The “human in the loop” is already being obsoleted to the “humanon the loop”, which means the human(s) are generally paying attention and have an inhibit button for the battle, not that each engagement or firing decision is individually assessed and individually authorized by a human.
The only way we avoid fully autonomous AI killing machines is if we get to a single whole-world benevolent non-corrupt democratic government before the AI becomes technologically possible.
Which former ain’t gonna happen nearly soon enough to forestall the latter.
Aircraft carriers don’t do a battleship’s job better. They do a completely different job. Modern navies don’t have anything that does a battleship’s job, because it turned out that the job a battleship does, and does better than anything even still, is a job that just isn’t very useful in the vast majority of situations, and for the few situations where it is useful, it’s not worth the tremendous cost of a battleship.
I’ve seen some discussion around the concept of “arsenal ships” or “arsenal planes” that are basically just big ships or aircraft that do nothing but hold a ton of missiles ready to fire. The actual targeting is performed by other ships and or aircraft.
One of the drawbacks is that it tends to be putting most of your eggs in one basket. So if it’s taken down somehow, your fleet is SOL.
You’re correct, the big fiery ‘explosion’ in front of the T-90M isn’t ERA, and the reactive armor is insensitive to the Bradley’s 25mm Bushmaster rounds. The big fiery spray in front of the T-90M is it firing its smoke dischargers, which also have an incendiary effect to conceal it from thermal sights. A good video addressing the entire engagement:
It’s not ludicrously vague, you just don’t understand what you are reading if you came to that conclusion. It a US Army Field Manual, FM 71-1 TANK AND MECHANIZED INFANTRY COMPANY TEAM. The US Army doesn’t do vague when writing manuals. Note the initial sentence, “The tank platoon has the following capabilities.” Note the word “platoon,” tanks aren’t supposed to operate as individual vehicles (note what happens to individual Russian tanks when they operate alone), a US Army tank platoon has 4 tanks. The platoon has “the necessary manpower and equipment to effectively develop the situation.”
Again, you don’t understand Army Field Manuals if this is the conclusion you draw from it. Not all military vehicles can ford water obstacles of the same depth and would require engineering support to make an effective crossing at different water obstacle depths. Some are even amphibious (at least in theory) and could cross water obstacles of any depth on their own. Again, in theory. The M2 Bradley and BMP are both in theory ‘ambibious’ but you’ll note that neither side has been in any hurry to actually try crossing the Dnepr with them under their own propulsion.
Again, you don’t understand what you’re reading if that is the conclusion you draw. The name of the field manual is TANK AND MECHANIZED INFANTRY COMPANY TEAM. These aren’t things militaries don’t send the tanks in until they are already done. They are things militaries use tanks for as part of a combined arms team. The statement that
is ludicrous on its face. Militaries know what their job is. As demonstrated, they write field manuals about it. I could dig you up manuals from WWII or even provisional manuals written during WWI, as well as manuals from the interwar era when everyone was still trying to figure out what the best doctrine for them was.
And again, you’ll note that Russia has been taking pains to ramp up its tank production rate and digging far enough into its storage inventories left over from the days of the USSR to pull out T-62 and T-54 tanks and using them on the frontline. Ukraine hasn’t been telling the West that it doesn’t want any more of these strange contraptions called tanks whose job they can’t figure out. They have been pleading for as many of them as possible since the war began, particularly modern Western tanks, of which they have been given grossly insufficient numbers. Last I heard publicly available numbers were 14 Challengers, 80-some Leopard 2s and 31 M1 Abrams.
Arguing that tanks get destroyed or that large numbers of tanks get destroyed isn’t evidence that they are obsolete. They always have been getting destroyed, and in large numbers, since their introduction in WWI. And again, the single most vulnerable thing on the battlefield since time immemorable has been the foot soldier. I imagine if humanity survives long enough, we’ll even find something to replace them with, but the fact that they can die in droves neither makes them obsolete nor means they either don’t have a job on the modern battlefield or that nobody can figure out what their job is.
Yes, aircraft carriers do in fact do the battleships job better than it did, leading to its obsolescence. You don’t understand what the battleship’s role was if you imagine it was simply ‘it has big guns’. Its role was that of the instrument of decision in control of the seas, they would form the line of battle (hence the name battleship, a shortening of ship of the line of battle) and the only ships that could hope to achieve a decisive victory over them would be an opposing battleline made up of battleships. Aircraft carriers performed the role of the instrument of decision better than the battleship did. A battleship could only project its fires out to 25 or so miles at the most extreme, aircraft carriers could do it out to 150-250 miles during WWII. The battleship still had advantages over the carrier, such as the ability to operate in inclement weather and at night, which the aircraft from a carriers couldn’t effectively do during WWII, but even those disadvantages were slowly being removed both during and post WWII.
