What are the best modern tank strategies? Especially Ukraine vs. Russia.
And a command structure that cares about whether or not the tanks and their crews survive. What do they think that they are doing? Are they just trying to intimadate the Ukranians by making one visible as a bluff?
Interesting. Dumb question. Is the Tank commander, the gunner and loader in the turret, but the driver is not?
I envision the turret attached to a hollow cylinder that extends into the hull.
I believe this is true. The gunner is on the left, in the turret, and the commander is on the right; and the driver is in the hull, on the left.
Russian tanks have been separating the turret, with an automatically feeding cannon, from the hull, where the complete crew is separated from the turret and gun. For instance, the pride of the Russian tanks, the T-14 Armata, so good that they hardly manage to build some prototypes:
The Armata was designed over the course of five years, and features a number of innovative characteristics, including an unmanned turret. The crew of three is seated in an armoured capsule in the front of the hull, which will also include a toilet for the crew.
Western tanks don’t do this, the doctrine is still relying on crews to load manually. It is considered more flexible and reliable. Russian doctrine prefers to increase the shooting frequency (shells per minute), the Western doctrine prefers to improve aim and reach/distance to target.
The best tactic against tanks probably remains to shoot, shoot, shoot at them with all you have: high penetrating kinetic ordnance, shaped charges, missiles, bombs falling from drones… Mines are great too. At least try to immobilize them (break the chains). Keep shooting until all the reactive armour, if necessary, has reacted. Don’t stop shooting until the turret blows off.
The toilet, it is rumoured, is necessary because the crew would otherwise shit in their pants.
'nother dumb question. If a tank for whatever reason is not fighting back, and there is no infantry, could a .50 cal machine gun shooting at the side of the tank, destroy a track? Perhaps crack a road wheel?
In the era of cheap ATGMs and drones, it seems tanks don’t do any good unless you can first clear out all enemy troops/partisans/infantry within a 3-mile radius. And then if you’ve already gotten that far in terms of clearing out enemy, tanks don’t do much good either anyway.
My High School History class was taught by the football coach. 
Here is just about all he ever said about WWII…
“Stay away from the tanks. Everybody loves to shoot at the tanks!”
Then he told us about ordering beer in German. If you hold up your index finger to signify “One”, you get 2 beers.
He was a great teacher. 
IIRC @Loach is a retired tank commander among other roles in his Army career. I believe he’s our sole resident expert.
It’s not clear to me what the OP is really asking about. Best way to destroy a lone tank or a couple? Best way for a team of tanks to fight other tanks? Best way for a team of tanks to attack fortifications or clear a town of opposition? Best overall tasking doctrine in general, IOW what tasks are tanks best at versus which tasks are better handed off to other departments within a fully equipped modern army? etc. Or is the question what constitutes good offensive employment doctrine for tankers and, conversely, good defensive doctrine for the folks responsible for stopping tanks?
As to how to kill just one, I’ll just point out in general that it’s very hard for a crew of any single weapon platform to deal with multiple attackers from differing directions. You can really only effectively attend to one threat, and engaging that singleton in the best manner leaves your more vulnerable areas pointed at the attacker’s partner(s). And also leaves you bandwidth limited on seeing and understanding the threat. Regardless of relative hardware (in)vulnerabilities, it’s the shot you don’t see coming that has the best chance of ruining your day.
Two attackers aren’t twice as effective as one, they’re 10x as effective. Doesn’t matter if we’re dudes street fighting, infantry with rifles, jets in the sky, or even subs dueling in the open ocean. Subs and ships have the advantage of larger crews that can, in principle, juggle awareness of and countermeasures against several attackers at once. But there is still a finite number of balls they can successfully juggle and the smart attacker brings a few more than that many.
The French Leclerc has an autoloader, as did the much older AMX-13 light tank. More importantly, the rate of fire of the Soviet/Russian 2A46 125 mm gun autoloader is 7-8 rpm, slower than the rate of fire of the manually loaded 120mm Rheinmetall Rh-120 (M256 in US service) which a well-trained loader can easily achieve 10 rpm from.
Having a fourth crew member as a loader absolutely aids in flexibility and reliability; tanks need a lot of maintenance to keep them in the field, and having four people to share the workload is better than having three. 120/125mm is approaching the limit for what a human loader can effectively handle though.
I had a co-worker who was a Marine sergeant in the infantry. He said their main use of a M2 .50 cal was to get a tank to button up. After they’d gotten it to close everything up and was less aware, then they’d set about finishing it off with an ATGM.
So, at least that infantry unit just saw it as something to scare the crew into the tank. I think if you were trying to disable a tank with a .50, it’s going to be a very slow process. After all, the T-90 in the video took quite a few rounds of 25MM, and was still mobile until it hit the tree.
