion, OP compared drone performances to a Cessna, and everyone is going in on the allegory, but the real question is if slow drones would be able to tackle an F-35, and the answer is it will depend on their armament, but probably) could overwhelm an F-35.
Slow drones won't be able to engage an F-35 in A2A combat because that's primarily determined by energy state. A Cessna 172 can carry about 100lbs of weapons after taking fuel and pilot into consideration. A Stinger weighs about 30 lbs or so, so three could be carried. Range of the Stinger is about 5 miles, so still sounds plausible.
So your cloud of Cessnas could conceivably carry 60 Stingers. How will they detect a fighter flying at 30K? A 172 can only get to about 15K in perfect conditions. It flies at like 100mph compared to a Mach 2 F-35.
Again, short of being a suicide bomber trying to kill an F-35 on the ramp, this idea is ludicrous.
To add, the primary advantage that A2A missiles have over SAM systems is that the missiles dont have to fly up 10s of thousands of feet to hit their target. Modern "dogfighting" is about achieving optimal launch conditions(Altitude, speed, heading) for your missile against the target. So even if a Cessna could detect the F-35 and carry the most advanced A2A missiles it would still be thoroughly ineffective.
To create a drone capable of threatening an F-35 requires creating something very similarly capable in all ways but without the pilot. This may exist one day but it isn't going to come at a discount.
Those missiles are not cheap, and it would be unlikely for cheap Cessnas to get in range of an F-35. At long range the F-35 is difficult to observe by sensors that fit inside a Cessna.
I believe it is possible to shoot down low-radar-crossection aircraft if the missiles are spotted/guided by other sensor networks, but that is not easy, cheap, or mobile. And land based radars are sitting ducks.
> but the F-35 can survive on the modern battlefield against S300/S400 etc. just fine
I don't think you could possibly know this. NATO countries have S-300s and the F-35 was probably tested against it, but it's highly unlikely it was tested against an actual latest gen S-400 in fighting condition ( if such a thing even exists, Russian military readiness is dubious at best).
Any SAM can shoot down any stealth fighter or bomber given the right conditions. Stealth isn't 100% invisibility. The US lost an F-117 in Bosnia due to both poor operational tactics and a clever foe.
You do realize that the S400 is just an upgraded S300, right? Hence it's original name of S300 PMU-3?
The US wants 2,456 F-35s that’s just a lot of freaking aircraft. It’s actually extremely well designed for this kind of combat. Stealth alone is overrated, but these things get to fight back and they don’t fight alone. Sam sites, manned or unmanned aircraft etc are targets. It’s exactly the same stupid expensive avionics and training programs that make the F-35 so expensive that make it effective.
The US can soften things up with cruse missiles and the F-22 or it’s successors, the F-35’s job is to crush what remains and it does that very well. Difficult enough to fight that you need expensive and therefore difficult to replace weapons systems while still being affordable enough to be plentiful.
I think we will see the tanks in future battlefields still but rather than cannons they will be using more electronic warfare and will be providing indirect fire with "smart" weapons. Essentially they will be multi role armoured vehicles with high manoeuvrability e.g. (British Ajax Scout Vehicle)
Or my sci-fi'ish theory of a "drone tank"
Why?
* Governments have high demands from defence and at the same time want low costs.
* Military doesn't want an infantryman any more; they want a soldier who can perform several other roles. Same goes for vehicles.
* The concept of modular vehicles with the same chassis is becoming popular.
* Everyone who was taught or believed cold war military tactics is retiring or will be soon. So new doctrines will emerge.
Reinforcement Learning will shine. From starcraft, even with all the handicaps, AlphaStar was capable of out maneuvering and outdoing humans in micro(management) without breaking a sweat! Now remove those limitations and let the stuff run on the hardware the US military has access to and you have a truly lethal swarm.
The ultimate faraday cage match, where swarms of autonomous surface and air vehicles jam, cook, and subvert the circuits of the opposition into oblivion
Considering drones are more expendable than humans we're more likely to see high volume swarms of low cost, lightly armored drones. Armor will likely be reserved for any humans who need to be in close proximity to the firefight.
> I think we will see the tanks in future battlefields still but rather than cannons they will be using more electronic warfare and will be providing indirect fire with "smart" weapons.
But why would such capabilities need to be installed on the heavy chassis of a tank?
Electronic warfare and smart weaponry benefit alot from mobility and redundant systems that can operate even when front-line-logistics are interrupted. Tanks offer neither, they are slow, hard to repair, and burn fuel like noones business.
The only advantage a tank offers is, well, being tank-y, and as modern ATGM systems have demonstrated in Ukraine, that advantage isn't what it used to be.
I'd imagine what you'll really have is a primary tank with a human "field support" technician/operator and a bunch of unnamed machines that are at the front doing most of the physical fighting. Humans are expensive and Russia (most Western countries really) was already suffering from a shortage of young workers.
I'd be shocked if canons went away though. The end goal of warfare is to cause enough chaos/destruction that your enemy's choices are constrained to what you want. Without physical violence there's no sense going out into the field in the first place.
>> The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver.
Doctrine and training are paramount, together with command and control that's what enabled the early German successes in WW1. And in the case of France a ton of luck.
The article asks the right question: is the role of the tank still needed? A Javelin neutralizes a tank, under the right conditions, it doesn't replace it.
I saw some tanker on twitter explaining just how bad the Russian tactics with their tanks are. Poor training, poor logistics, and undermanned. Tanks get such poor gas mileage that they need tons of support. Extremely effective weapons when used properly but clearly Russia is not doing that.
Thr Turkish army lost a couple of top of the line Leopard 2s in Syria some years ago for the exact same reason: lack of infantry support.
Seems that the "West", spearheaded by the US, has the most experienced military in the world at the moment. 20 years of counter insurgency warfare and some more conventional wars before that seriously helped a lot. Just how much is at display in Ukraine, first by the, so far, Russian failures and second by the preparation and performance of the Ukrainians, which where supported, cinsulted and equiped by NATO for years by now.
There is an issue with that, being efficient in conter insurgency warfare doesn't necessarily translate into High Intensity warfare. Infantry support for armor is one, but things like maneuvers, operating under contested skies, EW, etc.
When were NATO troops under heavy sustained artillery barrages?
I m quite impressed by the attrition in both troops, ammo, and material. More than Wunderwaffen, i think the lesson is more in trained personel reserves, as well as stockpiles.
You mean reactive armor? The Leopard doesn't have active armor (or reactive like Kontakt-5 etc). It's been tested with Trophy APS, but the Turks didn't have that.
On the note of logistics, the turrrets on these lose their rifling after a few hundred rounds, they need to be replaced in field after this or they just become much less precise. Same with artillery.
I do not know for tanks, but for artillery, it tends to be much higher (few thousands) It is quite variable depending on if you re firing full charges, firing when the tube is hot, etc.
The only NATO tank with a rifled cannon is the Challenger 2. The Brits preferred HEASH ammo, a rifled cannon improved accuracy. It took some development to get HEAT and SABOTs that can be fired from a rifled cannon. No idea what the Russian tanks are using.
EDIT: Just looked, the T-72 has a 125 mm smoothbore cannon.
But if a military investment worth several million dollars (a tank) can be neutralized by something that is an order of magnitude cheaper to produce (an ATGM), then how can it fulfill its intended role?
Read the submitted article for details, but it comes basically down to the need of protected offensive destructive power (a tank) to get infantry close enough to engage the target. Without said tank, the infantry will be eliminated by enemy artillery and static defenses. So the trick is to protect the tanks. That is done by suppressing enemy positions with artillery and air support. And to protect your air assets, you need artillery to suppress enemy anti-air positions.
Basically, it is doctrine and some technical solutions (Javelins attack tanks from the top as opposed horizontally like older anti-tank missiles) that will enable the tank to do its job.
It's curious so, that nobody asks these questions when it comes to fighter aircraft and helicopters. Because those are vulnerable to manpads as well, and the war in Ukraine shows this pretty clearly. I guess burned out tank make for better footage then some small pieces or debris in some field that only experts can tell which aircraft it used to be once.
> the need of protected offensive destructive power (a tank)
Offensive destructive power can be provided by air support, long range self-guiding weapons and drone weaponry as well.
I also don't believe that ATGMs mean "Tanks are already obsolete". But I do think they are under threat of becoming so, because: ATGMs will get better, as will drones. Meanwhile, a tank will always be a big hunk of metal moving comparatively slowly on the ground.
Air support is as vulnerable to MANPADs as tanks are to a Javelin, that's one of the (potential) reasons why neither side has air dominance over Ukraine. And long-range guided weapons are awfully expensive. And they need eyes on the ground. And they cannot carry infantry into battle, nor can infantry hide behind them.
EDIT: The point is that a tank will be made obsolete by weapon system that replaces the tanks function on the battlefield. And not by a system that can destroy a tank. Because those anti-tank systems exist since WW1. Initially the Germans were not that impressed by tanks, large caliber rifles and re-purposed field guns worked just fine against the first tanks the French and British used. Nobody stopped tank, or anti-tank weapon, development then so. I don't see a reason why anybody would stop tank development just because we have impressive Javelin footage. If anything, tanks will improve to increase protection against ATGMs and drones. As will tactics and doctrine.
