Are tanks of any use anymore on the modern battlefield?

I have seen it said that the reason one military needs tanks is to defeat the tanks the other side has.

In Ukraine we are seeing Russian armor not doing well.

Of what use is a tank if it can be taken out by a much cheaper system?

Javelin antitank missiles cost around $200,000. Replacement missiles cost about $78,000. A TOW missile costs even less.

An Abrams tanks costs around $9 million.

So, why go tank-vs-tank? Why not make a jillion man portable anti-tank missiles and be done with enemy tanks?

Use drones on any tanks unwilling to get close. If they are at range then artillery is probably better anyway (and cheaper).

Cheap, autonomous, low observable drones change the battlespace in a lot of fundamental ways. Tanks become more vulnerable but so does just about everything else. Artillery is terrifying if you are anywhere near the fire zone but without forward observers directing fire it’s basically the ground equivalent of saturating bombing. Overhead drones are precision devices that strike particular targets, often with no warning and evading all defenses.

Tanks are great for moving across large, flat spaces and clearing the way for mechanized infantry and support. If they are restrained to a column because they can only traverse roads due to the ground being too unstable, or if they are creeping around urban areas where attackers with anti-tank rockets have plenty of cover and high ground, they are tragically vulnerable.

Stranger

Zelensky renews his call for planes and tanks from NATO

Mr. Zelensky renewed his public appeal to NATO for military equipment, saying he wanted “1 percent” of the alliance’s tanks and planes.

It’s not a very good sign of the alleged imminent demise of the tank, which has been predicted since Soviet supplied ATGMs proved so effective against Israeli armor back in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the side in the current conflict that is using the latest in modern Western anti-tank technology is asking the West to supply them with more tanks. The Egyptian and Syrians were hardly in any rush to throw away all of their tanks in 1973 either, or to turn down replacements for all of the tanks that they had lost themselves.

As long as there is nothing that can replace the role of the tank on the modern battlefield there will remain a need for tanks on said battlefields, regardless of where the pendulum of improvements in anti-tank weapons leading to improvements in tank defenses leading to improvements in anti-tank weapons and back again to improvements in tank defenses is swinging at the moment. The same argument could -and was- made with regards to the vulnerability of infantry on the battlefield dating back to the US Civil War Era with the invention of rifled muskets, then breech loading rifles, then bolt-action magazine fed rifles, then machine guns and indirect fire artillery.

Jan Gotlib Boch, a Polish banker, wrote a very prescient book on the future of war in 1898 entitled Is War Now Impossible?, in which he correctly predicted that the magazine rifle, quick fire indirect artillery and the machine gun would reduce future war between European powers to siege warfare, where the spade would be as important as the rifle and large scale maneuvers would be rendered impossible as both sides settled down to entrenching to survive the vast increase in firepower. Where he was wrong was his conclusion, that war would now be impossible as infantry was far too vulnerable in the then modern industrial age. As long as there is nothing that can effectively replace the role of infantry on the battlefield, infantry isn’t going anywhere either.

The GI action figure (and definitely not a doll) Bazooka was released in 1985. He backstory is that he was an Abram’s driver who came to the conclusion that “an illiterate farmer armed with a $200 disposable rocket launcher could put out a million dollar tank with less than two weeks training.” So he transferred to the infantry and became an expert in man portable missile systems and Warsaw pact RPGs. So I guess the idea that tanks would become obsolete is nothing new.

It’s hard to judge the actual efficacy of Russian tanks when a big part of their problem is their poorly trained military.

But that was before Cobra updated their HISS tank.

The opinion of a retired tanker,

Basically, the answer to pretty much any threat to the tank has been and continues to be combined arms. Sure new systems like active protection systems do provide a saving throw and are helpful but they are not the first line of defense.
That tanks unsupported by the other arms are easy prey is tanking 101 and what we are seeing in Ukraine isn’t revolutionary it’s exactly what you would expect to happen if you send vehicles in unsupported into areas infested with infantry and not denied to enemy air.

