Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-25

[PDH]

The best way to gain the Black Sea Coast is to:

1) Send in your elite troops in the North and Central Fronts to be butchered.
2) Have large armored and mechanized formations rush in to be ambushed and lose large numbers of equipment.
3) Make sure these units ignore the tactical formations you have bragged about so they can lose large numbers of soldiers
4) Even in the South have incompetent Hell-Rides to places where they are ambushed.
5) Expend thousands of lives besieging a city.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think tanks will always have situational relevance which a fair reading of history would suggest is all they ever had. With the development of shaped charges in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the British became fairly convinced tanks would be useless in any future conflicts. They instead proved highly effective in the opening battles of WWII in Europe, primarily due more to their mobility than their defensive armor. In the North African campaign tanks were likewise very important, they could cover ground much faster than men on foot, and WWII was in an era prior to the full mechanization of infantry so foot marching was still how many infantry moved around.

However in that same war, tanks proved minimally effective in the Italian front, to the point Churchill bemoaned having over-invested in them, and in many battles in the Pacific theater they were of limited value/importance.

There's been a back and forth ever since, new developments in anti-tank weapons come out, new mitigations for those come out, new doctrines are developed and forgotten, tanks are used disastrously, tanks are used decisively etc. I think the reality is their ability to move a lot of firepower around at good speeds and their ability to survive small arms fire means they will likely always have some use cases. Commanders will really need to understand, in the war they are fighting in, what (if any) use tanks might be put to in that war, and what doctrines should be followed in using them. The sort of city-siege warfare Russia has been engaging in where the tanks are often times patrolling areas near logistical lines, I think they are sitting ducks. If Russia had pursued a different strategy, for example trying to push into the Ukrainian plains and crack the country in half for example, the mobility and rapid force projection power of an armored column would have probably still been useful (however without a logistical train to follow they would have ultimately become sitting ducks.)

[The Minsky Moment]

I suspect that right now tanks are like battleships in about 1935. It is clear that they are not the dominant weapon anymore, but its not entirely clear what the dominant weapon is going to be.

Bayraktar!

[Sheilbh]

So.... Are tanks done as a front line military weapon?

They need infantry support to protect them, but I think they always have. 

We'll see how active defenses work, this will likely reinvigorate that particular arms race. 

It's interesting because it's definitely playing into the UK defence debate - and whether the strategy in the inteegrated review was right.

I think pre-invasion, there was a sense that it might have got things wrong and that actually (which I mentioned here) we have gutted our tank - and we may need to go back to them and build them up pretty rapidly, like the old British Army of the Rhine model.

Since the invasion it's not clear to me that the case is as compelling as it was for re-focusing on tanks. Particularly since Germany has announced it's re-arming. I'm now seeing defence/foreign policy think tanks etc suggest that actually the idea of the UK needing to re-build tank forces to support Poland and the Baltics may not be necessary if Germany is filling that gap. Instead they're now suggesting that it may be worth focusing more on the navy, air force and the Nordics/High North as the bit of the NATO map the UK particularly focuses on. Not least because the JEF (which includes Finland and Sweden who are not in NATO yet) seems to becoming more of an active thing since the invasion.

But that would make sense just on a map of NATO and EU allies at a European level (though this is very basic of me): the UK with the Nordics and the High North; Germany with central Europe; France in the Med with Greece and Romania; and Turkey being Turkey That's probably too rational and coordinated to have any chance of happening though.

[The Minsky Moment]

About a year or two I read a book about AI and the end of the book the author discussed possible military applications of autonomous systems in a very censorious way, expressing the hope that international cooperation could halt deployment of such systems.  That seemed to me now as sadly unrealistic, as it was difficult to imagine China and Russia refraining from such development or committing to a viable arms control regime for autonomous systems; it virtually impossible now.

I make no claim to deep knowledge about military strategy or technology, but common sense and simple extrapolation suggest that drones and autonomous systems are growing rapidly in capabilities and cost-effectiveness, and in the Azeri-Armenian war and the present conflict they have demonstrated great utility.  Even if Moore's Law does not fully apply, that area seems a logical place to look for the next big thing.