> Air support is as vulnerable to MANPADs as tanks are to a Javelin
They are not, the fact the Russians have lost so many planes is a testament to their inability to suppress the Ukrainian air defense.
Fighters are capable of flying far higher than MANPAD ceilings the only reason to fly that low is to employ visually guided weapons under cloud cover or to attempt to hide behind the terrain against longer range air defense systems.
Both of these issues can be resolved. By suppressing the enemy long range air defense and by employing laser guided weapons along with ground based designators.
Also fighters can evade missiles, google f16 dodges 6 sams for an extreme example.
It depends. If you're like Russia and only have limited stocks of PGMs, then you're stuck using dumb bombs and S-8 unguided rockets. So you either bomb from high altitude, which isn't really air support, much less CAS, or you get down in the weeds where you're facing Igla, Starstreak, Stinger, or Groms. Those will ruin your day pretty quick, and a plane flying CAS is much easier to see (and hear) than a tank. And if you're a helicopter, the same rules apply.
Tactical aircraft in Ukraine is also targeted by Buk/Tor/Tunguska, but I believe most of the aircraft and helo losses have been due to MANPADs.
Now the US is realizing that what it once thought of as robust stocks of PGMs may not be enough for a high-intensity conflict. Production rates of Javelin are pretty slow, and the Stinger has been out of production for a while with no planned replacement. The US Army has always given air defense low priority, counting on the USAF to provide air supremacy. Against a near pear, that might not be the wisest choice, and doesn't help with drones anyways.
The tank isn't dead because armies still need the capabilities the tank gives them. You need a long range direct fire weapon, capable of engaging armoured targets and infantry (canister or airburst rounds), with rapid engagement of multiple targets, low time to target, rapid reloads and follow up shots, and high survivability.
Lighter wheeled gun armed vehicles can be cheaper, but they don't have the survivability. They also can't go everywhere a tracked tank can go, such as jungle busting or just driving right through many kinds of buildings or cover. Missile have much longer flight times to target than gun rounds. A tank can move into position, fire, destroy it's target and be back in cover before a missile gets anywhere near it's target. The missiles are also vastly more expensive than tank rounds.
Yes tanks are vulnerable when not properly integrated with air support, artillery and infantry. They're still a lot more survivable than pretty much anything else that can provide the same capabilities though. One tank in the second Gulf War shrugged off 14 RPG hits, and overall tanks in that conflict amply proved their value, when used effectively.
imho the failures observed caused by manpad in the ukrane theatre were directly attributable to an almost comically poor systems integration on the part of the aggressor and an unwillingness to commit longer range artillery and missile strikes to soften what were hardened infantry targets equipped with sixth generation anti-air and anti-tank weaponry.
> almost comically poor systems integration on [Russia's part]
Russia's BTGs were explicitly designed to (a) consume minimal manpower (they were composed of non-coscript troops from their parent units), (b) consequently, to maximize lethality:person (tank co + 3x mech inf co + 2 AT co + artillery/anti-air), and (c) to minimize logistical support requirements (by deploying smaller units).
Essentially, they were built to win small-scale conflicts at a price Russia could afford.
Ukraine is not a small-scale conflict.
Consequently, the following chain of events (predictably) occurred: (1) Putin proposes 2003 military reforms [0], (2) Serdyukov realizes many of these in 2008 reforms [1], (3) optimistic appraisal of capabilities vs Ukraine leads to Army grandstanding, little strategic integration with different branches (e.g. VVS, VMF), (4) utter failure of real political intelligence mistakenly assumes Ukrainian population (esp urban) will not support government & defense, (6) infantry-light, manuever-oriented assault predictable bogs down in urban areas, without necessary troop count in assaulting units, (7) strategic approach is locked in, as a consequence of previous choices, (8) everyone involved at a command level scrambles to cover their ass and blame others.
If Russia had wanted to win the war they ended up getting, they should have never assaulted urban areas with BTGs.
They would have manuevered south from western Belarus, bisecting the country, and forced Moldova to declare neutrality and forbid weapons shipments. Then pick key infrastructure apart at leisure. Because that's the sort of thing the BTGs were built to do.
But presumably Russia didn't want to do that because it betrays the "this is all about Donbas (and the criminal Ukrainian government)" talking points, and it didn't think it would need to. Hindsight is 20/20.
Explain how the Bayraktar has been very effective targeting SAM systems? SAMs designed to destroy aircraft in this size range, and operating altitude?
Systems like TOR/Tunguska/Buk should be easily capable of detecting the Bayraktar and destroying it. It's not like Russia didn't see how it worked in the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict. They knew Ukraine had Bayraktar, but seemed completely unprepared to deal with it.
Frankly they seemed unprepared to deal with anything. I think it’s another case where half of them thought they were going on a training exercise, and the rest thought it would be over in 72 hours.
The Ukrainians have all the same SAM systems the Russians do, so are super familiar with their limitations. They’re also many times more motivated.
Also remote controlled ATGMs and I'm sure remote controlled machine guns and other stuff (the israelis already have a lot of remote controlled machine guns afik).
The tank may not be completely obsolete and indeed properly used like the US did and like Russia sadly probably re-learned it is a very useful tool.
More defensive automation will put even that "properly used" to the test.
I think we've just scratched the surface of what AI can do for defense; for offense also, but not as much. It's now in the realm of reality (think the mossad machine gun attack in Iran) to have systems that will autonomously attack any tank/vehicle/human, just waiting in ambush. It's orders of magnitued to have offensive AI driven tanks.
Imagine 1000 Mariupols, all automated with automated machine guns, AT missiles, drones and so on. Those do not require food, no water, no sleep, are not afraid to die.
Regardless, tanks are not what they used to be in WW2 -- modern tanks are extremely expensive and there are a lot of ways to kill tanks nowdays.
The battle will go back and forth, the tanks will get active protection, the ATGMs will get a lot faster, will used efps like the NLAW, but I think the writing is on the wall. Yeah, it was said before, just like it was said about the missile making dogfights obsolete -- a little early, but true eventually.
>> the missile making dogfights obsolete -- a little early, but true eventually.
Not true so. The US thought that in Vietnam, the F-4 (?) didn't have an on-board canon for that very reason. All new planes again have one, because dog fights turned out to be very much a thing. The Phoenix missile, and the F-14, have been built around the beyond-visual range idea. Both are out of service now. Beyond visual range works when you see the enemy but the enemy doesn't see you. If both parties see each other, the first shot will be beyond visual range, any survivors will find themselves in dog fight after that. And if both side use stealthy fighters, they won't see each other, or be able to engage each other, at distances beyond a dog fight.
That's a question we won't really know the answer to until we get a nice big shooting war between peer air forces again. So hopefully not in my lifetime. I think what they really learned was dropping guns is a gamble and when you don't /really/ have to control costs that much it's safer to include a limited gun in case you need it. AFAIK the current doctrine thinks dog fights are going to be a small part of air to air combat as both the f22 and f35 have less than 5 seconds of ammo.
That's one of the big challenges, isn't it? If an enemy catches a flight of F-35s / F-22s with enough numbers the result could be devastating. And the big limitation of stealth aircraft is payload. Have them carry more, on external hardpoints, and they loose stealth. Have them maintain stealth means carrying less. Having too large internal bays makes them useless as fighters. Quite a fascinating conundrum there.
The main reason cheap drones are effective is because they come from fast-moving consumer product lines instead of the slow-moving monolithic military industrial complex side.
There is nothing fundamentally indefensible about drone swarms, the complex just hasn't had enough time to react. You can bet that, if it doesn't already exist in secret somewhere in the US, there are many teams actively working on tank-mounted drone laser defense systems.
I suspect that drones have been hard to target until now because they have a unique air signature far different from all previous air targets, not because they are fundamentally more "invisible" than a Predator or a helicopter. Given their unique shape, movement, noise, and radio profile, a CS grad could certainly cobble together a drone target acquisition system using some consumer-level optic systems combined with a radio antenna, radar, and microphone array.
And as we all know, quadcopter drones are exceedingly fragile and most of their profile is millimeter-thin plastic blades. Once you have the ability target them, you'd only need a moderately powered laser to completely disable them.
The problem with this logic is both that Russia's tank building philosophy is very different than the US's (or Israel's) and that tanks and defensive systems have also improved (significantly) in the last 20 years but the article glosses over that and uses a conflict from 16 years ago and the Ukraine invasion as "proof" that Javelins can kill modern tanks.
I think the article is very measured about its approach to the purpose and continued value of tanks, and the specific failing of the Russian army in Ukraine:
> The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver. Where is the accompanying infantry with the tank formations, who are supposed to bust the ambushes executed by Ukrainian forces? Where are the suppressive mortar, artillery, and close air support fires? If the Russian Army was tactically skilled, then the Javelin and other ATGMs would be suppressed by artillery or air support and their surviving crews would be swept up by Russian infantry. Thus far, these key competencies seem to be lacking and Russian soldiers are paying a high price for their unpreparedness.