I really like his channel.

But, ISTM, tanks are only needed if the other guy has tanks.

And, if you have tanks, you need to dedicate a substantial effort to support those tanks.

So, best case, you have tanks and the other guy does not. How much benefit does that get you?

Conversely, the other side has tanks but you do not. How hard is it to stop those tanks? If the other side is really good and has the wherewithal they can protect their tanks. But that takes a lot of effort on their part.

I get their value in WWI, maybe WWII but today with man portable missiles and drones? Tanks start seeming like too much of an expense for their worth.

Tank & APCs are slowly merging.
As anybody who paid attention to Infantry riding the back of Tanks in WW2 could have told you.

The trick, as always, is not to send your tanks charging in on their own, and nor do you generally want your infantry facing tanks on their own . That’s why you’ll hear the term “combined arms” thrown around a lot when you’re reading up on US military stuff.

Basically the idea is that the infantry and tanks mutually support each other, and the supporting branches support them as well (artillery, air). So in theory, the enemy infantry with the Javelin missiles or whatever never get close enough to actually be much of a threat.

But the Russians apparently suck pretty hard at soldiering, so their tanks/vehicles don’t seem to be well supported by infantry, so they’re getting chewed up. Which is exactly what happens to tanks when that happens, even in WWII.

Practically speaking, anti-tank missiles aren’t anything new- they’ve fired big tank-busters from airplanes, helicopters and larger tripods/vehicles for decades now. The only real innovation in the NLAW and Javelin missiles in use in Ukraine is the fire-and-forget guidance- the infantryman can fire it, and then scurry off into better cover. Prior to that, they had to keep the sight on the tank until the missile hit, which left them vulnerable for a while.

You can think of it as a pendulum that swings between the tanks being ascendant, and the anti-tank systems being ascendant. During the first half of WWII, the pendulum had swung toward the tank, as infantry generally didn’t have much to counter them with, and countermeasures were limited to other tanks or relatively heavy anti-tank guns. Then the shaped charge came into its own, with the Bazooka, Panzerfaust, PIAT, etc… for infantry. Tanks and anti-tank guns then also got various other improved ammunition- HEAT rounds (shaped charge), APCR (armor-piercing composite rigid), APDS (armor piercing discarding sabot) that swung the pendulum back toward the center. Not until the 1960s and 1970s did the pendulum swing away from the tank with the development of the anti-tank guided missile, which married a large shaped charge with a long range and a guidance system. Even at that, improvements in engines and suspensions meant that tanks could carry more armor and be faster than before, making them more survivable than before, and damping that swing.

Eventually the pendulum swung the other way in the late 1970s/early 1980s with the development of various sorts of composite armor and of explosive reactive armor. The former is armor made of various sorts of ceramics and metals that is considerably more effective than an equal thickness of armor steel vs. shaped charges and APFSDS kinetic rounds. Explosive reactive armor is different- basically when a shaped charge jet hits the reactive armor, it explodes, disrupting the jet, thus minimizing penetration. It also tends to deflect/disrupt APFSDS long-rod penetrators as well.

The pendulum started swinging back in the 1990s with things like top-attack guidance systems, explosively formed penetrators, and things like tandem-charge warheads, all of which are engineered to defeat tanks with modern composite or reactive armor.

We’re actually seeing the pendulum swing back for tanks, believe it or not, with the advent of active protection systems on the most modern tanks. These are essentially small radar systems coupled with some sort of countermeasure- some use small rockets, others projectiles, and still others use IR jamming countermeasures. Basically if the radar detects some kind of projectile on a trajectory that will impact the vehicle, it fires the countermeasure at it to destroy or disrupt it. Right now, these aren’t super-common, but they’re starting to be more and more common, especially in Western armies.

A big part of the problem we’re seeing in Ukraine is older T-72 tanks with only ERA being attacked by modern top-attack missiles- essentially the results of the 1990s pendulum swing away from tanks.

