What are the best modern tank strategies? Especially Ukraine vs. Russia

Great Debates
41

I agree, with the proviso that in the case of both battleships and knights, they were made obsolete because something was invented that did their job better, aircraft carriers and mounted troops using guns instead of lances, pistoleers and dragoons. Until there is something that can do the tanks job better than it does, it’s not going anywhere.

The single most vulnerable thing on the battlefield since war has been a thing is the foot soldier, the Poor Bloody Infantryman. They’ve gone through phases of armor of all kinds, shields, entirely abandoning any armor at all by the age of Napoleon since it was of absolutely no use, to camouflage, to the return of the helmet to provide at least some basic protection from fragments to the bulky ‘modern’ era body armor often left unused by soldiers in Vietnam due to its bulk and lack of real protection, to today’s body armor that while far from perfect, offers at least a lot more protection for a lot less bulk than that available during Vietnam and now actually used by soldiers. None of that changes the fact that the PBI is still the most vulnerable thing on the modern battlefield, but nothing better exists that can do its job, and they aren’t going to be going anywhere until something can.

I agree, but the modern active protection systems aren’t really anything new. They’re just part of the endless back and forth of tank protection and anti-tank weapon development. Javelin doesn’t use a self-guidance system to perform a top attack on the center mass of the turret of tanks using a tandem charge HEAT warhead just for the hell of it.

Active protection systems are also literally not anything new, the Soviet Union developed and deployed the first active protection system Drozd back in 1977, but this being the USSR and a top-secret program, the West didn’t really find out about it until after the Cold War was over. It’s an interesting story.

It’ll be hard to say with any certainty until the war is over, and likely for some time afterwards, but I’d argue that very likely the number one effect that drones have had upon armored warfare in Ukraine is to both make it impossible to conceal troop and vehicle concentrations for any appreciable amount of time due to the saturation of the battlefield with cheap, easily replaceable drones to surveil behind the enemies front lines to call in and direct timely and accurate artillery fire, particularly when armored vehicles are forced to clump up due to one of their oldest counters, the anti-tank mine. Expensive precision guided shells like Excaliber aren’t even needed with the increased accuracy of modern artillery systems, gone are the fire tables and calculating everything by hand, it’s all done by computer. You don’t even need a battery of guns with each gun crew doing the calculations to get a Time on Target, now you can just plug in the target coordinates into the computer of a single artillery piece and it’ll figure out the trajectories and powder charges needed to perform a MRSI (Multiple Round, Simultaneous Impact) and do it entirely on its own with an autoloader.

As I noted earlier about the Israeli Trophy system, yes, its impressive but take care not to overhype it. Hamas destroyed Israeli Merkavas equipped with Trophy by dropping RPG-7 rounds on them from commercial drones. And the RPG-7 is a weapon dating back to 1961.

42

It’s a pendulum that swings toward or away from tanks or tank-destroying weaponry.

For example, at the end of WWII, steel armor was still more or less predominant, because shaped charge rocket launchers (Bazookas, Panzerfausts, etc…) were still very close-ranged weapons manned by infantry, and outside of a hundred meters or so, it was still high velocity guns that were the primary threat.

Then the ATGM came on the scene, and gave infantry/lighter vehicles the ability to reach out and destroy any AFV at as long of a range as the most powerful tank guns could. This meant that tanks themselves evolved- where before the ATGM, designs like the M103, T-10 and Conqueror were fielded (all three heavily armored, large-gunned heavy tanks), after the ATGM was devised, they typically became smaller, faster and more lightly armored (why carry heavy armor if a comparatively cruddy AT-3 SAGGER can penetrate 400 mm of armor?), and the German Leopard 1 was the poster child for this approach to armored combat, and was the distillation of Germany’s WWII experience modified by the reality of the modern battlefield. The US and British never quite bought into the light, fast, and effectively unarmored MBT, so we ended up with the M60 and Chieftain which were still fast-ish, but much more heavily armored.

Then in the late 1970s/early 1980s, composite armor evolved to the point where it rendered the HEAT warheads of the ATGMs more or less impotent. Reactive armor was fielded at more or less the same time with similar results. Armor was back in vogue, and so were tanks. The M1, Challenger, LeClerc, Leopard 2, etc… were all tanks of this era.

Now the pendulum has swung back the other direction with top attack warheads and tandem shaped charges to avoid the heavily armored parts and/or defeat reactive armor. Drones are just an extension of that- they hit tanks where they’re vulnerable. So for now, tanks are more vulnerable than they had been since the early 80s. But not more than the 1950s-1970s, IMO.