Thanks for the correction and additional details. I k ew ERA was hard to set off and that small arms fire wouldn’t do it, But I thought a 25mm cannon round should have done it. Ignorance fought. That reactive armor mist be finely calibrated if it will stop rounds that could penetrate the tank, without detonating after a 25mm cannon round hits it.
OK, so it’s FOUR tanks that are supposed to “develop the situation”. But what does “develop the situation” even mean? Situations develop no matter what you do. Presumably, you want them to develop in a certain way. How?
Tanks aren’t part of the Air Force teams that actually break through hardened enemy defenses. US tanks wait until the air power has broken through the defenses, and then drive in over the rubble.
And battleships: They were the “instrument of decision in control of the seas”. That just means that they’re supposed to win fights. Well, yeah, that’s what any military unit tries to do. That’s a goal (and a very vague one), not a role.
If we’re going to be that vague about the tank’s role, then we already have the replacement for the tank, and it’s called everything, because everything is supposed to do all of those vague things.
If you don’t understand what developing the situation means in the context of a combined arms tank and mechanized infantry company means, or what a combined arms team means, or think there is actually anything vague about the tank’s role in FM 71-1, I’d suggest actually reading the field manual. And no, all the Army does isn’t to drive over the rubble left by the Air Force. See, just for instance, Battle of 73 Easting, Battle of Medina Ridge, Second Battle of Fallujah, and hmm… seeing how neither side has managed to achieve air superiority in the current Ukraine War due to a combination of the effectiveness of Soviet-era SAMs and incompetence on the part of the Russian air force, the entirety of the fighting for the past 2 years in Ukraine.
Even in a purely hypothetical situation where the air force reduces the enemy to rubble that the tanks do nothing but drive over it, you’d just be arguing the same point made by US General William DePuy in the Perun video I linked upthread that “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.” just substituting ‘tanks/combined arms in the army’ for DePuy’s infantry battalion and ‘the air force’ for artillery. The fact that the artillery does most of the killing and the infantry does most of the dying doesn’t mean that the infantry is either obsolete or can be done away with. Somebody needs to occupy your hypothetical rubble, and good luck on your air force actually making that rubble without an army in the way to prevent its airbases being overrun by the opposing army. The same way the infantry had to be there to at the very least put something in the way of the enemy and your own artillery.
But again, that’s an entirely absurd hypothetical. Actual history doesn’t bear out your hyperbolic conclusion.
No, that’s not the goal or what any military unit tries to do, and “instruments of decision in control of the seas” doesn’t mean “they’re supposed to win fights.” Again, you don’t understand what you are reading if that is the conclusion you draw. Good luck trying to win that decisive battle to decide control of the seas with frigates. Their role in the age of sail from which the line of battle was borne was to perform reconnaissance for the battleline and to protect merchant ships from raiding or to conduct raiding on them, or to perform general patrol. They stayed the hell out of the fighting between opposing lines of battle. In WWII the role of the destroyer escort nee frigate was to protect convoys of merchant ships from submarines and aircraft.
Speaking of submarines, good luck using them as an instrument of decision in determining control of the sea in decisive battle instead of battleships. I mean according to you that’s just a goal, and a very vague one, right? Only it’s not, again you don’t understand what you are reading if that’s the conclusion you come to. Submarines are a weapon of attrition, not decision. They are also an instrument of sea denial, not sea control. Their role is to slowly attrit away an opponent’s ability to effectively make use of their command of the sea, not to either command the sea themselves nor to stake everything on a single throw of the dice in decisive battle. They can neither command the sea, nor due to their very nature are even capable of fighting a single decisive battle.
Battleships and aircraft carriers both were able to fight decisive battles that could sway control of the seas one way or the other in a single pitched battle lasting less than a day. See for examples, Battle of Tsushima, Battle of Jutland, Battle of Midway, Battle of the Philippine Sea, Battle of Leyte Gulf. Leyte Gulf being Japan making its last desperate throw of Kantai Kessen “naval fleet decisive battle” using its battleline as its carriers were no longer an effective force. And as I noted, battleships did still have advantages over carriers in night operations at the time, leading to the last battleline engagement between refloated survivors of Pearl Harbor and a hopelessly outnumber Japanese battleline consisting of only two battleships at Surigao Strait.
