All true, but just recognize that the Russian Army is mostly failing because of poor planning, training, and maintenance. Even with modern anti-armor guided rockets the Ukrainians wouldn’t be doing this well if the Russians had command of the airspace and was effective in bringing close air support to bear. It doesn’t help that the T-72 tank is not a very good main battle tank and has a number of inherent vulnerabilities, but at least per doctrine they should still be capable of deploying them effectively against the numerically much smaller Ukrainian forces who have mostly similar and more obsolescent hardware. That they aren’t really speaks to just how poor Russian Army training, command & control, and general doctrine is.
It also may be worth pointing out (and this may well have factored into Russia’s rosy pre-war assessment) that the Ukrainian armed forces did not do spectacularly well in 2014-2015, especially after Russia started supporting the separatist rebellion. In certain respects it is easier to be the one playing defense and motivation counts. Being under existential threat is a big deal and the Ukrainians currently are and those under-trained and inexperienced Russian conscripts mostly know they are not.
Good post, but I have to disagree with you here, we are seeing the best the Russians have being used and lost. Most of the visually confirmed T-72 losses are the most modern upgrade, the T-72B3 obr. 2016, which is arguably superior to the T-90 - which is also being seen destroyed, 19 T-90s being visually confirmed as of today. There’s a really good website tracking equipment losses here, Attack On Europe: Documenting Equipment Losses During The 2022 Russian Invasion Of Ukraine. A good video on the topic which led me to said website:
One thing that most (all?) contemporary Russian tanks have is autoloaders, and as a result, their ammunition is stored in a carousel either in the turret or right below. This makes them hideously vulnerable to having the ammo go up on a penetrating hit, and is a big part of why so many Russian tanks exhibit the “jack-in-the-box effect” when hit (the turret blows up in the air as its ammo explodes).
Meanwhile most Western tanks still have a dedicated crewman who loads the main gun, and also store the ammunition in a protected part of the turret with specific blow-out panels on top. That way, if the ammo is hit, and the blast door isn’t open, it can blow up/cook off/catch fire and any blast/fire will be channeled up and out of the tank via the blow-off panels.
I keep on hearing this same response, that tanks need to be used as part of combined arms. OK, I can see what the infantry are bringing to that partnership, but what are the tanks bringing? Taking down enemy tanks? Javelins are a lot better at that, and besides, if the tank’s purpose was taking out enemy tanks, then you could render your enemy’s tanks obsolete just by not fielding your own. Just what is that big gun supposed to be aimed at?
A tank is a mobile direct fire weapon capable of moving positions rapidly, taking out armored vehicles (other tanks, APCs, armored box launchers), reinforced emplacements, and other hardened targets. It can advance faster than artillery and bring more firepower than infantry alone, even mechanized infantry. It can hold territory, unlike air support. A single tank by itself is vulnerable to being disabled or attacked because it has poor visibility and in the case of complex terrain is restricted in its movements, but I guarantee as infantry you do not want to face off alone against a tank platoon even with effective anti-tank weapons because you might take out one or two but you are not going to be able to defend against the onslaught of the remaining vehicles.
This is kind of like saying that bombers are obsolete because we bombed the ever-loving shit out of Viet Nam (and Laos, secretly) and we lost the war anyway. We didn’t lose the war because of a lack of bombing, or effectiveness of the weapons, but because the Vietnamese had both a greater motivation to keep fighting and refused to just come at us all lined up. The Ukrainians are effective at taking out individual tanks because they are using hit and fade tactics, which have been effective in stalling the Russian advance but it isn’t as if they’re really pushing the Russians back or in anyway threatening to break their lines (such as they are); they’re just doing enough damage to prevent a rapid advance and break morale.
