I’ve seen a photo shared a few times of what’s meant to be a Russian tank in Ukraine that suffered an ammunition detonation, popping it’s turret right off, and another in a ditch smoking.
But any other photos of ruined military vehicles are of lesser armoured vehicles or trucks. Plenty of Russian tanks that are apparently abandoned after running out of fuel or stuck in mud too.
Are the Western supplied weapons doing much against tanks? There can’t be a shortage of targets for them to be tried against.
I can’t give a full answer, but here’s a good article that describes the Javelin and uses the word “dastardly”, so apparently is written by a 20th century cartoon character.
The Ukrainians might be doing a cost-benefit analysis here. Sure, blowing up tanks is good, but a “maybe” shot against a tank vs. a “pretty good chance” shot against an APC or a truck is a legitimate debate.
Take out enough of the support vehicles, and the tanks will eventually bog down all on their own, from lack of one critical supply or another.
Impossible to say from the information we have available.
Despite some relatively impressive upgrades since the end of the Cold War, the old Soviet tanks still suffer from a Soviet era design choice. The autoloader stores ammunition in the bottom of the turret. Gravity pulls hot/burning bits down towards that stored ammunition. When it detonates turrets tend to come off.
Ukraine has a lot of anti-tank capability. The NATO provided weapons systems are only a small chunk of their ability to kill armor. They have a nice, modern, locally developed heavy ATGM( Anti-Tank Guided Missile) in the Skif that is capable of defeating tanks with reactive armor. It even has a fire and forget mode although not as advanced as the one used in the javelin. Ukraine also has a plethora of RPG-7s as a light antitank system. (They even have US manufactured clone, with upragdes, launchers.) I have not seen if they have fielded some of the types of upgrades for the rockets designed to deal with reactive armor. They also have their own upgraded T72s. Incidentally, trying to differentiate their upgrade packages from Russian upgrades after the ammo cooks off is going to be difficult from a single pic or video clip. Some of the destroyed Russian tanks we are seeing may in fact be destroyed Ukranian tanks.
The Javelin and NLAW are nice systems on paper and in testing. Their paper capabilities introduce some wrinkles to the tactical situation for Russian mounted leaders. Whether they are living up to that reputation in use is hard to say. I suspect a lot of their effect can be summarized in a turn of phrase from a now retired Lieutenant Colonel I served with - “More anti-tank weapons, more gooder.”
I suspect that NATO specific weapons ( so excluding things like NATO manufactured RPG-7s) are only responsible for a minority of current Russian kills. They are a minority of weapons available to Ukraine. I also suspect NATO will become an increasing source of Russian armor kills. NATO can supply Ukraine from war stocks and factories that are not within range of the Russian air and ballistic missile threats. Even there I expect that some of those NATO resourced vehicle kills will be with ammo for ex-Soviet systems still in use by many eastern NATO allies.
One thing I’ve wondered about is whether or not the Eastern European NATO countries have modern ammo for their older ex-Soviet weapons? Like modern, Western-style APFSDS rounds complete with DU penetrators for older T-72s? Or better artillery shells? Or does say… AirTronic make modernized RPG rounds to go along with their nicer RPG-7s?
Am I the only one who, on reading that article, has no idea what the connection is to Mary Magdalene? It has a lot of praise for the Javelin as a weapon, and I can understand the inclination to canonize (or cannonize) it for that, but why Magdalene specifically?
It’s referencing a meme, explained in another article:
Mary Magdalene is apparently a popular saint in Ukraine, and a picture of her holding a Javelin, tagged “Saint Javelin”, has apparently become a very popular image in Ukraine.
Ukrainians appear to have adopted Mary Magdalene-holding-a-Javelin, aka Saint Javelin, as the patron saint of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion.
I’d have to say no. The idea that tanks are going the way of the dinosaur to ATGMs has been bandied about since at least the 1973 Arab-Israeli War when Arab ATGMs took a hefty toll on Israeli tanks but they haven’t gone anywhere so far. There’s been a lot of development recently in active protection systems, such as the Israeli Trophy APS, which has shot down over a dozen anti-tank missiles or rockets in combat since 2011.
Sure, there are systems that can stop a lot of missiles. But can they stop 99% of the missiles? A main battle tank costs over 6 million dollars, while an anti-tank missile costs 80 thousand. That means that you only need about 1 missile in 80 to succeed in order to break even. From everything I’m seeing, it sounds like the Javelin’s success rate is far higher than that.
