Most of what you have mentioned are inherent shortcomings of tanks in a modern battlefield. They are fuel intensive. They need massive logistical support. They are vulnerable to targeted attacks, like from drones. None of this is unique to the Ukraine situation.
It is very hard for tanks to be effective in the age of cheap UAVs.
Infantry are vulnerable to literally everything, and yet no one besides some dingbats that watched terminator too many times are suggesting the age of infantry is over. Aircraft are vulnerable to missiles. Is anyone suggesting the age of aircraft are over? Drones, particularly consumer quadcopter adopted out of convenience are vulnerable to missiles, autocannons, and electronic warfare. Does not the very same logic being offered as proof of the end of tanks apply to drones as well?
This whole argument is stupid and predicated on a vast misunderstanding of how combined arms operations work. Systems are not discard because they're vulnerable, if they can be employed in a way that min/maxes their impact vs vulnerability.
There is nothing new about this conflict as far as tanks and ATGMs. Everything happening here happened in the Yom Kippor war, in Grozny, in Syria, and in Yemen.
You just have a bunch of lazy bloggers and journalists making a sensationalized claim to sound like something exciting and dramatic is happening, at the cost of grossly distorting the actual reality.
What will change is future tanks will likely prioritize active protection systems and sensors over bulk armor. But the basic concept of combing firepower, mobility, and protection is not going away any time soon.
* an active protection system specifically for top attack munitions like Javelin
* a remote weapons station with a machine gun specifically for engaging small low altitude drones like quad copters
* flexible manning, including looking at autonomy and remote control
* ability to host drones for its own situational awareness
* a loitering munition that's being co-designed, launched by the big gun
Maybe the era of the T-72 is over. But the people confidently predicting the era of tanks and armored fighting vehicles in general are over, cuz missiles, cuz drones, frankly, have no clue what they're talking about.
> and yet no one besides some dingbats that watched terminator too many times
and missed the moral of the story...
> This whole argument is stupid and predicated on a vast misunderstanding of how combined arms operations work. Systems are not discard because they're vulnerable, if they can be employed in a way that min/maxes their impact vs vulnerability.
The mythology of the board game Go is that it was invented by a Chinese general in an attempt to teach his son strategy and tactics. In that domain there is a concept called Aji, in which you should not write off pieces on the board that are doomed. The fact that they are still on the board makes them useful, even if they can't possibly be saved, saved only by gross error by the opponent, or saving them is possible but devastating to your overall prospects.
So we might see tank designs sort of repeat the evolution of surface warships. Such ships used to rely on armor for survivability, but the advent of submarines and aircraft (and later guided missiles) made that approach unviable. Now the armor is mostly gone, and instead ships rely on a mix of sensors, active defenses, and mobility to avoid getting hit at all. Of course they're still vulnerable, but nothing else can accomplish the same missions, so there's no other option but to keep building more.
Practical APS is going to require a full sphere LPI radar of some sort. Given you already have to build that, it's logical to leverage it as a sensor for sensor fusion in general. Same goes with IR, both distributed aperture systems and telescope/periscope. EW equipment is going to require antenna apertures that can cover DC to 6ghz. If you gotta build those might as well aggregate all the needs into a common set of apertures.
The logic here is straightforward, and it does directly lead to thinking of future MBTs as like the mini land version of multi role naval frigates, imo.
> Infantry are vulnerable to literally everything, and yet no one besides some dingbats that watched terminator too many times are suggesting the age of infantry is over. Aircraft are vulnerable to missiles. Is anyone suggesting the age of aircraft are over? Drones, particularly consumer quadcopter adopted out of convenience are vulnerable to missiles, autocannons, and electronic warfare. Does not the very same logic being offered as proof of the end of tanks apply to drones as well?
Being armoured is the tank's core value proposition in a way that it isn't for those other examples. The thing that a tank can do that a self-propelled gun can't is survive on a battlefield where small arms fire is overwhelmingly common and armour-penetrating munitions aren't. If we get to a point where that situation is no longer relevant, the tank's reason to exist disappears.