The pendulum will swing back- you’ll see active protection, active jamming, etc… fielded very quickly to defeat ATGMS and drones.

Then something else will come up - focused EMP or something like that to fry the electronics and mission-kll tanks. Or hypervelocity missiles. Who knows?

43

Re. infantry and armor, a cartoon about the never-ending cycle says it all:

44

And that’ll take a while to develop, because first we’ll need to figure out what the tank’s job is.

45

Strangely, militaries the world over have figured out what the tank’s job is for more than a century now. They even publish field manuals about it.

The tank platoon has the following capabilities:

  • It has the necessary manpower and equipment to effectively develop the situation.
  • It can conduct operations requiring firepower, mobility, armor protection, and shock effect.
  • When equipped with mine rollers and mine plows, it can reduce mine and wire obstacles.
  • It can employ maneuver (a combination of fire and movement) to destroy enemy tanks, fighting vehicles, antiarmor systems, and emplacements (such as strongpoints and bunkers).
  • It can assault enemy positions.
  • It can secure terrain.
  • It can defend, repelling enemy attacks with fires.
  • It can conduct combat operations under limited visibility conditions.
  • It can conduct mounted patrols.
  • It can provide support, in the form of armor protection and fires, to infantry and engineer elements in restricted terrain or during an assault.
  • It can suppress enemy positions with machine gun and/or main gun fire.
  • It can ford water obstacles up to 4 feet in depth.
  • It can operate in an NBC environment.
  • It can operate in a stability and support environment.

The tank platoon has these limitations:

  • Built-up areas, wooded areas, and other types of restricted or rugged terrain can severely limit the platoon’s maneuverability.
  • Tanks are vulnerable to antiarmor weapons.
  • Water crossing operations present a variety of difficulties because of the weight of the platoon’s tanks and requirements for fording sites and/or bridges that can support them.
  • The tank’s weight and size limit its mobility over soft ground and prevent it from crossing many bridges.
  • During offensive operations, the platoon is vulnerable to dug-in enemy infantry elements, which are especially dangerous when equipped with antiarmor systems.
  • In defensive operations in restricted terrain, the tank platoon is vulnerable to dismounted infantry elements attacking from well-covered positions.
  • The platoon requires large amounts of fuel during extended operations. It can operate for eight hours without refueling.
  • It has limited capability to hold ground without infantry support.
46

First of all, a lot of that is ludicrously vague. “Developing the situation”? “Conduct operations”?

Second, a lot of that isn’t even about what it does; it’s just about what circumstances it does it in. It can ford water obstacles? Well, yeah, so can all military vehicles. What is it doing once it gets to the other side of the water?

Third, what substance there is in there, are things that modern militaries, whenever possible, don’t send the tanks in until they’re already done.

47

Related, here’s an amazing video of a run-in between a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and Russia’s latest T-90 main battle tank.

Nobody is killed here, so I didn’t spoiler it. What you are seeing is the Bradley immediately opening up on the tank with its 25mm Bushmaster auto-cannon.

The explosions and sparks are probably the reactive armor doing its thing. The tank isn’t penetrated, and later all the crew get out and run.

But here’s the thing: A tank is of no use if you smash its eyes and control. Even though the tank is not ‘destroyed’, the turret starts running out of control and the tank veers around and eventually hits a tree. Later a drone comes along and finishes it off.

The Bradley wins. Didn’t get a scratch.

48

That T-90 vs Bradley battle was discussed starting here:

and running for about 15 posts including this cite to a very nice video analysis here:

49

Best tank strategy for russ? Go home while you can, and take your effin’ tanks with you.

Dan

50

I think the explosions and sparks are the 25mm shells disintegrating and/or exploding when they hit the tank. I don’t think a 25mm shell can penetrate a tanks armor. In fact, the Wikipedia article on reactive armor says it generally is insensitive to projectiles of less than 30mm.

That said, to your point those hits can still damage optics, communications gear, and external mounted weaponry and keeps the crew buttoned up. I imagine it’s also pretty unnerving for the crew having autocanning fire beating on their turret as any second one of those hits might be a TOW missile or tank round that can actually penetrate the turret.

51

Here’s a thought.

I’ve heard (mostly from Perun whose videos were linked above) that next-gen fighters may not carry their own weaponry, since weapons ruin stealth and stealth may be key to survivability of aircraft on a next gen battlefield. Instead, when a fighter pilot pulls the trigger, electronically linked wingmen drones will fire at whstever the pilot lit up.