I know the US media is really loving up the story of how the brave, scrappy Ukrainians are really giving the Russians the what-for despite seemingly unwinnable odds, but while the Ukrainians are acquitting themselves better than anyone expected they’re still fighting an insurgency battle to just make this invasion too painful for the Russians to continue rather than actually beating them back. For every tank the Ukrainians take out the Russians can bring ten more to bear (again, if they can managed to get them to the front lines, and that limitation alone may blunt the Russian advance to the point that they effectively lose) and eventually with sufficient numbers they will overrun Kyiv and other cities. Holding them, on the other hand, is going to be a logistical and security nightmare, and I half suspect this is exactly what the NATO powers are hoping for; a quagmire that keeps the Russians so occupied with Ukraine, to which they can deny any specific security commitments, that they don’t try to advance on Poland or the Baltics. Ukraine ends up being the sacrificial goat but NATO remains secure without direct conflict. Realpolitik is ugly and immoral, but more palatable than a exchange between nations the two largest nuclear arsenals…I guess.
If tanks are doing this badly against Ukraine (albeit because of poor tactics,) how could they possibly hope to survive against a modern NATO opponent with sensor-fuzed weapons? The American CBU-105, for instance, contains 40 tank-killing skeets per bomb. A few dozen such bombs could take out 1,000 enemy tanks if they were in Kyiv-convoy formation.
Presumably in a Russia vs. NATO conflict, the Russians would be fighting for air superiority to keep guided bomb and close air support attacks from being a threat but they don’t seem to be any more effective in their control of the airspace in Ukraine than they are on the ground, at least not sufficient to suppress Ukrainian defenses. This ill-conceived “special military operation” has certainly revealed what a paper tiger the Russian conventional military forces are despite their size.
Question: Is lousy Russian air-ground support a tactical or strategic error? In other words, is the Russian Air Force just incompetent/cowardly/stupid, or does Russian doctrine not place an emphasis on close air support?
This reminds me of debates around here about the value of battleships (and I defended the battleship).
It is not that the battleship can’t put the hurt on something or that it is durable. It is that it is too expensive for what it does and inexpensive weapons can disable or sink them. Sure you can protect the battleship with combined arms but all that is very complex and even more expensive.
Tanks seem in the same boat (so to speak). They are robust and powerful but if a Javelin missile can take one out as easily as an APC or other light armor then what has a main battle tank really got you for the cost? Same reasoning for getting rid of battleships in favor of destroyers or frigates. Many smaller ships are better than one big ship.
We saw that in WWII. The US Sherman tank was good but it was not the best in terms of armor and gun. Its advantage was it was good enough and there were a helluva lot of them.
Battleships became obsolete because naval power went from direct ship-to-ship confrontations to air power and mobility. Even when the US Navy brought back the Iowa-class battleships in the ‘Eighties they basically functioned as missile cruisers with the ability to shell shore installations from the sea.
It seems the argument that tanks aren’t of any use on the modern battlefield stems from observations about this specific conflict, with Russians using outdated and inappropriate doctrine, lacking necessary support or control what is frankly a bad tank design further marginalized by poor maintenance and training. The counterexample to this claim is the US invasions of Iraq where tanks operating on a large open desert with good forward air support were able to charge into Barsa, Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk, destroying Iraqi fortifications and their Soviet/Russian-supplied armor and anti-armor defenses with ease, demonstrating that a modern battletank on an open battlefield with good combined arms doctrine and support is a highly effective warfighting system. (Whether that was a war that needed to be fought is another question, but the military doctrine was undeniably effective.)
If the US had tried to take over Afghanistan with the same methods they would have failed spectacularly because the terrain and type of conflict does not favor the use of tanks, and in fact, one of the problems the Soviets had in their 1979-1989 invasion of Afghanistan is they tried to use mechanized big army tactics against an insurgent force. One of the fundamental lessons of warfare is to use the terrain and geography to your advantage; the Russians, by invading during the rasputitsa (‘mud season’) virtually ensured that their tanks would be restricted to paved roads with little maneuverability, and then stupidly allowed them to wander off in small groups with no air support or any way to suppress small units with portable anti-armor weapons. So, basically the Russian army picked the worst conditions on top of being ill-prepared and poorly maintained, while Ukrainian forces have clearly been training and being equipped for waging a war of insurgency for several years.
No weapon is very effective if you don’t know how to use it and don’t keep it maintained.
The classic triangle is your tanks take care of enemy infantry, your infantry take care of enemy anti-tank guns, and your AT guns take care of enemy tanks.