I suspect that if we were seeing top of the line T-90 tanks with composite armor, ERA and APS well supported by competent infantry, we’d see a LOT less destroyed Russian tanks.

A few months ago I learned that some of the vehicles I thought were APCs or even tanks were actually infantry fighting vehicles.

CNN announcers often speak of tanks being destroyed while showing pictures of armored personnel carriers.

Most journalists have little understanding of technical issues and basically repeat things they’ve heard other people say.

The video linked above by @crowmanyclouds makes a lot of good points even beyond the specifics of tanks. Ukraine is playing a good media game of making every tactical success seem like winning a battle but for every tank they destroy the Russians can send in ten more (provided, of course, that they can maintain supply lines to keep them fueled). Ukraine isn’t really winning; it is just losing a lot slower than anyone expected, and maybe slow enough that the Russians will end up grinding to a halt under the weight of their own poor leadership and ineptitude.

Don’t mistake incompetence and obsolescence of the Russians specifically to validate the claim that tanks in general are obsolete. The Russians are using poorly maintained and supported tanks in an ineffectual way; that doesn’t mean that tanks when used correctly as part of a combined arms offensive aren’t a highly effective and fearsome weapon.

Stranger

An IFV is an APC with medium-weight mounted weapons (mid-caliber autocannon for instance) to fight their way into placing their carried infantry, and sometimes the ability for the “passengers” to fight while riding, usually through gun ports for their infantry weapons.

Yeah, but not for long. For every charm there is a counter-charm and anti-drone systems have already emerged/are emerging. The battlefield just keeps getting more complex at some levels.

Drones can also make Forward Observers obsolete. All artillery needs is grid coordinates, whereat they can hurl great chunks of budget. Drones are aces at doing just that thing.

If you remotely into military SF, and haven’t read David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers yet, do so. The stories address just this question, only in a futuristic setting. But the jobs remain the same.

Yeah, that’s why I just assumed the ones I had seen in previous years were APCs. While my dad was in the army, I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time with that kind of equipment. I remember waiting at a train crossing and seeing a bunch of “tanks” with red crosses being hauled. When I expressed my surprise at seeing armored ambulances my father said, “Yeah, I used to drive one before you were born.” I was absolutely floored by the MK 19 grenade launcher when I saw it on an educational program in the 1990s.

The first purpose-built American IFV was the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle from 1981. Before then, an M113 carrying infantry was pretty much an Armored Personnel Carrier.

Sure, but then it is going to be a competition between drone attack systems and anti-drone defenses. Eventually, you’ll see a platoon of mostly-autonomous tanks directed by one controller (who may or may not be on the battlefield) with its own anti-drone systems that seek and destroy drones before they get into position to attack. Regardless, no flying drone is going to fire a kinetic round capable of lancing its way through thick armor regardless of active countermeasures. The advertised demise of the tank as a 21st century battle weapon is at least premature, even though we can expect the main battletank of the future to resemble the current systems as much as the M1 Abrams is different from an M4 Sherman.

Stranger

Must get pretty noisy in there.

Based on these numbers, Russia has done more to build up the Ukrainian armed forced than anyone!

Still counts as a “win” if Russia can no longer field their massive army because they can’t afford to maintain it.

I feel like a lot of people gloss over the logistics and operational complexities of operating a fleet of tanks. It’s not just about having a big armored gun that can race around the battlefield blowing up stuff. As others have mentioned, to be used effectively, a tank must be part of a combined arms team of infantry, air defense, artillery, and those elements all need their own armored vehicles in order to keep up with the tanks. Which further adds complexity to the logistics, communications, and other support elements needed to keep them running.

In a way, it almost seems similar to the battleship. Sure, there might always be a use for a giant floating gun platform. But the cost and complexity and vulnerability to relatively less expensive weapons systems (aircraft, anti-ship missiles, etc) rendered battleships impractical.