I wonder whether the same concept may apply to a next-gen land war.

If we get to a point where a vehicle can paint a target and have a dozen drones fire on and destroy it instantly, having a massive cannon on that specific vehicle may no longer be necessary.

As far as getting massive cannons into firing range, as automation continues to improve, it may not be necessary to have any humans inside the vehicle on which the giant cannon is mounted.

52

I was thinking of that big blast at the end where all the sparks went shooting out in one direction. I think there was a combination of 25mm detonations and at least one reactive armor detonation. But I could be wrong, having just an amateur’s knowledge of these things.

Yeah, I can imagine being in that tank would have been terrifying.

I’d go further and suggest that there won’t be pilots in fighters at all in another generation or two. There might be people in an AWACS or something directing operations, but most of the airwork will soon be done by drones. Heck, in Ukraine that’s almost the case already.

A fighter without a person saves a huge amount of weight and can be made more aerodynamic. A pilotless plane can take more ‘G’ forces, and be built to lower standards more cheaply.

Advances in AI in the past couple of years make this almost an inevitability, IMO.

53

That’s precisely what the next gen “fighter” is rumored to be. It’s two seater stealthy aircraft with the speed and maneuverability of a fighter, but instead of weapons it is packed full of sensors, countermeasures, and the like.

That’s why it will be a two seater. One for the pilot and one for the person controlling the swarm of drones accompanying the plane.

54

Yeah, could be. I’m not sure even that will be needed soon.

I imagine the military is already fine-tuning AIs with aerodynamics and fighter tactic texts, gun camera footage, after-action reports, and all the other info it will need to be able to make judgment calls in battle. They might even be doing mock dogfights and such now and giving AIs human feedback afterwards.

55

Unless and until we accept the use of LAWs (Lethal Autonomous Weapons) having the decision making humans as close as possible is going to be crucial in any peer or near peer conflict.

56

Maybe, but ‘close’ can mean sitting in a room at a military base in America. That’s where the Predators and Global Hawks are flown from.

Starshield, the military form of Starlink, enables this with fighters, with sub-20mS latency and an (so far) unjammable, unkillable communications link. I can see a future where a drone is loaded into the catapult on a carrier, then linked to a pilot sitting in a room in Alabama. And that ‘pilot’ may be more a systems manager and an approver of lethal weaponry than someone actually flying the plane.

57

Problem is those drones need to be following not too far from the fighter. Being the guy in the stealthy jet in the center of a cloud of non-stealthy weapons-laden drones is not obviously better than being weapons-laden yourself.

But to the last several posts, overall USAF’s and other air force’s research is heavily aimed at armed unmanned wingmen working with manned fighters, remotely controlled fighters, and very quickly, AI self-controlled fully autonomous flying killing machines. Maybe with a human someplace to eyeball the video feed and give a general yeah/nay decision to engage.

There have already been air combat tests involving manned F-16s flown by the very best of the best against unmanned F-16s flown entirely by experimental AIs. The humans could hold their own … barely. Which reminds me of the situation with computer chess in the late 1980s.

And that’s before you build a fighter that’s not lugging around a bulky heavy cockpit and life support system, one not designed for the paltry G-limits of human bodies, etc.

58

There are some proposals, such as carrying the drones inside a stealthy bomber-like vehicle that deploys the non-stealthy drones when required.

But there is one major advantage to being the stealthy brain of a non stealthy cloud of drones: you are the most high value target, and you cannot be directly targeted.

This is a major factor. A purpose built drone fighter is going to be able to pull off maneuvers that would physically crush a squishy human pilot. There’s no way to dogfight something like that.

59

That reminded me of HiMAT, which they were testing when I was working at EAFB. I know there are other unmanned fighter projects ongoing, but I haven’t been following them.

60

And when the human eyeballing the video feed can’t keep up with the pace of the action in front of them, because the robots are going too fast for them?

Skynet, here we come!

Seriously, I do worry about the possibility that the human in the loop in this kind of circumstance will be conditioned to press the “engage” button in much the same way that people with intrusive firewall software end up getting conditioned to press the “allow” button… the human in the loop is there in part to put a moral context on the decision. If the setup doesn’t allow time for reflection on the action being checked, the only real result will be to cause moral injury to (or scapegoating of) the human in the loop when the inevitable mistake is made.