So has reactive armour and systems like Trophy. This argument has been made for many decades at this stage. This isn't just about vulnerability. Infantry are vulnerable to practically everything, sometimes they just drop dead all by themselves. It's also about capabilities. What are you going to use instead, and how is it better?
That isn't really fair, it is comparing 90's American tech which has presumably been updated over time to, essentially, minimally maintained Soviet tech. Maybe that last 7% is the tanks they've made since ~1990.
The numbers don't add up. The US has sent 7,000 javelins to Ukraine and overall they're been sent 30,000 anti-tank weapons and Ukraine is asking for hundreds more per day. It seems unlikely those javelins have killed 6,510 (.93 * 7000) Russian tanks, or that they will be destroying hundreds more per day. Many of the drone videos released by the Ukrainians show tanks hit by ATGMs but not actually being destroyed.
For sure the Russians have lots a lot of vehicles to ATGMs, they have proved to be extremely effective weapons, especially against tanks moving forward in tight formations without infantry support. However nobody is looking at the terrible infantry casualties Russia has suffered, due to poor tactics, training and resupply, and concluding that infantry are obsolete.
Here's a video of a Ukrainian tank ambushing a Russian convoy. Seems like a pretty effective weapon system to me.
On the video, the ukrainian tank is of course performing an effective ambush. I don't pretend I have the answers, but I wonder how would perform a bunch of infantry with NLAWs striking the column from multiple places at once, for cheaper than the tank, able to engage multiple targets at once, much less spottable, and so on.
Javelins are designed to be used for more than destroying armor, it has other selectable operating modes. They are being used by the Ukrainians against non-armor vehicles and as direct-fire weapons (US infantry uses this mode a lot). It also has a mode for helicopters.
Yeah, an anti-tank missile would be a pretty bad example of its category if it couldn't destroy a tank.
The point is that a properly equipped, prepared and trained military would have taken steps to use assets like tanks well and not marched them into oblivion, and perhaps researched and developed countermeasures to what is clearly a popular anti-tank missile system.
Such a military would also have conducted reconnaissance by drone, scouts, satellite etc. and concluded from the data gathered that driving a tank into [area with lots of unpacked Javelin crates] would perhaps be impractical, and focused on eliminating the munitions before playing the tank card.
The tank can wipe out infantry and survive anything with less-than-anti-tank weapons, the Javelin user can kill the tank, the sniper can kill the Javelin, the counter-sniper can kill the sniper, the artillery strike or sustained covering fire by infantry can cancel out the counter-sniper, etc.
The point is that simply driving tanks into a city full of people with anti-tank missile launchers and a strong inclination to attack invading tanks is not a good idea without mitigating the risk.
The existence of an anti-tank missile launcher does not make the tank irrelevant. Fighter jets still fly despite the existence of anti-aircraft missile systems.
What makes war technology irrelevant is whether it is prohibitively expensive to replace, assuming non-zero odds that the unit will be incapacitated/destroyed.
This is especially true against an opposing military force that has large amounts of existing man-made or natural shelter and cover, high motivation, *and* supplies/support from multiple wealthy countries, etc. that basically doesn't have to spend because it's defending with whatever it has, tooth and nail.
The survivability property is the one being questioned right now. If you can attack a tank from 5 clicks away with a high probability of success then air support and infantry have to cover a really wide perimeter inviting the question if the resources spent on the tank can give better capabilities in other form.
I am too lazy to write anything cohesive. Here is starting point on things that will make the tank more survivable and persist it as a heavy weapon platform.
1. Hard-kill APS - active protection systems - mm AESA (fast, high resolution) miniature radar detecting threats and sending munitions to intercept them. See Arena, Trophy. Eventually, laser counter-drone systems for small swarms (see Israeli developments)
2. Soft-kill APS - smarter/highly-automated smoke deployment, IR smoke, radar chaff. Directed radar / IR blinders. (See T-90 systems failing in Ukraine atm)
3. Passive - lower signatures.
4. Target detection and automatic turret queuing - tanks have a lot of space, they can have sophisticated optics and computers that find targets (including OTH data from tethered drones) or find launches against them and can fire on that launch. This is less effective against fire and forget systems ala Javelin or systems like Stunga where the launch platform is away from the guidance system.
5. Trench sweepers and coupled 30mm cannons - tanks can airburst and clear trenches / buildings better.
6. Operating in fully jammed environments. This has NOT happened in Ukraine at all. Wide-area signal suppression seems like a myth in the current war.
Anyway, this is just basic stuff to look into. The tanks remains a "go fast, penetrate stuff, maneuver" platform.
One thing most people also forget is the cost of the firepower that comes with the platform. Smart/loitering munitions are still expensive, and still have a high time-to-target than direct fire or dumb mortars.
Better combined arms tactics and road march protocols will reduce the losses from these attacks. It's like the Russians became stupid. No bounding overwatch, no artillery prep, no jamming as you said. No air support, dumb attack helicopter usage. No effective recon, no proper ambush engagement. It's like you gave a bunch of military gear to drunk conscripts who were poorly trained...
A cohesive BCT would be able to decimate light infantry. Yes, there will always be losses in war, but this shouldn't be an effective strategy. And I also think that the video coverage is making everyone think that ATGMs are winning the war. In the 2014-2016 Donbass, the UA lost over 400 tanks, the majority to artillery. Yet that isn't captured on video as easily unless there's a drone correcting the artillery's fall.
Army has been the most despised and low-status part of Russian society for the last 30 years, and mandatory service has been something that anybody with any means tried to avoid like he'll for even longer. The only people who go into an army career are those who don't have any means or talents for anything else.
Hmm. Intentionally? That would be beautifully ironic if Putin nerfed the army (judging a competent army as being a threat to his rule), and then he didn't have a working army when he wanted to invade Ukraine.
Yeah, a competent military would be a threat to the state. So keep it neutered, have an alternate state service that can blunt the threat of a coup, etc etc. Oh and use the military as a source of graft so you and your friends can benefit financially.
Of course. Most authoritarian regimes intentionally castrate their armies, kill promising generals and remove authority from officers, because otherwise they get military coups.
That's the secret power of a functional democracy: it can empower the military.
What we're seeing is that low cost precision guided munitions can engage tanks from beyond their direct fire range. Within direct fire range they can be engaged by even lower cost munitions fielded by light infantry and light vehicles. The tank also suffers from requiring large amounts of fuel, making supply line strikes more dangerous to armored advances.
The first point is the big one, the future of ground forces may not be built around gunned vehicles. Drone swarms can threaten entrenched infantry, ATGMs can destroy tanks from a distance. A "dumb" artillery round costs $1,000 and is accurate to 20 meters, recent "smart" artillery rounds cost $140,000, a switchblade costs $6000.
Armies will start deploying jamming effectively, cutting off the ability to control the drones. For some reason, the Russian army (which had a reputation for excellence in ECM/ECCM) has been completely ineffective in this area during it's invasion of Ukraine.
Then the drone swarm meets this and one or the other survives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8 (As an aside, it always fascinates me that arms manufacturers not only create ads and brochures but that they're often done rather well.)
A lot of the breathless enthusiasm for drones seems premature. SAMs didn't make aircraft obsolete, air to ground missiles from aircraft and helicopters didn't make tanks and other vehicles obsolete, and there's doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that adjustments won't be made by the various militaries to provide protection against drones.
Lots of outdated information here. I served in the IDF on something related and (obviously) can't disclose anything of military importance but do you really think for the last 16 years tank armor hasn't gotten (much) better to deal with these threats?
Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin?
The tank is not dead (well, not any more than large tank charges are probably dead and ww2 style combat is dead? We likely won't see anything like in desert storm or the Yom Kippur war again).
>Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin?
If this exists, why did the USMC binned their tanks 2 years ago stating they weren't cost-effective anymore? I'll believe this exists when I'll see it, but so far we have seen $4M tanks defeated by $100K javelins with a 93% kill rate, and so far cope cages have done nothing against them.
I did not work for the USMC and the strategic goals of the IDF (land defense, small area) are very different so I can't answer for sure. In many modern battle scenarios (specifically urban warfare scenarios) tanks aren't of much use so I totally see binning them in favor of better combined arms.
Also again: you are taking Russian armor survivability as proof for US armor survivability against the same threat. I totally get if you take my comments here with a (big) grain of salt because I can't provide citations and I'm not making any direct claims about US armor survivability against Javelins (and you'll note you won't find any videos/info online about that because of classification).
The USMC had become a second land army, and decided they needed a mission and set of capabilities of their own. They've pivoted to facing off against China in the Pacific theatre and decided that tanks just don't fit into their requirements for that mission. If they do need tank support, the army has plenty.
I read that the USMC ditched their tanks in preparation for a conflict with China in the South China Sea. In that environment, tanks don't really fit in an island-hopping scenario. In the place of the armor and aviation units they got rid of, they are looking at things like HIMARS systems. The U.S. Army on the other hand has kept it's tanks.