[Berkut]

I think people talking about the need for infantry support are missing the point. 

Of course they need infantry support, that has always been true...mostly.

But in WW2, a tank was not threatened by infantry generally, unless that infantry could get environmental advantages to get close. Forests, urban areas, etc., etc. And even then, it was still pretty hard to actually destroy a tank with infantry portable weapons. AT rifles in the early war were kind of barely effective, and then became useless.

Later in the war, everyone started developing man portable AT weapons - Panzerfausts, PanzerSchrecks, bazookas, PIATs, etc., etc. They were sort of effective, but very very short ranged (40-100m), hence again, back to needing environmental factors to allow them to work. 

Even in WW2, the problem of infantry support for armor was well understood, and attempts to create AFVs that could allow infantry to keep up with armor without being sitting ducks in a truck was being developed. 

But at that time, the only really reliable way to engage armor outside of the armor cooperating and attacking you in a forest or a city, was with

A) Emplaced AT guns, or
B) Your own armor

AT guns were effective, but you had to be able to anticipate where the armor would attack. Even then they could be overwhelmed with artillery, or even just accepting some armor losses while you broke through the AT line. Sure, if you could have multiple AT gun lines, then that works great, but that is really hard to manage, since they have little or know mobility once the fighting starts.

Which is why at the end of the day, the best way to take on a tank is with another armored vehicle, and why tanks continued to be the dominant weapons system. This was true even into the Gulf War. There was a quote from some Iraqi armored brigade commander that he started  the war with 36 T-7s, and after 6 weeks of air attack, he had 30 operational, and after 15 minutes of combat with Abrams, they were all dead.

There has been a sea change in the lethality of AT weapons though. You don't need another main battle tank to kill a tank anymore, nor do you need the tank to cooperate by driving into a city or a forest. Those certainly help, but a Javelin can reliably and easily take out a tank at a mile away. Now tanks are vulnerable in the exact environment they used to be most decisive in - the open. 

What's more, the problem of how to provide them infantry support is much worse as well. MBTs are vulnerable to man portable AT weapons, and the infantry fighting  vehicles are *incredibly* vulnerable. Drones, and smart artillery munitions?

How do you provide infantry support to protect MBTs from man portable AT weapons when the infantry's vehicle are just giant coffins? And how does that infantry support even help, when the thing they are trying to protect the tanks from can hit the tanks from 2.5km away? The area the infantry has to control around the tank is so great, that the effort to protect the tank becomes much more work then the utility the tank provides. If you have to protect your armor from a guy with a Panzerfaust that has a range on 80m, then the bubble of protection needed is quite manageable, in broad terms it is a circle with a radius of about 80m. That is well inside the effective range of the infantry personal weapons. When that same guy has a javelin that can kill the tank from 2500m, the bubble is immense, and basically not even possible to control, or at least if you could control that bubble with the infantry, then what do you need to the tank for - you've already "won" that area!

No, there has in fact been a change in the basic equations for how armor applies its firepower. Its mobility, which has always been the point, can no longer protect it from the basic threats (outside of other armor) it has to face. You can drive away and around AT gun screens because they are large, fixed (relative to armor), and difficult to move. You could avoid most man portable AT weapons by simply not going into environments with them, or if you had to, you could bring along your infantry, have them dismount outside the range of the same weapons that could threaten your tanks, and then with support from that tank staying at range, clear out any threat from infantry weapons with ranges less then the range of infantry weapons and tank weapons. The tank is still decisive, in enough cases that the attacker could dictate the engagement, if they were good, to exploit those cases.

I just don't think that is true anymore. This has been an evolutionary change, and has been a long time coming, but it is here, now, IMO. Nlaws, Javelins, drones. I think the battlefield has become an environment where if you cans see it, you can kill it, and the high intensity warfighting of the future will revolve around not being seen. Which means the place for gigantic (relative to the size of a human) vehicles will be largely limited to areas where they cannot be seen at all - moving supplies, and over the horizon support. And even then, they are still very vulnerable.

