Global military buildup

[grumbler]

So swarming instead of expensive targets.

In a high-threat environment, ten $1 million drones may not be as survivable as one $10 million helo. 

But they'd have more utility in any other environment.  Drones are clearly the way of the future, but they are not a panacea, and the much greater situational awareness of the helo crew still has its place.

[Threviel]

It seems to me that this war so far shows the value of combined arms. The Russians seem to run an equipment heavy army to compensate for the lack of infantry and they have about as much success as Monty had on Caen.

So yes, tanks will probably be part of a future army, as one component in a combined arms army.

The Russian strategy of storing all equipment as long as possible seems to be a good approach right now. If all modern heavy equipment is shot up the one with the most old functioning stuff will have an advantage. An old T-72 is better than no tank at all. An old VAZ fuel truck from 1969 is better than no fuel truck.

[The Larch]

I also guess that for the foreseeable future it'll be smart to invest heavily in counter-drone measures.

[Berkut]

I don't think the man-portable AA is really similar to man portable ATGM.

The range thing is the key - at the end of the day, a man portable AA weapon cannot have the range to deny air power within the range of air powers ability to operate on the battlefield. It can make it less effective by forcing it to stay out of range, but the F-16 can still drop a PGM on you from 15,000 feet. (The advances in SAM systems are an interesting thing to think about however, but at the moment it looks like the advances in stealth might be able to overcome that - the Russian Air Force being notable absent from this fight in the numbers expected is rather interesting - I am looking forward to some analysis of that. But I suspect that the same answer might be forthcoming - it's hard to say since their Air Force has clearly not had the training hours needed to be survivable in a high threat environment regardless of technology).

The range of modern man portable ATGM's however are effectively similar to the range of the modern battle tank - you can't stay far enough away from them, because as as noted, they both have basically LOS range.

And as Jake mentioned, and I pointed out before, the combined arms answer isn't really an answer. That worked back when the threat posed to the armor was largely equivalent to the range of the infantryman's weapons to neutralize that threat (or at least degrade it). A WW2 Panzerfaust or Bazooka has largely a similar range (often a lot less in fact) to the infantry's personal and squad weapons. So if you can reasonably assume the infantry with you has established fire control over the area they are in, and they are with your tank or near it, you have degraded significantly the threat of anti-armor personal weapons.

That is no longer true. Your supporting infantry would have to be able to establish fire out to some 2 kilometers. They cannot do that. If you could establish that control over that area, then what do you need the tank for? You've already taken that space!

I still don't know what replaces the tank as the primary offensive weapons system though - because grumbler and such are right, ATGMs are almost entirely defensive weapons. Tanks are actually pretty hard to see when they are not moving, for example - they can be hidden. And while these ATGMS are man portable, they are not THAT portable.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Grumbler made a strong point about offensives--against a prepared enemy who is holding say, a line around an urban area from which it is raining artillery fire, a tank battalion moving in force is likely to fuck them up, bad. You will lose some of those tanks from anti-tank weapons, but you won't lose all of them, and once their line is broken the tanks value diminishes in any sense. Tanks are not rendered useless because they might be lost in relatively high numbers, but they are rendered less valuable in a lot of situations in which they had been "adapted" for use--their core role going back to the experimental tanks of the first world war they are still valuable, and there is no obvious better solution.

Mind you that's because you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't have great solutions--when an enemy is well dug in with heavy automatic weapons and artillery support, how do you drive them out if for whatever reason you can't degrade their capacities via attacking their supply lines, and can't prepare any sort of flanking maneuver against a less defended angle? Close air attacks or even fixed wing bombers can be an option, but if you lack air supremacy there is a ton of risk in using those, as seen in the war in Ukraine.

[Berkut]

THat is a good point - in a point assault against a fixed defense, there is actually a lot you can do to degrade an enemies emplaced AT weapons as well, since you know where they are, and rpesumably are bringing considerable weight to bear on that point (your own artillery, CAS, etc).

You are going to take losses for sure, but there isn't a scenario where you aren't going to take losses.

That is a very specialized case though, and one that every military planner tries very, very hard to avoid. Because you are right - there is no "good" solution there, just a bunch of bad ones (unless you can fix them and isolate them, in which case it becomes bad for them, but that is a different scenario).

[Malthus]

Hmm. I wonder - if the tank is obsolete, what will replace it?