Is it really though? There are some really good active protection systems like Israel's TROPHY which do a pretty good job taking out incoming sabot style (tank shell, javelin, RPG) warheads. The modern incarnation[1] (M1A2 SEPv2) of the US Abrams tanks all have it
A sabot round is really two parts, right? You have the shaped charge that blows up exterior armor and then a small penetrator, generally the size and shape roughly of a pencil, that goes in and makes a tiny hole.
Active protection systems like Trophy are designed to pre-detonate that shaped charge so that they actual sabot penetrator just bounces off the normal armor, or is hit by ERA (explosive reactive armor). I'm sure APS work better against most ATGMs than sabots, but fundamentally, many of them are designed similarly. Sans maybe there are no depleted uranium ATGMs.
modern APFSDS rounds work purely through kinetic energy penetration and don't contain any explosive charge. The penetrator is usually around an inch in diameter, and maybe 30 inches long. I doubt Trophy can target these rounds effectively since velocity is just too high, something like mach 5 (compared to a javelin's paltry 140 m/s).
A TROPHY system wouldn't screw up the APFSDS round's bearing and structural stability? I know it's moving really fast, but how effective is it should the tip be broken off, or the round begin to tumble in flight before hitting the tank at a broadside angle?
IF the APS system (Trophy or Arena) could hit the sabot in time, yes, it would diminish its penetration capability substantially. Whether it can react fast enough to do so is doubtful. 3500mph projectiles are tough to counter. There have been plans to try to deflect it via armor so the tip gets shattered and the energy dissipated, but I'm not sure how effective that is with current armor tech.
The US latency target for APS from detection to engagement is tens of milliseconds. That is good enough for just about everything except sabot from short range.
Latency target says it all. Hard kill of sabot munitions just isn't currently feasible.
Plus, while adding layers of protection to armor (or ships and planes) is a useful endeavor, the maxim of shooting the archer, not the arrow is a better strategy. There's a point of diminishing returns when you layer so much on a vehicle instead of dealing with threats using an entire system (Artillery/Infantry/ECM/ECCM/Air Support).
I said sabot style… meaning explosive shaped charge to take out external armor, and usually a small (usually titanium) penetrator. An RPG just has the shaped charge aspect. Trophy was designed exactly to kill stuff like rpgs.
I also should have been clearer, there are other options. The Brits like this idea of HESH. This works against both tank armor (though less than APFSDS rounds) and fortifications alike. This way the tanks can carry just one type of armor instead o f having to manage a mix. HESH has persisted because the Brits like rifled barrels, and doing a sabot round with a rifled barrel has proven quite difficult.
The way _Russia_ uses tanks has been dead... basically since 1972 and the advent of the A10. Here a $23 munition, fired quickly, could chew up an armor column. Don't forget the Javelin is still $250k, it's not exactly cheap.
Tanks must be supported by infantry teams. Without capable mortar teams, rifle teams, automatic weapons teams, they are sitting ducks, as Russia has proven.
Nope. Maybe slightly better than the SU-25s have, and Maverick etc might make them able to stand off a bit from all the manpads, but the A-10 would be an easy kill for any fighters/SAMS.
The gist of the article which I agree a lot seems to be.
Nothing has significantly changed since the 80s-90s, ATGMs have gotten better but they were still a huge problem back then and the solution seems to be the same, better recon, more artillery.
Drones don't represent something new but really precision strikes at a discount, capabilities only available to major powers once are now "buy off the shelf".
The TB-2 with a couple of MAM missiles does the same job as an f4 with a couple of walleyes.
The only difference being the f4 cost 2 million dollars in 1965 while the TB-2 costs 2 million dollars now.
Not even $2M. Have you seen the footage of the UA/TDF using civilian quadrotor drones to drop anti-tank hand grenades on vehicles? As long as the radio spectrum is open, these type of attacks will be very hard to stop.
Tell that to the tanks being destroyed as I described. These drones are dropping RKG-1600 grenades on to the top of Russia's top tanks and destroying them.
I don't think the article pays enough attention to drones. It does mention their importance, and the possibility that they will do away with armor altogether -- and then says, "well, we don't yet know if that's right, so tanks are probably still important." Seems to me that whether or not that is right is the big question.
Modern war is no longer military show, resemble more criminal-based guerrilla. Traditional military technique can work or not much depending on combatant motivation more than mere material superiority.
Given that modern war should be centered toward war crimes, witch means using civilian stuff to disguise forces, mass kill people with poisoned water without damaging significantly the infra, use and abuse modern IT crap vulnerabilities do disable infra (like electric grid, connected vehicles etc) without physical damage, spread disinformation with the best possible ability etc.
That's why, for instance, in Ukraine Russia can't really arrive to a quick victory. Such immoral and criminal pattern is nothing new: WWI was a combat between armies, civilians are evacuated before combats, non-combatant on the front line was a bit respected etc, WWII change the game hitting civilians without any morale, hitting ambulances, putting military in hospitals etc. Now we do not even use State's official army preferring mercenaries with formally no flag and no code of conduct, engaging rule: "do what you want but win".
In such scenario try to be civil is not doable, the sole option is show equal behaviors, not encouraging criminals and violence per se, but mastering it to crush enemy forces and push civilians of all sides against the combatant because being unable to distinguish between them any unknown human being can be an enemy so a legit target for all sides.
Reaching such level of brutality means creating just bloodbaths where public opinion will rise at a certain point against the war itself. At that point no gear will work, the force of the crowd could not be stopped.
That's the modern strategy no one admit of course, but many practice shamefully.
> The 1967 Arab-Israeli War was the first conflict since World War II that saw the large-scale employment of tank formations on a mobile battlefield
Anyone with a mild knowledge of history knows about the huge tank battle that took place between India and Pakistan in 1965. Hard to take the article without any reference to that conflict.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] thread[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/04/01/why-do...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Bradley: "The use of aluminum armor and the storage of large quantities of ammunition in the vehicle initially raised questions about its combat survivability."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams: "The M1 Abrams...introduced several innovative features, including a multifuel turbine engine, sophisticated Chobham composite armor, a computer fire control system, separate ammunition storage in a blow-out compartment"
This made me happy. :)
(In Russian, numeric determiners 2-4 place the noun in genitive singular and numeric determiners 5+ place the noun in genitive plural. One book, two of book, three of book, four of book, five of books.)
As far as I know, it is because the current gen of Russian tanks were designed for how they envisioned WW3 40 years ago [1]. Basically the tanks would follow nuclear strikes, and making humans load the ammunition would make them die a lot quicker from radiation, so they made an autoloader.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine
According to the wiki, an autoloader also improves smoke removal, which would also help maintain a safe NBC-isolated interior space.
This argument only makes sense if the turret is entirely unmanned.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/86aeL6xY0PQ
It's a large-scale conflict so one can cherry-pick enough footage to support any narrative.
And because US marines conceded on the idea of fighting China amphibiously. Honestly, the idea to take, and hold those tiny islandlets in the South Sea by force landing is ridiculous.
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No tank, or just anything will "live" if being sent into a know killbox, and Russians keep doing that repeatedly. This is what's happening in Ukraine now. Literally this: a clueless battalion sized force wades into a killbox, gets annihilated to last few men, next day, another battalion is sent to exactly the same spot...
Russians could've easily lost as much with modern, or other kind of military hardware than tanks.
Most Russian tanks were disabled by artillery, and missiles, not in tank vs. tank battles. No tank in the world would survive a 40kg missile, or an artillery shell hitting its roof. So, the quality of hardware is irrelevant.
Most of Russian military hardware losses are not from battles, but from soldiers routing, and abandoning their vehicles, which are LATER destroyed, or captured.
What is really telling is extremely low quality is the Russian military leadership.
The key here is to understand that losses do not come from 40kg missiles themselves, but from Russian generals knowingly sending their troops into ATGM, and artillery killboxes, and from Russian troops knowing their generals intentions, and acting accordingly (routing upon first battle damage)
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In the context of above, it's very clear that amphibious landing in the age of satellite reconnaissance, infrared optics, 100km artillery projectiles, and antiship missiles is not a smart way to wage war today
I think DIY weapons would be the more dangerous threat btw. A sharpened stick on one of those racing drones could rest on top of (say) a small shack until the target comes by, then strike extremely quickly.
> Its not like the President / etc are actually all that important. The Government is more than them, and will live on and continue doing the objectionable stuff regardless.
The US president is a very important symbol and therefore a potential target, even though the whole of the US government consists of much more than just that one person.
There are a lot of Americans who talk up the "right" to armed resistance against their government. There are also an alarmingly large number of mass shootings in America. It's almost surprising that these rarely overlap and you get people shooting up their school, university, a nightclub, or random people in Las Vegas rather than directed terrorism towards the actual government.