Yes, but AIUI, the issue is not one of dollar cost, but availability. The Ukrainians have, I believe, fewer than a thousand Javelins at the moment. Expending even one on a Russian tank has to be a careful decision. If the Ukrainians were to fire multiple Javelins and fail to score a hit due to the tank’s active defenses, that would be a disastrous ratio for the Ukrainians. They need to carefully budget their Javelins and each Javelin must be a decisive hit.
So any Russian active-defenses would be hugely effective in the ratio analysis.
They should have more than that…we have given them more than that in just the past month, and we gave them a bunch last year and the year before. Plus, they have a bunch of Brit ATGMs, and now a bunch of German ones as well. Plus, I think one of the Scandinavian countries gave them a bunch as well. Even if they are down to that many Javelins (which would mean they have fired literally thousands of the things in just 2 weeks) they have those others, plus their own home grown stocks (they make their own Soviet pattern Stugna-P.
Tanks are not obsolete in the sense of effective battlefield weapons but it should be understood that a tank is really a weapon for taking on another tank, and needs to be supported by reconnaissance, antipersonnel, and central battlefield command elements to be effective . They lack the maneuverability of faster light armored weapons and don’t have the surveillance abilities of drones or scout helicopters, so in an environment that is permissive to light armor and insurgents they are vulnerable to attack just because they move slow and can’t see well. However, there is no weapon on a battlefield that can deliver the volume and intensity of direct fire in a movable platform as a main battle tank.
The problem with how the Russians are using tanks is they appear to be sending them forward individually without a scouting element even though they know that the Ukrainians have and are effective at using modern anti-tank weapons. This makes them vulnerable to attack, and is a general problem with the apparent lack of air superiority or even close air support. It really isn’t clear what the Russians are actually trying to accomplish with this, and it seems to indicate either a lack of clear battlefield doctrine or poor training among armored units.
Now, whether a conventional battlefield with armor vs armor is “obsolete” in an era with autonomous weapons, ‘fire & forget’ man-portable missiles, low observable air attack drones, et cetera is another question, but since the Russians don’t seem to have any of these capabilities, they are essentially fighting a 1980s style European conflict against an opponent that is basically playing strike & fade guerrilla tactics, they are taking a lot of damage without doling it out. The Ukrainians are making a meal of this on social media, but it should be pointed out that even if they are successful at knocking down one tank after another, the Russian Army has such an enormous mass of armor and men that they can keep shoving them into the grinder indefinitely. Their real Achilles’ heel is the ability to keep tanks and other vehicles going, which is why Ukrainians have been focusing on supply lines and fuel trucks to the extent possible, and why they keep asking for a ‘no-fly zone’, so they can do this with near impunity.
All weapons are obsolete if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
Modern warfare is about combined arms. You need infantry, mechanized forces, artillery, AA assets, electronic warfare units, recon, the works. Any one approach has a critical point of failure if not supported by the other elements of a modern army.
Tanks have always been vulnerable to anti-tank weapons, and anti-tank weapons have always been fractionally as expensive as the tanks they destroy. I highly doubt that a panzerfaust cost even anything close to 1/100th as much as a Sheman or a T-34, but they didn’t render the tank obsolete, and Germany produced 8 1/4 million of them. Improvements in anti-tank weapons leads to improvements in tank armor and defenses which leads to improvements in anti-tank weapons which loops back to improvements in tank defenses. The Javelin doesn’t perform a top-attack with a tandem HEAT warhead using a thermal imager to determine center mass of a tank just for the hell of it. It does so because of improvements in tank defenses such as spaced armor, composite armor, explosive reactive armor, etc. that have been introduced since Syrian and Egyptian AT-3 Saggers were knocking out Israeli tanks in 1973.
Israel claims a 100% success rate with the Trophy APS, but I have no doubt that that record won’t last:
No tanks were damaged during Operation Protective Edge, with the Trophy Active Protection system performing over a dozen interceptions of anti-tank weapons including Kornet, Metis and RPG-29.[42] The system, by identifying the source of fire, on occasion also allowed tanks to kill the Hamas anti-tank team.[42]
Giora Katz, head of Rafael’s land division, stated that it was a “breakthrough because it is the first time in military history where an active defense system has proven itself in intense fighting.”[43] During the war, Trophy validated itself in dozens of events, protecting tanks and crews over three weeks of high-threat maneuvering operations in built-up areas without a single hit to defended platforms and zero false alarms".[44]