There is a pretty clear line of development, from heavy cavalry - tanks. Heavy cavalry got more specialized, and eventually disappeared from the battlefield altogether, because they became too vulnerable to infantry weapons - the tank was the solution to this. Is there a solution to infantry held anti tank missiles and drones?

Maybe walking/flying antipersonnel drones too small to make good targets for missiles, yet armoured enough to be less vulnerable to rifle fire. Something that can crawl in after people hiding in bunkers and trenches.

[Berkut]

I am not sure the development line from heavy cavalry to tanks is all that clear at all.

I think the US Civil War and WW1 saw a clear break in the utility of cavalry, and basically there was no heavy cavalry at all during either war (heavy cavalry being defined as cavalry with the armor and weapons necessary to fight from horseback as shock troops, rather then skirmishers, scouts, or mounted/mobile infantry). 

I think of it more like the Napoleonic Wars seeing the beginning of the re-ascendancy of the infantry as the primary battlefield weapon system, that being solidified in the US Civil War (where cavalry was strictly scout/harassment (South) or scout/mobile infantry (North)), and then WW1 seeing cavalry as being nearly useless. 

The development of armor was more an attempt to break the impasse of the infantry/artillery/machine guns, and it did that very, very well. Not because it was heavy cavalry, really, but because it was able to operationally break a line, then exploit itself. Heavy cavalry is the closest analogy, but it is (IMO) only an analogy. Armor was something different, because it's utility was beyond that battlefield itself. It wasn't useful because it could break a line, it was dominant because it made forming a line in its presence much harder to do - it could get inside the decision cycle of the enemy operationally, making those lines actually a liability.

But that was reliant on them being largely invulnerable to infantry, not entirely so, of course, but largely so.

The battle back and forth between armor's ability to defend itself, and new AT weapons as been going on since the beginning. AT Rifles were the shit when they were developed in the aftermath of WW1, after all. But it turned out that you could add more armor to tanks (and the engines to move them) faster then you could up the penetration power of an AT rifle, and by WW2 they were largely useless.

Maybe armor will come up with something to deal with the Javelins and NLaws, and the balance will be preserved for a while longer. But it seems to me that battlefield lethality just keeps getting higher and higher across the board, and we are largely moving into a realm where if you can see it, you can kill it, so not being seen will become too important for something as bulky as the "tank".

[Syt]

As long as there's infantry fighting in the field, I feel there's going to be a desire to have mobile heavy firepower with protection there with them. Armor may develop new countermeasures, or completely new designs, or remote controlled ones, but I don't think that the basic idea will disappear. We may see less of tank divisions charging the enemy rear and more of their role as infantry support and a means to overcome strongpoints.

[Threviel]

Just a reminder that a combined arms approach includes artillery. It is still the obvious queen of the battle field and an infantryman pissing himself under drum fire will not fire light AT at tanks on the other side of the fire curtain. And once the drum fire stops he will have infantry supported by armoured vehicles on top of him.

Prepared peer war is not the same as US soldiers going up against irregulars or Russian tanks rushing along single file on high ways.

[Zoupa]

I see a lot of videos from drones filming or correcting artillery fire.

How far away from the target are they? Are they visible from the ground?

[Malthus]

I am not sure the development line from heavy cavalry to tanks is all that clear at all.

I think the US Civil War and WW1 saw a clear break in the utility of cavalry, and basically there was no heavy cavalry at all during either war (heavy cavalry being defined as cavalry with the armor and weapons necessary to fight from horseback as shock troops, rather then skirmishers, scouts, or mounted/mobile infantry).

I think of it more like the Napoleonic Wars seeing the beginning of the re-ascendancy of the infantry as the primary battlefield weapon system, that being solidified in the US Civil War (where cavalry was strictly scout/harassment (South) or scout/mobile infantry (North)), and then WW1 seeing cavalry as being nearly useless.

The development of armor was more an attempt to break the impasse of the infantry/artillery/machine guns, and it did that very, very well. Not because it was heavy cavalry, really, but because it was able to operationally break a line, then exploit itself. Heavy cavalry is the closest analogy, but it is (IMO) only an analogy. Armor was something different, because it's utility was beyond that battlefield itself. It wasn't useful because it could break a line, it was dominant because it made forming a line in its presence much harder to do - it could get inside the decision cycle of the enemy operationally, making those lines actually a liability.