>On June 14, 2017, during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, Virginia, James Hodgkinson shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika. A ten-minute shootout took place between Hodgkinson and officers from the Capitol and Alexandria Police before officers shot Hodgkinson, who died from his wounds later that day at the George Washington University Hospital.[7][8] Scalise and Mika were taken to nearby hospitals where they underwent surgery.[9]
Hodgkinson was a left-wing political activist[10][11] from Belleville, Illinois, while Scalise was a Republican member of Congress. The Virginia Attorney General concluded Hodgkinson's attack was "an act of terrorism... fueled by rage against Republican legislators".[12] Scalise was the first sitting member of Congress to have been shot since Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011.[13]
In a 2021 report, the FBI classified the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism, and the perpetrator of the shooting as a "domestic violent extremist" with a "personalized violent ideology."
By whom?
> proliferation
Unlike firearms, the critical and expensive part of these weapons is the round, not the launcher. And they're being used up at a huge rate.
What exactly is the worry scenario, that after the war is over the Ukranian state, newly forged in adversity, will immediately lose operational control over its units which will then decide they aren't imminently going to need these weapons for homeland defence, so they can sell them on the black market?
The Capitol Police, despite being both armed and trained to use their arms, inexplicably did not use their weapons until something like 90 minutes into the riot. The only fatality from the riot, one unarmed protester, was the result.
The Capitol Police is wholly under the control of Congress. Keep that in mind as you read this Time article <https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/>, which specifically discusses how leftist groups that also had planned protests at the Capitol that day were specifically told to stand down.
> This bs from western media has no commitment to truth
Western media tends to use Ukrainian claims, generally saying so.
Search for "Pravda in English" and you'll find it. It may seem a bit detached from reality and insulting to anyone's intelligence but unlike Internet in Russia it's not censored.
Obviously Ukrainian news is also biased, but so far, it seems to be a lot more rooted in truth than anything from the Russian media. And Ukrainians do excel at grassroots propaganda in ways nobody in the west has ever done.
But many western media seem to be doing a pretty good job of distilling the truth from these reports. Not all obviously, but good journalism absolutely does exist.
Basically yes: this war has been a disaster for Russian armor.
I think it's pretty clear they didn't. They went in poorly prepared, many soldiers thought they were on exercise and had no idea what they were even doing in Ukraine, and recently it turned out a lot of Russian soldiers have radiation poisoning because they were digging trenches in radioactive soil at Chernobyl, because they'd never even heard of the Chernobyl disaster.
It appears Putin has been thoroughly misinformed by his intelligence service, people lie to their superiors because they don't date to deliver bad news, and Russian supplies have been crippled by corruption.
I fail to see how this isn't a disaster.
The Ukrainian tank divisions are likely better equipped than they where when the war started.
There are "western medias", plural, and you have the luxury of choosing your bias.
There are plenty of idiots in the west who will sell you re-furbished Russian propaganda, if that's what you want.
(Is CNN stupid? Yes, it is, it's the same crap hysterical entertainment-news it has always been, mostly laughable to non-Americans and Americans alike. But there's plenty to choose from if you don't like that)
You can stare at CNN or MSNBC and see a bias, of course. They largely repeat Pentagon or White House talking points. But that is no longer where people get the bulk of their information.
Spend 20 minutes clicking the "wrong" links on YouTube and you'll get an entirely different bias. It should be obvious from the last two election cycles that people don't get their "news" from cable news anymore. They're deep in the bowels of social media and whoever manipulates that best. For better or for worse.
Sorry, it's you who comes across as ignorant. And elitist and smarmy. Talking about "the west" as if there's one block, when what we actually have is a highly divided society... Except there's one thing that's actually uniting us right now and that's almost universal disgust at Russian actions in Ukraine
EDIT: To add: is there a society-wide bias highlighting the ineptness and weakness of the Russian military? Probably inaccurately? Yes, quite likely, and it's probably dominant across the whole west. But why? Is it because propaganda? No, it's because we hope and wish this to be the case. I'm perfectly willing to admit that Russia is probably stronger and will "win" but goddamn it if I don't want to boost the narrative otherwise because I want them to lose so bad it hurts.
And even if it was: the media should impartially cover events. It should not manipulate numbers in favor of cherry picked narratives.
edit replying your edit: But then; again, we should not create media based in wishful thinking. Instead, media should be based in facts. It disappoints me very much that so many people just accepts this blatant propaganda and sell these as if they are true.
It used to be my fellow travelers on the radical left. Now it's nutcases on the far right. It betrays a simplistic propagandistic desire to create a singular "enemy" narrative to which one is righteously opposed, without having to get deep into the weeds to pick things apart.
It's pathetic and elitist "analysis". There is no singular "media". There is no singular narrative. People pick the poison that fits their ideological biases. In general the ideological biases they have are the ones that fill their stomachs and keep a roof over their head.
But be my guest, rant all you want about the western or "mainstream media". It won't help you convince anybody.
Well yeah, they provide opinions about facts. They all select subjects from a given pool of "content" (ie. world/local events) and spin it their way. It's not like some greater entity force them to talk about a restricted set of "content"
This is your authoritarian thinking, at least in Europe there are political parties that are kissing Putin's ass hard and deep, so there are groups that have media control that you can chose to follow. But even those can't pretend that the reality before their eyes is fake and instead try different tactics,
The Russian trol army is as pathetic as their real army, those destroyed tanks are real so you need some other bullshit excuse then west propaganda, I seen more competent trolls blaming NATO, Putin should ask you for a refund, then give you his favorite tea, really low quality trolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUyAPQEb01Q
Chieftain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8
Bernard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY
Extreme summary, blame me if I missed something obviously important - unsupported tanks will die to infantry or artillery and have done so since shortly after the inception of the tank. Tanks are actually pretty cheap compared to replacing a human, it costs quite a lot to raise a modern human. The tank role still exists, but ratios of tanks to other fighting vehicles may change.
It's easy to forget that reality isn't a third-person shooter. When you're sitting in a steel box with an engine in the back and a cannon on the top, situational awareness will inevitably suffer to some degree, and no amount of cameras will completely offset that.
Do you now what's funny? Even RTS videogames like the Command and Conquer series or Star-Craft made this point clear early in our childhoods.
Tanks will be eaten alive by hoards of cheap disposable units, so you always had to support them with anti-infantry units if you wanted them to be useful in battle.
Putin and most of the Russian military doctrine would beg to differ.
It depends on the nation and their political situation.
Since 1945, Russia hasn't shown that it can accept a war of mass casualties without political fallout. Russian military doctrine may say that it can, but Putin would be unwise to assume so.
Siege tanks are grouped with marines and firebats for protection, Marines and medics run with medics for assistance. Have your infantry out front. Move to a location, plant your troops, put your tanks in siege mode, rain hellfire down upon aerial defenses and approaching units so your Battlecruisers can come in with their Vulture and Wraith support to decimate a base.
It takes a village. You know, to destroy the other guys village. But still. Villages.
No realistic amount of infantry support can shield you against weapons with such a huge range. An entire army could, but that is obviously too much.
The point is that a soldier with a Javelin is a much less visible target than a big vehicle. Even if he runs just 40 meters away between the firing of the missile and its impact, any return fire aimed at the original site will likely miss him. And there can be a hundred of such Javelin-equipped soldiers in range.
There’s no scenario where hundreds of Javelins are sitting in one infantry company. It’s the type of thing that only makes sense on paper.
Would be much more worried about evolution of loitering fires with drones.
But there may be cheaper and better models one day. This war has shown that ATGMs, MANPADs and their ilk have a huge potential, which means that a lot of countries and companies are going to pour resources into R&D. This usually means an overall improvement in capabilities and possibly a reduced price tag.
As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse. Russia still cannot do that, but for rich Western countries, it is an absolutely realistic option.
Have you ever humped a combat load? It sucks. You’re rolling out with 40 lbs of stuff hanging off you before we even talk sustainment.
Javelin has gotta be 40-50 lbs. Add that on. Want an extra missile? Add another 30 or so.
Now suppose you don’t run into any armor, this is why every infantryman doesn’t/won’t carry one. Maybe 1 per squad, if we want to be super aggressive maybe 1 per fireteam. But that’s now a machine gun they’ve left out, what if they really needed more suppression?
It’s a trade off and humans aren’t capable of bringing all the nice to haves to every fight. This is why there won’t be hundreds in a company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin
What we are witnessing from Russia is not how armor should be employed. Armor is not suddenly obsoleted due to tech that’s been out for decades. That take is probably overly simplistic and wrong.
By the way, I’m a big proponent of FD2030.
And when that "one day" comes around, the tank engineers will have outfitted every vehicle with Trophy-style active protection systems AND laser anti-missile/anti-drone remote weapons stations on the turrets.
>>>As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse.
Interesting that you mention night vision. We used to swear by equipping our infantry with IR lasers as well, for pinpoint accuracy during night combat. Now that more of our adversaries are using night vision, we are swinging back towards NOT using IR lasers because the active emission is just like the old Murphy's Law adage: "tracers point both ways".
Until very recently, 2 guys hiding in a bush couldn't kill a tank, you needed a predator drone, an helicopter or some other advanced system requiring heavy logistics. Now behind every bush and every road corner is a potential enemy able to defeat you. With >90% kill ratio for javelins, the tanks needs to be lucky for weeks on end to survive, and the ATGM needs to be lucky only once.
Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper when there is a physical limit on the armor+weight+cost+logistical support equation for tanks.
And you don't just have the cost of the tank - there's also the cost of all the logistics needed to get the tank to the battlefield, no matter where it is in the world - and then to feed it a constant supply of fuel, ammo, spare parts and repair.
Tanks are expensive, missiles that can defeat tanks are cheap. But the question is, what is a replacement good for a tank? What fills the role? What is the role?
Does it take a platoon to replace a tank?
The lifetime value of a human is only going up. Most soldiers go on to take jobs and contribute to the economy of a nation.
You could think of a tank saving the lives of the 3 people inside it, or the lives of the 10 or 20 people it would take to fill the role if the tank was not available. You could think of the days, hours, or minutes of fighting it might save, which might translate to many more lives saved.
Also consider the political cost of loss of life.
I don't think it is AT ALL clear how to evaluate the relative costs here. One would have to consider the mission at hand and the value of that mission.
I'm guessing the total lifetime cost of a trained soldier is less than $8.9M but I wouldn't be suprised to find that the figures are comparable in the end.
A tank performs a critical role. You can't replace it until you have something else performing that role.
I think the main gun on an MBT will be replaced by rocket systems on smaller lighter, faster vehicles like the Boxer CRV family.
Edit just to add,
The secrets out that the idea behind Javelin and NLAW is sound. Expect there to be a proliferation of reasonably cheap weapons in this category being developed and built by everyone.
The only reason we're hearing so much talk about the Javelin/NLAW is because of cheap cellphone videos capturing so much of the war in Ukraine. (And extremely poor Russian tactics...)
That's what I call over simplification.
The point is that modern, competent armies have been preparing to counter the ATGM threat for over half a century.
On a more serious note, I would have counted the Russians in the group of competent armies. Maybe they were during the cold war, Afghanistan is not really a good measure. Maybe they were not, no way to ever find out. All being said, I'm happy that we never found out so far. Because one thing is sure, finding out involves turning whatever region is used to find out into a war zone.
Now? I think that NATO could easily handle almost anything Russia could throw at it, short of nukes.
It really is amazing how poorly they've performed. And the BTG concept has been utterly disproven as a brittle, unsustainable force.
The only more advanced tank Russia has is the T-14, but it likely has less then 20 of those and due to the sanctions wont be able to make anymore, so its unlikely to be fielded in Ukraine.
For example, the T-72B3M Obr. 2016 is a thoroughly modern tank, though obviously based on the T-72. Modern fire-control, modern vision equipment, solid ERA, good cannon.
Where it is failing is in how it's being used, even ignoring the lack of appropriate infantry/artillery support. This is a tank that has thermal day/night sights (not IR spotlights). It should be able to see someone lurking with an NLAW or RPG, but they are continually being sniped.
So why? Well, perhaps the thermal sights suck, or were stripped out at depot by some corrupt quartermaster. Or perhaps the crews are so poorly trained they can't take advantage of them. Or perhaps a lot of the ATGM kills we see are abandoned vehicles that are just getting destroyed.
Also, during the 2014 Donbass war, the UA lost roughly 400 MBTs, the majority of which were lost to mortars and artillery, not ATGMs. We see the videos of the Javelin/NlAW strikes, but we don't see hardly as much artillery. Artillery is the king of war...
Most of this we won't know until the conflict has quieted down, and after action reports are gathered.
Tanks aren't obsolete by any means, but the reasons for the high losses are multivariate, a nd not due to old armor being destroyed by "modern" (30 year old Javelin) anti-tank weapons.
It is entirely reasonable that, similar to the aftermath of the 90s wars, weapons from Ukraine will turn up in every major conflict zone - especially because the current supply from the Balkan is all 30 years old decrepit shit, whereas Ukraine (rightfully) got the very best of the best of Western weaponry.
[1] https://www.nordbayern.de/region/nsu-prozess-gericht-will-he...
[2] https://www.dw.com/de/waffenlager-balkan-kalaschnikow-300-eu...
https://www.rferl.org/a/pandora-papers-tax-havens/31490744.h...
there is no reason to assume weaponry will be somehow excluded from their corrupted business operations
Its not like a medium income politician having hundreds of millions stored away.
In the end we are at a trade-off situation: Either we don't send weapons to Ukraine and let Putin take over, raze the country and genocide off the population (they are already setting up "filtration camps" and forcibly relocating Ukrainians to Siberia [1]), and risk that the Baltic states or Poland becomes the next target for Putin. Or we send weapons to Ukraine, blow the invasion forces to pieces, and risk that the weapons will be sold off later on to the highest bidders.
Personally I prefer the latter: no one should be forced to live under Putin's dictatorship and the post-WW2 world order was explicitly created to condemn Nazi-style landgrab operations. If the price of that will be that some ammo gets diverted off to some other warlord, that's bad but acceptable because the alternative is so much worse.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ukrainian-woman-gives-accoun...
[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/stinger.htm
If the F-35 will be allowed to shoot targets over the horizon based only on instruments, it will most probably work as intended.
If visual confirmation will be required, it will be a boondoggle.
[1] by the US, Iran has used it more with more success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-54_Phoenix#U.S._combat_exp...
In the case of the US involved conflicts it was working with allies and fighters lacking modern IFF that made the likelihood of friendly fire or collateral losses unacceptable to them.
It's a matter of acceptable risks. The AIM-54 was designed with a world war III in mind, employed in the middle of the ocean in closed airspaces were unidentified contacts could be treated as hostile with minimum political consequences.
The point I was making is here is an example of a time a major force decided not to use their prime BVR missile because of target identification concerns.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-120_AMRAAM#United_States_o...
> The two F-15s now initiated a visual identification (VID) pass of the contact.
> Wickson's VID pass was conducted at a speed of about 450 knots (520 mph; 830 km/h), 500 feet (150 m) above and 1,000 feet (300 m) to the left of the helicopters.
Now I am not saying there is no room for BVR, ofcourse there is. The 2 tracks in formation coming from Russian airspace pinging you with their Russian military radars are definitely Russian fighters. But there are also a lot of times where there has to be a visual id.
A military jet with it's radars turned off is almost impossible to tell apart from a civilian jet based on radar data alone, and everyone errs on the side of caution, of course the side of caution occasionally is to fire first and id later[2][3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Black_Hawk_shootdown_inci... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
And the reason it wasn't used much wasn't just ID issues, but cost. It was supremely expensive, in limited stocks. Why use it against an Su-22 in the Gulf of Sidra? Or waste it over Iraq?
Unaided pilot vision is unlikely to spot a target at 22 miles without some type of guidance.
From what I have seen reported every major player is working on "loyal wingmen".
Autonomous drones that would fly along manned aircraft. That way you supposedly get the best of both worlds, the situational awareness and judgement of a human along the expendability of a drone.
The F-35 is fine. It's designed to be a replacement to the F-16 with a good level of stealth. NO fighter is 100% immune to SAMs, but the F-35 can survive on the modern battlefield against S300/S400 etc just fine. It would be cleaning up in Ukraine right now as long as the airbases it flew from were protected.
And what "unmanned fighters" are out there right now? Some low performance drones? Sure. But unmanned fighters that can engage in A2A combat are non-existent. Most current drones have the performance of a Cessna 172.
So your cloud of Cessnas could conceivably carry 60 Stingers. How will they detect a fighter flying at 30K? A 172 can only get to about 15K in perfect conditions. It flies at like 100mph compared to a Mach 2 F-35.
Again, short of being a suicide bomber trying to kill an F-35 on the ramp, this idea is ludicrous.
To create a drone capable of threatening an F-35 requires creating something very similarly capable in all ways but without the pilot. This may exist one day but it isn't going to come at a discount.
Those missiles are not cheap, and it would be unlikely for cheap Cessnas to get in range of an F-35. At long range the F-35 is difficult to observe by sensors that fit inside a Cessna.
I believe it is possible to shoot down low-radar-crossection aircraft if the missiles are spotted/guided by other sensor networks, but that is not easy, cheap, or mobile. And land based radars are sitting ducks.
No, they would not. I believe they would seem easy-mode target practice for the cannon.
I don't think you could possibly know this. NATO countries have S-300s and the F-35 was probably tested against it, but it's highly unlikely it was tested against an actual latest gen S-400 in fighting condition ( if such a thing even exists, Russian military readiness is dubious at best).
You do realize that the S400 is just an upgraded S300, right? Hence it's original name of S300 PMU-3?
The US can soften things up with cruse missiles and the F-22 or it’s successors, the F-35’s job is to crush what remains and it does that very well. Difficult enough to fight that you need expensive and therefore difficult to replace weapons systems while still being affordable enough to be plentiful.
Where do you get that from? The whole point of the 1.2 trillion endeavor is survivability.
I think we will see the tanks in future battlefields still but rather than cannons they will be using more electronic warfare and will be providing indirect fire with "smart" weapons. Essentially they will be multi role armoured vehicles with high manoeuvrability e.g. (British Ajax Scout Vehicle)
Or my sci-fi'ish theory of a "drone tank"
Why?