One of the things that’s surprised me in Ukraine is how up-close a lot of the armored fighting is. Curious to me why they give up so much advantage by moving so close. It’s one thing if you’re in a town, but a lot of what I’ve seen is in the country side. I’m sure your rounds are more likely to hit up close but the chain gun carries a lot of ammo. Here’s a Bradley shooting up positions from what looks to be less than 100 feet away.
I expect that type of encounter starts as an attempted roadside ambush from a semi-concealed trench position, but the opening shots missed (or maybe got another vehicle) and the ambushers weren’t ready for the vehicles to charge them.
Maybe not an ambush; I’ve seen video of Ukranian armor rolling up a Russian trench system which had been spotted by surveillance drones. It would be a matter of attacking with the expectation that you will kill anyone with the ability to kill you before they can, pretty much like every charge in military history.
It’s hard to say for sure what is going on in the greater context of things from that 17 second clip, but remember that the Bradley is an IFV, an Infantry Fighting Vehicle, and the job of the infantry is to close with and destroy the enemy (US Army and USMC field manuals on the mission of the infantry using that exact verbiage or variation of it if needed). What differentiates an IFV from an APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) is that it is armed with more than just a machine gun for self-defense and is able to directly provide fire support for the infantry that it carries and is normally much more heavily armored than an APC and thus much more able to survive while providing this close support than a thinly armored APC would be able to.
Notably though, especially in light of the war now ongoing in Gaza, is that Israel has over the past few decades been undertaking a very different approach with HAPCs, Heavy APCs. This started in the 1990s with converting Centurian and T-54/55 tank chassis into APCs by removal of the turret and the creation of an infantry compartment. The current production model is the Namer which uses the chassis of the Merkava, and the weight savings from removal of the turret is used to add even more armor on it, making it more heavily armored than the Merkava itself:
According to Brigadier general Yaron Livnat, they are more heavily armored than the Merkava IV tanks: “The weight saved by eliminating the turret was ‘reinvested’ in beefing up the armor.”
It is also like the Merkava being fitted with the Trophy APS. While it might seem odd at first for the infantry carriers to be as heavily if not more heavily armored than tanks, there is a very solid logic behind it. Tanks don’t necessarily have to get as close to enemy positions as possible in order to do their job, and getting too close rapidly begins putting the tank at a disadvantage. The logic behind the HAPC is that the more heavily protected it is, the better it is at performing its job of delivering infantry as close to enemy positions as possible.
The Falkland Islands War. British nuclear attack submarines could not control the sea, but they denied Argentina any chance at all of trying to do so. Once General Belgrano sank, the ARA returned to port.
Exactly, and had British submarines not denied the sea to the Argentinian Navy, and a battle between the Argentinian carrier Veinticinco de Mayo and the British carriers developed, with General Belgrano and her Surface Action Group perhaps playing the role of ersatz battleship, the potential carrier duel between them could have been a battle of decision over who had control of the seas, deciding the fate of the entire operation in an afternoon. Had the Royal Navy lost even one of their two carriers, or even only had one so badly damaged that it had to return home for repairs, they would have lost control of the seas around the Falklands and had to go home before retaking the islands - or at least until the US leant them the USS Iwo Jima had it come to that. Even with the two carriers intact, the Royal Navy was hard pressed dealing with the Argentinian air force with their carriers only having V/STOL Harriers.
Retired U.S. Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, commander of the U.S. Second Fleet at the time of the conflict, helped develop the plan to supply the Royal Navy with Iwo Jima if the Hermes or Invincible were lost. Though primarily a helicopter carrier, at least one Iwo Jima-class ship was qualified to operate the American version of the Sea Harrier, according to the 1982 edition of Combat Fleets of the World.
Getting back to the thread topic, I’m wondering what the U.S. Army even needs tanks for. It doesn’t seem likely that Abrams would be going toe-to-toe against a peer enemy in an environment where enemy tanks would probably already have been stomped by allied airpower first. If it’s just for urban battle, like Fallujah or a Black Hawk Down scenario, seems liked armored IFVs/AFVs are much more what you need - troop transports that can ferry wounded or non-wounded infantry to and from a location, and can pack all the firepower you need against ragtag Taliban/warlords/militia/ISIS/whatever. The tank having armor-piercing sabots or HEATs doesn’t do much additional good against irregular enemies anyway.
