@ExTank goes on long hiatus, then pops up now and then.
Maybe you don’t.
By which I mean that maybe what we currently have in terms of wars between near-peer combatants is, in sum, something similar to what the WWI Western Front saw - high-tech stalemate. Maybe the pendulum has swung back to defense, at least in the circumstances we see in Ukraine, and it will take something like the development of air superiority in the battlespace to see the lines shift again.
Or maybe even air superiority is too costly to gain, for evenly matched opponents, and we’ll have wait for new tactics or technological breakthroughs to make the battlespace more fluid or conducive to the offensive again. Or maybe it’ll just turn into an attritional fight until either Russia or Ukraine give out.
Yeah, those are all logical suppositions.
Also possible is that drone technology coupled with AI is going to make deadly aviation ridiculously cheap. How does war change when even small counteies have the capacity to launch literally millions of cheap drones? No operators required - the AI is the operator, and it will be just as good or better at finding the enemy as a human would be.
I think the potential of this will trigger a new arms race in drone vs anti-drone tech. You can’t afford to waste a million dollar missile on a $200 drone, somwe are going to need very efficient countermeasures. Against evasive drones with AIs flying them.
Also, defensive systems will be at risk of being overwhelmed by drone swarms.
We are living in the future.
I was exposed to mecha at an impressionable age so I may be falling to “rule-of-cool” thinking, but may be battle armor? infantry sized, armored like a tank, able to hide like infantry, move at near tank speed (faster perhaps on certain terrains) …
More realistically is probably going to be small drones, lots and lots of small drones.
Combined arms are where it’s at, and honestly, where it has been since WWII and probably even before that.
This means that tanks, infantry, artillery and air support are all working in concert to achieve the objectives, and they’re all basically playing to their strengths and minimizing each other’s weaknesses.
As I understand it, tanks really have a trio of primary roles. One, is to fight other tanks. They’re the primary tank-killer in most modern armies. Two, is to support infantry. They do this by being a what amounts to a mobile pillbox with several machine guns and a cannon, that can’t be taken out with typical infantry weapons. Third, they’re the most mobile (in a battlefield sense) of the vehicles/units in a modern army. If there is a breakthrough, they and their associated infantry fighting vehicles are what’s going to exploit it.
Out of curiosity, how do you think the ATGM game has changed since the 1960s? They’re not significantly longer ranged or anything since then- if anything, they’re catching up on the lethality curve vs. where they were back then before composite armor.
As far as drones go, we’re seeing the equivalent of the Arabs using the AT-3 SAGGER missiles vs. the Israelis in the early stages of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It took the Israelis a while to figure out countermeasures, and I suspect the Russians will figure something out (or someone else will eventually, if the war ends first).
Just a tangential thought that popped into my head. Did anyone play Ogre back in the day? In it, one player using various weapons is pitted against the other player who controls a giant robotic tank.
The different types of units available to the defender encourage a combined-arms approach with each type being better than the others in different aspects.
You underestimate just how armored tanks are. There’s a lot of very heavy metal in a tank, and moving that much metal requires a very large engine and a lot of fuel. The amount of armor scales with the square of the size, but the room for the engine and fuel scales with the cube, so there’s a minimum possible size you can make a tank, at least without a Mr. Fusion or similar game-changer technology. If you’re going to make something that’s not a tank, you need to do that by doing without the armor: Either it gains protection in other ways, like stealth or range, or you make it so you just don’t care if it’s destroyed.
To the first point, if tanks are the best weapons against tanks, then that means that whenever you’re sending tanks against enemy tanks, you’re sending them against the best weapon to use against them. To the second point, we’re getting to the point where typical infantry weapons can take out tanks: You’ll never have infantry without at least a few anti-tank missile systems, and also drones and such. And to the third point, infantry fighting vehicles are much more mobile than tanks, since they’re lighter and can carry more range worth of fuel.
Yeah I thought about after posting.
However, you don’t necessarily need to make the battle armor tough enough to resist anti-tank weaponry, if it can resist anti-infantry weapons it’s good enough to break through prepared positions and other tank roles.
Well, they’re lighter and more mobile, as well. A Javelin is a lot more portable than a TOW system.
I did, and there’s a funny story about using combined arms in the game being the sub-optimal approach. I guess during playtesting everyone made a combined arms force because “of course” it was the best thing to do. Then there was an article later included in the Ogre Book that demonstrated that a force composed entirely of GEVs was the most effective way to win against an Ogre, so much so that GEVs were nerfed in later editions of the game.