* Governments have high demands from defence and at the same time want low costs.
* Military doesn't want an infantryman any more; they want a soldier who can perform several other roles. Same goes for vehicles.
* The concept of modular vehicles with the same chassis is becoming popular.
* Everyone who was taught or believed cold war military tactics is retiring or will be soon. So new doctrines will emerge.
<armchair_opinion/>
The ultimate faraday cage match, where swarms of autonomous surface and air vehicles jam, cook, and subvert the circuits of the opposition into oblivion
But why would such capabilities need to be installed on the heavy chassis of a tank?
Electronic warfare and smart weaponry benefit alot from mobility and redundant systems that can operate even when front-line-logistics are interrupted. Tanks offer neither, they are slow, hard to repair, and burn fuel like noones business.
The only advantage a tank offers is, well, being tank-y, and as modern ATGM systems have demonstrated in Ukraine, that advantage isn't what it used to be.
I'd be shocked if canons went away though. The end goal of warfare is to cause enough chaos/destruction that your enemy's choices are constrained to what you want. Without physical violence there's no sense going out into the field in the first place.
Doctrine and training are paramount, together with command and control that's what enabled the early German successes in WW1. And in the case of France a ton of luck.
The article asks the right question: is the role of the tank still needed? A Javelin neutralizes a tank, under the right conditions, it doesn't replace it.
Seems that the "West", spearheaded by the US, has the most experienced military in the world at the moment. 20 years of counter insurgency warfare and some more conventional wars before that seriously helped a lot. Just how much is at display in Ukraine, first by the, so far, Russian failures and second by the preparation and performance of the Ukrainians, which where supported, cinsulted and equiped by NATO for years by now.
I m quite impressed by the attrition in both troops, ammo, and material. More than Wunderwaffen, i think the lesson is more in trained personel reserves, as well as stockpiles.
EDIT: Just looked, the T-72 has a 125 mm smoothbore cannon.
Basically, it is doctrine and some technical solutions (Javelins attack tanks from the top as opposed horizontally like older anti-tank missiles) that will enable the tank to do its job.
It's curious so, that nobody asks these questions when it comes to fighter aircraft and helicopters. Because those are vulnerable to manpads as well, and the war in Ukraine shows this pretty clearly. I guess burned out tank make for better footage then some small pieces or debris in some field that only experts can tell which aircraft it used to be once.
Offensive destructive power can be provided by air support, long range self-guiding weapons and drone weaponry as well.
I also don't believe that ATGMs mean "Tanks are already obsolete". But I do think they are under threat of becoming so, because: ATGMs will get better, as will drones. Meanwhile, a tank will always be a big hunk of metal moving comparatively slowly on the ground.
EDIT: The point is that a tank will be made obsolete by weapon system that replaces the tanks function on the battlefield. And not by a system that can destroy a tank. Because those anti-tank systems exist since WW1. Initially the Germans were not that impressed by tanks, large caliber rifles and re-purposed field guns worked just fine against the first tanks the French and British used. Nobody stopped tank, or anti-tank weapon, development then so. I don't see a reason why anybody would stop tank development just because we have impressive Javelin footage. If anything, tanks will improve to increase protection against ATGMs and drones. As will tactics and doctrine.
They are not, the fact the Russians have lost so many planes is a testament to their inability to suppress the Ukrainian air defense.
Fighters are capable of flying far higher than MANPAD ceilings the only reason to fly that low is to employ visually guided weapons under cloud cover or to attempt to hide behind the terrain against longer range air defense systems.
Both of these issues can be resolved. By suppressing the enemy long range air defense and by employing laser guided weapons along with ground based designators.
Also fighters can evade missiles, google f16 dodges 6 sams for an extreme example.
Tactical aircraft in Ukraine is also targeted by Buk/Tor/Tunguska, but I believe most of the aircraft and helo losses have been due to MANPADs.
Now the US is realizing that what it once thought of as robust stocks of PGMs may not be enough for a high-intensity conflict. Production rates of Javelin are pretty slow, and the Stinger has been out of production for a while with no planned replacement. The US Army has always given air defense low priority, counting on the USAF to provide air supremacy. Against a near pear, that might not be the wisest choice, and doesn't help with drones anyways.
Lighter wheeled gun armed vehicles can be cheaper, but they don't have the survivability. They also can't go everywhere a tracked tank can go, such as jungle busting or just driving right through many kinds of buildings or cover. Missile have much longer flight times to target than gun rounds. A tank can move into position, fire, destroy it's target and be back in cover before a missile gets anywhere near it's target. The missiles are also vastly more expensive than tank rounds.
Yes tanks are vulnerable when not properly integrated with air support, artillery and infantry. They're still a lot more survivable than pretty much anything else that can provide the same capabilities though. One tank in the second Gulf War shrugged off 14 RPG hits, and overall tanks in that conflict amply proved their value, when used effectively.
imho the failures observed caused by manpad in the ukrane theatre were directly attributable to an almost comically poor systems integration on the part of the aggressor and an unwillingness to commit longer range artillery and missile strikes to soften what were hardened infantry targets equipped with sixth generation anti-air and anti-tank weaponry.
Given the current state of cities such as Mariupol I don't believe you can attribute an unwillingness to use artillery to the Russian side.
Russia's BTGs were explicitly designed to (a) consume minimal manpower (they were composed of non-coscript troops from their parent units), (b) consequently, to maximize lethality:person (tank co + 3x mech inf co + 2 AT co + artillery/anti-air), and (c) to minimize logistical support requirements (by deploying smaller units).
Essentially, they were built to win small-scale conflicts at a price Russia could afford.
Ukraine is not a small-scale conflict.
Consequently, the following chain of events (predictably) occurred: (1) Putin proposes 2003 military reforms [0], (2) Serdyukov realizes many of these in 2008 reforms [1], (3) optimistic appraisal of capabilities vs Ukraine leads to Army grandstanding, little strategic integration with different branches (e.g. VVS, VMF), (4) utter failure of real political intelligence mistakenly assumes Ukrainian population (esp urban) will not support government & defense, (6) infantry-light, manuever-oriented assault predictable bogs down in urban areas, without necessary troop count in assaulting units, (7) strategic approach is locked in, as a consequence of previous choices, (8) everyone involved at a command level scrambles to cover their ass and blame others.
If Russia had wanted to win the war they ended up getting, they should have never assaulted urban areas with BTGs.
They would have manuevered south from western Belarus, bisecting the country, and forced Moldova to declare neutrality and forbid weapons shipments. Then pick key infrastructure apart at leisure. Because that's the sort of thing the BTGs were built to do.
But presumably Russia didn't want to do that because it betrays the "this is all about Donbas (and the criminal Ukrainian government)" talking points, and it didn't think it would need to. Hindsight is 20/20.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ground_Forces#Reform...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Russian_military_reform
Systems like TOR/Tunguska/Buk should be easily capable of detecting the Bayraktar and destroying it. It's not like Russia didn't see how it worked in the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict. They knew Ukraine had Bayraktar, but seemed completely unprepared to deal with it.
The Ukrainians have all the same SAM systems the Russians do, so are super familiar with their limitations. They’re also many times more motivated.
The tank may not be completely obsolete and indeed properly used like the US did and like Russia sadly probably re-learned it is a very useful tool.
More defensive automation will put even that "properly used" to the test. I think we've just scratched the surface of what AI can do for defense; for offense also, but not as much. It's now in the realm of reality (think the mossad machine gun attack in Iran) to have systems that will autonomously attack any tank/vehicle/human, just waiting in ambush. It's orders of magnitued to have offensive AI driven tanks.
Imagine 1000 Mariupols, all automated with automated machine guns, AT missiles, drones and so on. Those do not require food, no water, no sleep, are not afraid to die.
Regardless, tanks are not what they used to be in WW2 -- modern tanks are extremely expensive and there are a lot of ways to kill tanks nowdays.
The battle will go back and forth, the tanks will get active protection, the ATGMs will get a lot faster, will used efps like the NLAW, but I think the writing is on the wall. Yeah, it was said before, just like it was said about the missile making dogfights obsolete -- a little early, but true eventually.
Not true so. The US thought that in Vietnam, the F-4 (?) didn't have an on-board canon for that very reason. All new planes again have one, because dog fights turned out to be very much a thing. The Phoenix missile, and the F-14, have been built around the beyond-visual range idea. Both are out of service now. Beyond visual range works when you see the enemy but the enemy doesn't see you. If both parties see each other, the first shot will be beyond visual range, any survivors will find themselves in dog fight after that. And if both side use stealthy fighters, they won't see each other, or be able to engage each other, at distances beyond a dog fight.
That's one of the big challenges, isn't it? If an enemy catches a flight of F-35s / F-22s with enough numbers the result could be devastating. And the big limitation of stealth aircraft is payload. Have them carry more, on external hardpoints, and they loose stealth. Have them maintain stealth means carrying less. Having too large internal bays makes them useless as fighters. Quite a fascinating conundrum there.
