Close assault on a T-62. The title may say T-72, but the turret looks wrong for that model. The fighter placed a demolition charge on the front of the tank. He should have placed it on the rear deck instead, IMHO.
The weakest point of a tank is probably the tracks.
Assuming a single soldier against a single tank:
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Take the C-4 (if that’s what they still use) from a couple of the Claymores he could very well be carrying.
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Make a sticky-bomb, ala Saving Private Ryan.
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Attach to track.
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Set the C-4
Crap, submitted it before I got done and then f’d up the edit.
Anywho,
1a. You’d probably need the C-4 from two Claymores. If you don’t have some critical mass it just burns up rather than exploding.
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Set the C-4 on fire.
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That should make it throw a track and be pretty much immobile.
While there still wouldn’t be much of chance of getting to the crew without getting killed I think we can still call this a job well done.
In olden times, crude fire bombs could sometimes cook out a tank crew. Is that still an effective tactic?
I actually intended to start a thread on this topic, I saw a picture taken inside a tank when the loader was loading a round, at that point the breech (I believe that’s the correct term) was open and you could see down the barrel to the outside. I wondered if a (very!) lucky shot could in theory enter the barrel at that point and kill the loader?
Not enough to disable a tank but certainly enough to cause problems.
This article describes Chechen anti-armor tactics against Russia. 15-20 soldiers in 3-4 squads, each squads armed with an antitank weapon. Snipers and machine gunners would pin down infantry while several tank killers would assault a single target, trying to disable the first and last tanks in a column. The Russian tank guns couldn’t effectively fire at basements or up at the higher stories of a building, and multiple attackers made it difficult for the tank’s machine guns to fend them off.
Yes, but they typically perish from suffocation, as the fire consumes the local oxygen, before actually burning to death. Which is why I suggested Molotov’s earlier upthread.
Getting close enough to a tank with a Molotov in open terrain is difficult enough; in an urban or “canyon” environment it’s much easier.
Armor is best used in “open country warfare.” It takes specialized training, close coordination, and even perhaps specialized vehicles to take an urban environment with Armor.
Unless you want to use the tactics used by the 11th ACR in Hue, in which they used medium tanks. They drove down the main street putting HEP rounds in every building they passed. Then, once they were out the other side, they turned around and did it again.
Or you could just pound the city to rubble with Artillery.
But “Not One Stone, One Upon The Other” is not a “Hearts And Minds” kind of strategy.
Could you immobilize a tank by shoving a log onto the tracks? A log jammed into the driving wheel could stop the tank. Then you could pour kerosene over the tank and set it on fire.:smack:
Throw a gallon of bromine trifluoride on it?
Sgt. Saunders did that on Combat once.
Don’t modern tanks have armor on the side of the treads which renders the driving wheels inaccessible?
It seems to me that they do, but I don’t think they go all the way down to the ground. So you’d have the bottom accessable.
Heh. Speaking as an ex-crunchie, I really liked the tank fighting tactic of “having it run over a mine I put down yesterday, preferably 5 miles away”.
Leading to one of David Drake’s earliest (and best) short stories.
Do infantry still dig individual holes to hide in if enemy tanks are going by like they did in The Big Red One? I never could figure out the point of that. Is it supposed to be survivable even if the tank runs right over your hole?
OK, there is no real-life way to do it. But since we are talking about television, what abaout …
He fires a pistol which enters the turret though the open breech just as the loader is serving the gun? The bullet pings around the interior doing Bad Things to the crew.
Or
He fires a pistol, the round hits and ignites the smoke grenades. The tank then loses control and flips? Or the resultant fire enters the crew compartment through the engine compartment?
Can’t believe I’m the first to post this. Sometimes moral outrage is stronger than a tank: http://rlv.zcache.com/tiananmen_square_courage_the_tank_man_poster-p228349504412364887t5ta_400.jpg
I still wouldn’t want to be that guy.
I admit that I didn’t pay too much attention to the promo, but I got the impression that the guy confronting the tanks was doing a Tiananmen Square kind of confrontation with the tanks.
This requires that he be standing in front of the main gun, just after it has fired. This seems like it would be difficult.
How? Dozens of tons of metal with a low profile are not conductive to flipping, even if the grenades continued to obscure the driver’s vision once he started moving.
I doubt that the smoke grenades are going to burn hot enough to ignite anything on the tank.
I think I’ve seen historical reports of WWII tanks having their smoke grenades (mounted outside the armor) ignited by enemy bullets. My recollection is that the tanks immediately left the battle, either due to the fact that they didn’t know what happened, and assumed a bunch of smoke coming from their tank was a Bad Thing, or knew what happened but couldn’t see sh*t through the smoke anyway, so were useless.
This is why some later designs kept smoke launchers inside the armor.
Best case is the crunchy sets off the smoke grenades; the tankers assume something else hit the tank and set it on fire, so they abandon tank; and the crunchy gets some target practice on soft things.
Thermal sights see right through engine smoke and grenade deployed smoke, and in most modern tanks both the gunner and the commander have their own sights. Drivers have light amplification at a minimum, and a lot of modern armor has a drivers thermal viewer as well. It would take an exceptionally ill-trained crew to believe their tank was on fire, ignore the fire suppression system, and bail out into a live fire environment. Also, the driver would probably just run over some moron shooting at his tank with a pistol.
There’s just no way an infantryman is taking out a tank without anti-armor weaponry.
ETA: (Oh, and the crew carries carbines as well, so if the crew bails, it’s still 4 on 1.)