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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A tank performs a critical role. You can't replace it until you have something else performing that role.
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.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/04/01/why-do...
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
It's a large-scale conflict so one can cherry-pick enough footage to support any narrative.
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.)
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/>
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
Tanks have always been vulnerable to very cheap infrantry weapons if used badly.
[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.
Tanks must be supported by infantry teams. Without capable mortar teams, rifle teams, automatic weapons teams, they are sitting ducks, as Russia has proven.
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.
anti-tank hand grenades are obsolete.
The only use is to somehow get them to detonate under the tank and pray it will do something.
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.
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.
>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."
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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)
----
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
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Where do you get that from? The whole point of the 1.2 trillion endeavor is survivability.
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...
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
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...