There is nothing fundamentally indefensible about drone swarms, the complex just hasn't had enough time to react. You can bet that, if it doesn't already exist in secret somewhere in the US, there are many teams actively working on tank-mounted drone laser defense systems.
I suspect that drones have been hard to target until now because they have a unique air signature far different from all previous air targets, not because they are fundamentally more "invisible" than a Predator or a helicopter. Given their unique shape, movement, noise, and radio profile, a CS grad could certainly cobble together a drone target acquisition system using some consumer-level optic systems combined with a radio antenna, radar, and microphone array.
And as we all know, quadcopter drones are exceedingly fragile and most of their profile is millimeter-thin plastic blades. Once you have the ability target them, you'd only need a moderately powered laser to completely disable them.
> The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver. Where is the accompanying infantry with the tank formations, who are supposed to bust the ambushes executed by Ukrainian forces? Where are the suppressive mortar, artillery, and close air support fires? If the Russian Army was tactically skilled, then the Javelin and other ATGMs would be suppressed by artillery or air support and their surviving crews would be swept up by Russian infantry. Thus far, these key competencies seem to be lacking and Russian soldiers are paying a high price for their unpreparedness.
For sure the Russians have lots a lot of vehicles to ATGMs, they have proved to be extremely effective weapons, especially against tanks moving forward in tight formations without infantry support. However nobody is looking at the terrible infantry casualties Russia has suffered, due to poor tactics, training and resupply, and concluding that infantry are obsolete.
Here's a video of a Ukrainian tank ambushing a Russian convoy. Seems like a pretty effective weapon system to me.
https://youtu.be/S27kw7XVvSA
On the video, the ukrainian tank is of course performing an effective ambush. I don't pretend I have the answers, but I wonder how would perform a bunch of infantry with NLAWs striking the column from multiple places at once, for cheaper than the tank, able to engage multiple targets at once, much less spottable, and so on.
The point is that a properly equipped, prepared and trained military would have taken steps to use assets like tanks well and not marched them into oblivion, and perhaps researched and developed countermeasures to what is clearly a popular anti-tank missile system.
Such a military would also have conducted reconnaissance by drone, scouts, satellite etc. and concluded from the data gathered that driving a tank into [area with lots of unpacked Javelin crates] would perhaps be impractical, and focused on eliminating the munitions before playing the tank card.
The tank can wipe out infantry and survive anything with less-than-anti-tank weapons, the Javelin user can kill the tank, the sniper can kill the Javelin, the counter-sniper can kill the sniper, the artillery strike or sustained covering fire by infantry can cancel out the counter-sniper, etc.
The point is that simply driving tanks into a city full of people with anti-tank missile launchers and a strong inclination to attack invading tanks is not a good idea without mitigating the risk.
The existence of an anti-tank missile launcher does not make the tank irrelevant. Fighter jets still fly despite the existence of anti-aircraft missile systems.
What makes war technology irrelevant is whether it is prohibitively expensive to replace, assuming non-zero odds that the unit will be incapacitated/destroyed.
This is especially true against an opposing military force that has large amounts of existing man-made or natural shelter and cover, high motivation, *and* supplies/support from multiple wealthy countries, etc. that basically doesn't have to spend because it's defending with whatever it has, tooth and nail.
That's the point so, there is no other system that can give those capabilities for now. Seriously read the article, it is pretty good on that topic.
In terms of tank usage, they are also quite good in when directly engaging fortified positions, e.g. field bunkers and so on.
1. Hard-kill APS - active protection systems - mm AESA (fast, high resolution) miniature radar detecting threats and sending munitions to intercept them. See Arena, Trophy. Eventually, laser counter-drone systems for small swarms (see Israeli developments)
2. Soft-kill APS - smarter/highly-automated smoke deployment, IR smoke, radar chaff. Directed radar / IR blinders. (See T-90 systems failing in Ukraine atm)
3. Passive - lower signatures.
4. Target detection and automatic turret queuing - tanks have a lot of space, they can have sophisticated optics and computers that find targets (including OTH data from tethered drones) or find launches against them and can fire on that launch. This is less effective against fire and forget systems ala Javelin or systems like Stunga where the launch platform is away from the guidance system.
5. Trench sweepers and coupled 30mm cannons - tanks can airburst and clear trenches / buildings better.
6. Operating in fully jammed environments. This has NOT happened in Ukraine at all. Wide-area signal suppression seems like a myth in the current war.
Anyway, this is just basic stuff to look into. The tanks remains a "go fast, penetrate stuff, maneuver" platform.
One thing most people also forget is the cost of the firepower that comes with the platform. Smart/loitering munitions are still expensive, and still have a high time-to-target than direct fire or dumb mortars.
A cohesive BCT would be able to decimate light infantry. Yes, there will always be losses in war, but this shouldn't be an effective strategy. And I also think that the video coverage is making everyone think that ATGMs are winning the war. In the 2014-2016 Donbass, the UA lost over 400 tanks, the majority to artillery. Yet that isn't captured on video as easily unless there's a drone correcting the artillery's fall.
That's the secret power of a functional democracy: it can empower the military.
The first point is the big one, the future of ground forces may not be built around gunned vehicles. Drone swarms can threaten entrenched infantry, ATGMs can destroy tanks from a distance. A "dumb" artillery round costs $1,000 and is accurate to 20 meters, recent "smart" artillery rounds cost $140,000, a switchblade costs $6000.
A lot of the breathless enthusiasm for drones seems premature. SAMs didn't make aircraft obsolete, air to ground missiles from aircraft and helicopters didn't make tanks and other vehicles obsolete, and there's doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that adjustments won't be made by the various militaries to provide protection against drones.
Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin?
The tank is not dead (well, not any more than large tank charges are probably dead and ww2 style combat is dead? We likely won't see anything like in desert storm or the Yom Kippur war again).
If this exists, why did the USMC binned their tanks 2 years ago stating they weren't cost-effective anymore? I'll believe this exists when I'll see it, but so far we have seen $4M tanks defeated by $100K javelins with a 93% kill rate, and so far cope cages have done nothing against them.
Also again: you are taking Russian armor survivability as proof for US armor survivability against the same threat. I totally get if you take my comments here with a (big) grain of salt because I can't provide citations and I'm not making any direct claims about US armor survivability against Javelins (and you'll note you won't find any videos/info online about that because of classification).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)
[2] https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/abrams-main-battle-t...
Active protection systems like Trophy are designed to pre-detonate that shaped charge so that they actual sabot penetrator just bounces off the normal armor, or is hit by ERA (explosive reactive armor). I'm sure APS work better against most ATGMs than sabots, but fundamentally, many of them are designed similarly. Sans maybe there are no depleted uranium ATGMs.
Plus, while adding layers of protection to armor (or ships and planes) is a useful endeavor, the maxim of shooting the archer, not the arrow is a better strategy. There's a point of diminishing returns when you layer so much on a vehicle instead of dealing with threats using an entire system (Artillery/Infantry/ECM/ECCM/Air Support).
Tanks must be supported by infantry teams. Without capable mortar teams, rifle teams, automatic weapons teams, they are sitting ducks, as Russia has proven.
https://youtu.be/QPJRd_XiDGg
Tanks have always been vulnerable to very cheap infrantry weapons if used badly.
Nothing has significantly changed since the 80s-90s, ATGMs have gotten better but they were still a huge problem back then and the solution seems to be the same, better recon, more artillery.
Drones don't represent something new but really precision strikes at a discount, capabilities only available to major powers once are now "buy off the shelf".
The TB-2 with a couple of MAM missiles does the same job as an f4 with a couple of walleyes.
The only difference being the f4 cost 2 million dollars in 1965 while the TB-2 costs 2 million dollars now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMWHTVLWo2E
Wikipedia is not always a good source for military information, FYI...
https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/grenades/rkg-1600-hand...
Given that modern war should be centered toward war crimes, witch means using civilian stuff to disguise forces, mass kill people with poisoned water without damaging significantly the infra, use and abuse modern IT crap vulnerabilities do disable infra (like electric grid, connected vehicles etc) without physical damage, spread disinformation with the best possible ability etc.
That's why, for instance, in Ukraine Russia can't really arrive to a quick victory. Such immoral and criminal pattern is nothing new: WWI was a combat between armies, civilians are evacuated before combats, non-combatant on the front line was a bit respected etc, WWII change the game hitting civilians without any morale, hitting ambulances, putting military in hospitals etc. Now we do not even use State's official army preferring mercenaries with formally no flag and no code of conduct, engaging rule: "do what you want but win".
In such scenario try to be civil is not doable, the sole option is show equal behaviors, not encouraging criminals and violence per se, but mastering it to crush enemy forces and push civilians of all sides against the combatant because being unable to distinguish between them any unknown human being can be an enemy so a legit target for all sides.
Reaching such level of brutality means creating just bloodbaths where public opinion will rise at a certain point against the war itself. At that point no gear will work, the force of the crowd could not be stopped.
That's the modern strategy no one admit of course, but many practice shamefully.
Anyone with a mild knowledge of history knows about the huge tank battle that took place between India and Pakistan in 1965. Hard to take the article without any reference to that conflict.