The Germans practiced this very well in North Africa and Normandy, whereas the British thought of tanks more like cavalry, whose job it was to take on enemy cavalry. So they kept sending armour to attack German armour, and were chewed up by 88s the Germans emplaced knowing that was going to happen. But the Brits had enough tanks to overcome their tactical shortcomings.
Of course the modern battlefield is radically different, but the core principle still applies IMO.
I missed this earlier but honestly I don’t know if anyone has an answer to this. Russia does not have the same kind of combined arms doctrine that the US and NATO use, in no small part because effective combined arms assault requires a lot of training and robust communications, but it isn’t as if close air support is some kind of new-fangled idea that only the US military has rights to. Russian air support seems to be woefully lacking which may suggest that despite the advanced capabilities displayed by advanced Russian aircraft and air defense systems that they aren’t actually able to put this into mass production and battlefield use.
How the Russians thought they would be able to storm Ukraine without undisputed control of the skies and ability to suppress ground defenses is beyond me. This probably represents one of numerous ways in which the Russian political leadership’s expectations in their military capability is not consistent with the actual ability to project power and conduct overland warfare operations.
Historically, the Soviet Air Force was very much oriented toward the tactical ground-attack mission, as a consequence of being an adjunct of the Red Army. I would be surprised if they changed the importance of their tactical air support mission that significantly since becoming the Russian Air Force.
Just about everything I’ve seen on Russia’s part of the air war has come from Justin Bronk, author of the above article, who seems to be the go-to analyst for looking at the performance of the Russian Air Force.
From what I understand of his writing, he says that the Russian Air Force simply doesn’t have enough training and experience in putting together large-scale missions with dozens or even hundreds of planes working together to suppress Ukrainian air defenses or drive attacks home to a defended target. They haven’t done anything like it in Syria; they don’t have enough flying time to do it in exercises or computer setups to do it in simulation. So they fall back to operating solo, or in pairs or groups of four, with less coordination needed but markedly lower effectiveness.
The intricate dance of complex air-to-ground missions is hard enough for NATO air forces to train. An air battle can coordinate the actions of early-warning, electronic warfare, real-time intel/recon, air intercept and strike aircraft across battle spaces measured in hundreds of cubic miles, with split-second coordination of actions between units located miles from one another. With double the number of flying hours in a typical year of service as the Russians, and more assets for practicing in simulation, even western pilots complain they don’t get enough training time.
We now return from this aerial warfare hijack to the tank-based thread already in progress.
I read somewhere (I forget where now) that the Russians apparently are not good at SEAD missions (Suppression of Enemy Air Defence). Think the Wild Weasels. They fly in and intentionally let themselves get targeted and shot at by enemy air defenses and then their partner (or other planes) target those defenses.
It takes a great deal of training to fly those missions. Something the Russians apparently do not do.
The Ukrainians actually are beating them back now.
They recaptured Irpin yesterday, and are slowly making advances against the main Russian body north-east of Kyiv. The Russian advance north-west of Kyiv, in the Chernihiv and Brovery directions has been substantially pushed back .
The Russians have been pushed back from Mykolaiv, one of their key objectives, and also around Kharkiv.
If I may say so, I think you have outdated ideas about the resources of the Russian military.
The Russian military is likely close to exhausting its available reserves of units capable of deploying to Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 28 that Russia continues to train and deploy additional units to Ukraine, including the Pacific Fleet’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade and an unspecified element of the 14th Separate Guards Special Purpose Brigade.[3] The Ukrainian General Staff additionally reported on March 27 that unspecified Western Military District and Pacific Fleet units continued to deploy toward Ukraine, but that Ukraine has observed a “significant decrease in the intensity of traffic from the depths of the Russian Federation”—indicating Russia has likely already deployed most of its reserves to Ukraine.
Far from having massive reserves, Russia is increasingly desperate for troops.
They failed to get Belarus to enter the war. They failed to bring Syrian troops to Ukraine – the fact that they even tried shows how desperate they are. They are conscripting men without military training in Donbas and throwing them straight into the conflict. They are now trying to bring soldiers from Russian controlled areas of Georgia, which will only be a small number.
Tanks… you must have seen the story about the commander of a Russian tank regiment who committed suicide. That raises the question of how many tanks that are theoretically held in reserve in storage depots are actually usable. Probably not many.