There are still places where the US Army could find itself fighting near-peer adversaries, and places where they would still be needed to fight other armor against less than near-peer opponents or need armor to do things its designed to do other than just counter enemy armor. And again, Ukraine wants as many M1 Abrams as it can get its hands on, but we’ve only provided 31 as far as is publicly known. “Stomping with airpower” still leaves plenty of the enemy behind, as was clearly demonstrated in Iraq both times. Even having over a month to conduct a massive air campaign against negligible effective air defenses at the start of Desert Storm didn’t obviate the need for a massive force of Coalition armor to go into Iraq and Kuwait, and they encountered tanks and AFVs numbering in the thousands that they had to destroy themselves. Again, just as individual engagements from the war after over a month of unrestricted pounding from the skies, 186 Iraqi tanks, 127 IFVs and 72 artillery pieces were destroyed at the Battle of Medina Ridge on Feb 27, and 160 Iraqi tanks, 180 personnel carriers, 12 artillery pieces and 80 various wheeled vehicles were destroyed on the night of Feb 26/27 at the Battle of 73 Easting.
That the M1 Abrams may be overkill and an unnecessarily large burden on the logistical network both in terms of getting them in theatre in the first place and then supporting them isn’t something the Army is unaware of or hasn’t been looking into though. That’s why the Army has been taking delivery of the first 96 low-rate initial production models of the M10 Booker light tank.
The M10 Booker is also just the latest in a long line of cancelled or unsuccessful attempts to replace the M551 Sheriden light tank which was itself a troubled design that soldiered on until retired in 1997. It was supposed to be replaced by the M8 Armored Gun System which was cancelled, and an unsuccessful variant of the Stryker, the M1128 Mobile Gun System was developed and first put into limited service in 2004 but was retired in 2022 “due to design and operational deficiencies.”
Not to mention… they’ve done extensive testing and research of pilotless aircraft safety and in 2024 the estimated pilot deaths per destroyed dronefighter is… roughly 0.
Are there any drones that can fly as fast as an advanced 2020’s fighter-jet? I would think that if there are they must cost as much as the advanced manned jet.
Also, it’s ironic to point to the Battle of Mogadishu as a reason for why the US Army doesn’t need tanks. One of the major fallouts from the fighting was the fact that there wasn’t US armor deployed to Mogadishu despite requests for it out of political concerns that the optics of it might look bad rather than military considerations, leading to the US Rangers having to rely on UN Pakistani armor to get them out. Les Aspin resigned as Secretary of Defense over it.
Criticism and final days in office
In September 1993, General Powell asked Aspin to approve the request of the U.S. commander in Somalia for tanks, armored vehicles and AC-130 Spectre gunships for his forces. Aspin turned down the request and did not take Powell’s request seriously. At some point during a lunch meeting, Powell presented to Aspin on the need of additional tanks, armored vehicles, AC-130 Spectre gunships air-support to support the U.S. Troops that were about to be deployed for Battle of Mogadishu and, discussing the battle preparation instead of paying attention to Powell’s recommendation, Aspin caused Powell to grow more irritated. This was believed to be the primary reason for Powell’s early departure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[23] Shortly thereafter Aidid’s forces in Mogadishu killed 18 U.S. soldiers and wounded more than 75 in attacks that also resulted in the shooting down of two U.S. helicopters and the capture of one pilot in the Battle of Mogadishu. In the face of severe congressional criticism, Aspin admitted that in view of what had happened he had made a mistake, but stated that the request for armored equipment had been made within the context of delivering humanitarian aid to Somalia rather than protecting troops. In an appearance before a congressional committee to answer questions about the Somalia disaster, Aspin made an unfavorable impression and appeared weak in response to the detailed probing and criticism of his performance. The president publicly defended Aspin but made clear that the White House was not involved in the decision not to send armor reinforcements to Somalia. Several members of Congress called on Clinton to ask for Aspin’s resignation.
Sure, but what about Mogadishu could not have been fulfilled by the role of Bradleys/M-113s alone? It seems Abrams was very heavy and ill-suited for a crowded city (and also couldn’t carry troops.)
The Rangers were mostly going about on Humvees, and the Humvees provided some protection but still not enough. So Bradleys and M-113s would have fit the niche nicely - armored but still light and can carry troops.