[crazy canuck]

I suppose the issue becomes the age old DnD issue - encumbrance for the infantry   

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think the case against the tank is a tad overstated. I think analysts are making a few false assumptions:

1. Assumption that countermeasures for javelin missile based anti-tank systems cannot be developed. We already know of several approaches under development.

2. Assumption that the current situation with anti-tank missile-based systems renders all current tanks not very worthwhile. This is not true--the Abrams for example suffered losses when operated by the Iraqi government and the Saudis in the 2014 ISIL campaign and the ongoing war in Yemen, but they also featured in several important battles and were used effectively. The Saudis have continually ordered new Abrams that are being deployed in Yemen. Just because a system has an effective counter, does not mean the system isn't useful. This should go without saying--I can counter an infantryman by shooting him dead, that doesn't mean the infantryman as a concept lacks military value.

3. To some degree vehicles like tanks will always have some requirement. A slow-moving military is a dead military. So moving around on foot over long distances is just guaranteed death in a modern battlefield from several risk vectors. Since there is thus an absolute need for mechanized movement of troops, typically in APC or sometimes lightly armored light trucks, it  is unlikely that you wouldn't want some form of more heavily armored vehicle with high mobility around as well in various tactical situations.

What is correct--and frankly no one should have even thought this, is that Cold War thinking where tanks were the decisive force in Eastern Europe, is not valid. A huge fear throughout the Cold War was the unstoppable horde of Soviet tanks rolling West and the United States invested a ton of money into research of various anti-tank systems for that reason. Such mass armored invasions are not likely to be viable but the tank is likely to still retain utility in some other situations. There many military systems with situational utility, this is simply nothing new or particularly interesting. The tank itself has only ever had situation utility to begin with.

[Berkut]

I suppose the issue becomes the age old DnD issue - encumbrance for the infantry   

Ironically, it's kind of the other way around.

It is the advent of AT weapons that actually can be toted around by the infantry, that is (IMO) spelling the end of the MBT as the decisive weapons platform.

Hell, 30 years ago they taught me how to be a TOW missile gunner. That is a AT weapon with a 3km range that can reliably kill any tank of its time. The modern TOW2 can as well, so far as I know.

But it was only nominally man portable. The launch unit weighed like 90 lbs or something, and each missile was like 30 pounds. You could move it by hand, but....well, not really. Not in a way that allowed you to continue to be an infantryman, anyway.

Now? A Javelin can easily be carried by a single person - at least in that you could have a couple in each squad. And it has the range of a TOW (or rather, it has a range greater then the effective range of the infantry "supporting" the armor), and the lethality as well. And the next version of the Javelin is supposed to cut the launcher weight by something like 35% again. 

[FunkMonk]

I mean, there will always be a need to immediately shoot a big explosive at a target within line of sight of infantry. I guess the question is whether that ordnance is delivered via a tank, a lighter vehicle, manned CAS, or a combat drone. My impression is that it will be anything that works.

[The Minsky Moment]

A key question is going to be - on land, sea, or air - whether going through the cost and trouble of designing hunks of metal in such a way as to provide sufficient physical space, sustenance and safety to multiple human occupants is worth it in terms of the marginal returns one gets from having human beings physically present in the space.

[Jacob]

A key question is going to be - on land, sea, or air - whether going through the cost and trouble of designing hunks of metal in such a way as to provide sufficient physical space, sustenance and safety to multiple human occupants is worth it in terms of the marginal returns one gets from having human beings physically present in the space.

And that I suppose is going to depend on how sophisticated and reliable those hunks of metal can be when operating autonomously and / or how vulnerable their remote controlling mechanisms are to jamming.

[The Brain]

If you can make a drone tank that is cheaper than the weapons needed to destroy it then you have something interesting. Relative expense isn't automatically a deciding factor, but with big numbers...

[PDH]

No matter what is designed I think we can all agree that tanks sent down forest roads in a line with no cover, air support, infantry, and running out of fuel is not the greatest used of these hunks of metal.

[The Brain]

No matter what is designed I think we can all agree that tanks sent down forest roads in a line with no cover, air support, infantry, and running out of fuel is not the greatest used of these hunks of metal.

You have more military training than a Russian general? Why not design heart surgery procedures while you're at it.