Modern tank strategies aren’t much different than they have been for 50 years. Infantry and armor in support of each other. Multiple tanks in support of each other in bounding or traveling over watch. There is certainly no doctrine calling for single tanks on patrol in either in the west or in the Soviet doctrine that Russia seems to always fall back on. The modern battlefield adds the need for electronic countermeasures.
While I was in active duty I was an aeroscout observer. I had to change a couple of times while I was in the Guard due to the structure changing. I was in tanks for years then ended my career as a combat engineer. Ex-Tank had years more experience than me in tanks.
I wonder if the drone video we saw was available to the guys in the Bradleys? Live. Pretty simple to do I think. Ukraine seems to be way up on their drone capabilities.
A little Discourse digging tells me @ExTank hasn’t been posting or reading here since 11-ish months ago. I had not heard anything about him and his last few posts are typical, not ominous.
Hope he’s OK.
The problem with the tank accompanied by unarmored infantry is that if you don’t have air superiority or there is artillery in range your infantry are sitting ducks to cluster munitions. So maybe you put the infantry in fighting vehicles like the Bradley or the MT-LB. But those now are vulnerable to kamikaze drones.
I think a mandatory part of future tank warfare is an anti-drone, anti-missile defense system like Israel’s Trophy system:
There are now drone jammers being used by both sides in Ukraine, but Trophy is much more than that. It’s also very useful against shoulder fired missiles, TOW style missiles, etc.
You’re exaggerating the inability of tanks to do any good - both the rapid advances by Russia in the first days of the war and the rapid Ukrainian counterattack at Kharkov would not have been possible without tanks, and for all the claims that the tank is now obsolete it’s telling both that Ukraine still wants all of the tanks that it can from the West, and far more than it has actually been given, and that Russia is both trying to step up its production of tanks and is pulling tanks as old as the T-55 from storage. Cheap, long range ATGMs have been around since the 1960s and 70s.
Cheap drones are another matter entirely. As the fighting has (d)evolved into an artillery war, the abilities of the cheap drone as a sensory platform able to see beyond the front line has had a dramatic effect on the fighting. I was watching (or well, rather listening to) an older Perun video for the first time on long ranged fires and was struck by the eloquence of a quote by US General William DePuy on the role his infantry battalion played in WWII that he summarized, the full quote is here, bolding is the summary:
GEN DEPUY: One of the comments that I’ve made has infuriated the Infantry School. Now, I
don’t blame them for being infuriated, but I honestly concluded at the end of World War II, when I
soberly considered what I had accomplished, that I had moved the forward observers of the
artillery across France and Germany. In other words, my battalion was the means by which Field
Artillery forward observers were moved to the next piece of high ground. Once you had a forward
observer on a piece of ground, he could call up five to ten battalions of artillery and that meant you
had moved combat power to the next observation point - more combat power than the light
infantry could dispose of. Now, you needed the infantry to do that. You needed the infantry to
protect them, but the combat power came from this other source, and I think that trend has
accelerated ever since. I think the infantry has the dirtiest job of them aiL But, if you want to be
rigorously analytical about what you’re really trying to do, it’s trying to move combat power
forward to destroy the enemy, and the combat power that you are moving forward has been, in
the past, mostly artillery, and that is even more true today. The infantry has a lot of ears and a lot
of eyeballs. Now, it can call forward even more artillery fire and different kinds of munitions -
Cannon Launched Guided Projectiles (CLGPs), the Family of Scatterable Mines (FASCAMs),
Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICMsJ, high explosive (HE), smoke, and
illumination, and soon they will also have terminally guided anti-a rmor munitions. The infantry is a
sensor. It’s a sensory organization that works into the fabric of the terrain and the enemy, and can
call in all of this firepower - including artillery and TAC air that can really do the killing .
And this interview was from 1979, the accuracy and ability to deliver precision fires from artillery - particularly against armor - has increased dramatically in the interim. The video is chaptered, the summarized quote from DePuy is in 4:33 “Long Range Fires”, a look at the effect that cheap, easily replaced drones have had on delivering long range fires in Ukraine is in the chapter at 12:41 “Lessons from Ukraine”
Before you hype up the abilities of Trophy too much, from wiki:
The Trophy system have a donut-hole like window of vulnerability to attacks from directly above, or the slow speed of the drone and the gravity-dropped grenade might have caused it to be filtered out by the Trophy’s sensors. In October 2023, Hamas used civilian DJI and Autel quadcopter drones, which dropped shaped-charge grenades to damage or destroy several Merkava tanks.
For people who think tanks are obsolete - how do you take and hold ground without them? How do you break through fortified positions? How do you move firepower quickly when needed?
Tanks have become more vulnerable, but not really less necessary.