But that was reliant on them being largely invulnerable to infantry, not entirely so, of course, but largely so.

The battle back and forth between armor's ability to defend itself, and new AT weapons as been going on since the beginning. AT Rifles were the shit when they were developed in the aftermath of WW1, after all. But it turned out that you could add more armor to tanks (and the engines to move them) faster then you could up the penetration power of an AT rifle, and by WW2 they were largely useless.

Maybe armor will come up with something to deal with the Javelins and NLaws, and the balance will be preserved for a while longer. But it seems to me that battlefield lethality just keeps getting higher and higher across the board, and we are largely moving into a realm where if you can see it, you can kill it, so not being seen will become too important for something as bulky as the "tank".

Not sure what you are saying is really different from what I was saying - I too believe heavy cavalry became obsolete on the 'modern' battlefield, and that tanks were the functional replacement, in that it combined mobility with armour. Obviously the analogy isn't exact, and I agree there was a historical gap between the use of the two.

The next wave also won't, I think, be exactly analogous to tanks. Whatever replaces them will definitely have mobility. But they may not have "armour" like we think of armour - or rather, only be armoured against certain threats and not others. Or, perhaps, armour will be mostly on the form of electronic countermeasures designed to confuse targeting systems - so "armoured" against small projectiles, with tricks to confuse the targeting systems of larger ones.

I also think they are going to get smaller, and so more concealable. Meaning they can't be manned. They still have to be large enough to carry weapon systems though - so maybe that will be the trade off; size and concealability versus firepower.

Problem with drones is that their controls can be jammed or hacked ...

[Threviel]

The war of the present, in my mind, looks like this.

An attack needs air operations, preferably superiority to suppress enemy artillery. Artillery to suppress enemy infantry and armoured infantry to lick the fire curtain followed by regular infantry to mop up. This goes on, in the style of WWI take and hold, until the artillery cannot suppress any more. Then the artillery moves up and rinse and repeat.

Extremely materiel expensive and if air superiority cannot be guaranteed presumably extremely manpower expensive.

Obviously tanks are an important part of this and, in my mind, the only necessary part of the armoured infantry. The rest of the plethora of different "stuff" are good, but not a necessity.

And of course it can be done without tanks, just pay more lives for the objective.

[Jacob]

My $0.02:

Artillery is great because it can blow up things very well, but it can't take and hold ground. You need infantry for that. Infantry often does better when supported by heavy firepower with situational awareness, and tanks do a pretty good job of that. Rock solid air superiority is great, but probably shouldn't be taken for granted (except possibly by the US, but this thread is about non-US actors as well).

I expect that as long as it makes sense to mount infantry in APCs and IFVs, then there'll be scenarios where it'll make sense to back them up with tanks where available.

That said, I'd expect doctrine to change to take the potential wide availability of man-portable anti-tank weaponry into account. So I'd expect the parameters of tank-deployment to change, both in terms of when and how to deploy them.

[Berkut]

It's kind of amazing and depressing we are still coming up with novel ways to murder each other.

On a tangent....

There has been a lot of talk about how this war has kind of woken the West up to the idea that defense is actually still important, and that maybe not nearly as much has changed as everyone thinks.

But maybe that is a mistake, or at least too broad. Maybe the reality is that things HAVE changed, that war is a obsolete idea, and what we are seeing now isn't a reminder that war is forever, but the last reactionary backlashes from authoritarians as they die away. Because it is the case that is still appears to be true that western liberal democracies do not go to war with each other.

The problem is that not everyone appears to want to be a western liberal democracy. It used to be thought that those who don't are either crazy (North Korea), too religiously indoctrinated (Islamist states), or simply "on the way" to becoming western liberal democracies (Russai/USSR, China), or at least something close enough that they would fall into the broad abandonment of war as a means to resolve disputes between liberal powers. Or not developed enough (Third World).

The crazies were seen as just something that would have to be contained until they hopefully collapse themselves.

Is this broad idea at all relevant anymore, if it ever was? 

Does this war tell us that Russia will *never* join the western liberal order, or at least not soon enough that it matters?

I do think it doesn't look like China will (or at least is on path to) ever be liberalish enough to matter.

I guess I am saying that not paying enough attention to defense is a grave error. On the other hand, paying too much attention to it is a error as well. Tanks and missiles and nukes are all opportunity costs bled away.