Ogres & the “Fuzzy Wuzzy” Fallacy | Article | RPGGeek
Famous article about how in original Ogre, a defense force of all GEVs was very effective, so the second movement allowance of GEVs was reduced from 4 to 3 in later editions.
One of the best tank strategies remains “don’t trap your tanks in a long narrow defile where their mobility is limited”.
Are you arguing that tanks aren’t intended to fight other tanks? Here I thought Gen. McNair died in Normandy in 1944, but I guess his ideas live on.
And there’s just not that much change between say… 1980 and today in infantry AT weapons. There’s a constant arms race between ATGMs and tanks; I’m not convinced that the ATGMs have anything other than a very temporary upper hand, and along with that, a LOT of what we saw in the early days of the Russo-Ukrainian War was poor Russian tactical coordination with infantry (i.e. their tanks got out ahead and were exposed) than it was some amazing properties of modern ATGMs vs. modern armor.
By mobility, I mean in an operational/strategic sense. As in, maneuver warfare, not immediate tactics. Tanks are the “combat arm of decision”, to use the US Army’s Armor branch’s motto. They’re the inheritors of cavalry’s prior status in that regard. Infantry, even in IFVs is still infantry. Same for artillery with SPGs. They’re the ones who break through, stop breakthroughs, and generally decide battles, due to their mobility, firepower and armor.
Which is where the engineers come into play in the combined arms doctrine. On the defense they place obstacles to funnel tanks and troops. On offense they destroy the obstacles used to channelize the maneuver force.
Other than actually immobile things, I’m having a hard time thinking of any military system that’s less mobile, in a strategic sense, than tanks. You can’t practically drive tanks to the front line under their own power: They’re too fuel inefficient for that. And any other vehicle that you can load the tanks onto to get them to the front line, you can load anything else on that vehicle, too. Plus lots of vehicles that can deploy infantry or other systems, but can’t deploy anything as massive as a tank.
So far as I can tell, the main role of tanks is to take the credit after other branches actually win the battle. American military procedure in the past several decades, at least, is to destroy the enemy from the air, and then roll the tanks through once there’s no opposition. Ukraine would do the same thing, except that Russian air defense is too strong, with the result that, despite tanks, they’re not breaking through.
More crucially tanks have to be spared as many miles as possible to minimize breakdowns such as the comparatively fragile tracks. And of course tanks mustn’t outrun their own fuel and ammo supplies.
Tracks are not fragile. Tracks that are neglected by their crews are fragile. A little bit of preventative maintenance goes a long way.
To speak to the second option, Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace had “soldierboys” - essentially, bipedal infantry drones, armored suits crammed with weapons, the operators working from a protected facility some distance from the battlefield.
He did a lot of handwaving about how they were “driven” - cybernetic linkage via a direct electronic link to the brain, with side channels to other operators was the future technology involved - but the basic idea was to get the people out of the field of battle, thus you would care less if the drones were destroyed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising defense contractor has considered creating a land combat drone, shrinking it down to the minimum possible size, and having it operated by several crewmen (why stop at four?) miles away, at least as long as transmission latency doesn’t grow too large.
(Oh, and bad news @Frodo - the Ngumi War portrayed was Global North vs. South, though the South thought of it more as a counterinsurgency against Northern-backed puppets…)
I mean, it’s not like, if tanks were made obsolete, it’d be the first time something like that happened. Battleships were once the most powerful thing ever built, and after 1946, not a single battleship was built because they were obsolete. Knights were put out of a job by guns.
I would agree with Sam that the next thing is likely tanks having anti-ATGM systems, much as ships had to develop anti-missile missiles. Or DEW defense systems, who knows. Certainly we’re entering the military Age of Drones, and it’ll be fascinating to see what countermeasures are invented.
I think we may also be headed towards the era of the Super-AFV or Super-IFV.
The weakness of tanks is that they are extremely expensive, heavy, consume much fuel and maintenance and don’t carry any troops. They offer limited usefulness for the buck.
With something like a beefed-up Stryker, you could have a vehicle that carries 10+ soldiers, weighs maybe half the weight of an Abrams, still carries a 105mm gun (and could be fitted with Javelins/TOWs,) consumes less fuel than Abrams, etc. In other words, is cheaper, has almost as much firepower, and ferries people places.
It would be more vulnerable to attack than a tank, but in the era where Javelins and NLAWs simply say “F you” to tanks anyway, it may be irrelevant. If all vehicles are equally vulnerable to ATGMs, then we might as well go with the one that’s lighter, cheaper, carries men and faster.
We’re close. It’s mostly a matter of cost and deployment schedules.