Aircraft are fast, have actual deterrents against attacks and can fire from a distance. Tanks need to be close to attack, are slow and completely vulnerable to drone attacks.
For ground combat tanks are very comparable. They can have an effect on any target within 2km or more within single seconds of spotting it. Tanks also have deterrents, such as the basics of combined arms tactics, but also smoke screens, etc.
> an active protection system specifically for top attack munitions like Javelin
Worth noting: The western-made MANPADs are designed to exploit a serious design flaw in Soviet-era tanks. The ammunition is stored in the turret where it is easy to ignite externally. That's why we have so much youtube of Russian tanks blowing their turret sky-high.
Long story short, design failure can't be remedied by anything they can put on the top of the tank unless it's another tank.
My mistake. Usually I know the (recently popularized due to use in Ukraine) modern infantry tools a shade better. I have been a sleep-deprived traveler this week!
Yeah, that's an issue too, though frankly speaking, partitioned ammo rack and blow out panels be danged, I don't think I'd want to be inside an Abrams that got hit by a Javelin or equivalent.
On an Abrams the ready to use rounds are stored in a partitioned sort of "duck tail" hanging off the back of the turret, with an armored door separating it from the crew compartment, and blast off panels on top.
The specific issue the other comment is referring to is unique to Soviet designed tanks that combined an autoloader with an ammo rack carrousel that's below the crew in the turret. This proved to be a big design flaw, but is not one universal across non Soviet tanks.
> But the basic concept of combing firepower, mobility, and protection is not going away any time soon.
This reads like the gist of it. I imagine them getting lighter, heavier, more sophisticated/expensive, cheaper, slower or faster. But the basic archetype seems to be almost timeless as long as there is some utility for armor, mobility and projectile weapons.
Is there going to be value in projectile weapons in the future? An autonomous quad copter with a grenade attached seems like a much more dangerous weapon than an automatic rifle.
An armored truck may have equivalent ability to defend itself using active systems with much greater mobility and firepower than a tank. A converted autonomous econovan might be even more effective, bypassing the need for defense entirely.
The typical generic tank round is 120 mm and around 50 lbs. This is interestingly mostly the result of the intersection of ergonomics (soldier needs to be able to hurk the round around) and metallurgy/engineering of the barrel. Anyhow, that's a whole lot of pain for any vehicle that's not a peer tank, any sniper/hmg/rpg team set up in a strong point, etc, for a very reasonable price. A good tank crew can fire these at a rate of about one every 10 seconds including overlapping recognition of new targets. This is what tanks are built to do, and it's not equivalent to what drones or man portable smart missiles/munitions can do, as interesting and increasingly novel as those latter are.
Do you think you would be able to see this tank if it were 3000 meters away?
Because the tank commander, with his set of night vision / thermal vision binoculars sees you.
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If that tank commander closes the hatch and ducks down, you wont see him at all. In full hide position, the tank commander will only reveal himself and his tank when a nearby infantry asks for support.
Of course, tank commanders want to see the battlefield for themselves and will stick their heads out like that unless they think there is an eminent danger.
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At 3000 meters, you can't hear the tanks, and you can't see them in hide position either. They move around the battlefield at 50km/hr all terrain, so they don't follow roads or well trodden paths either.
And the tank is absolutely lethal at this range in a way that no other weapon is comparable to. Even sniper bullets and rockets are far far slower than tank shells.
That tank squadron will have spent 24 hours digging into that position, if the engineer support was even available! An infanteer achieves the same level of concealment much more easily.
Or maybe the tank used its 50km/hr engine *finding* a suitable, natural defilade.
When you're on the attack, you often don't have time to dig in and instead have to make due with the natural terrain. Tanks will reach those natural slopes and enter hide position faster than infantry.
Yes, exactly. The infantry screen the tanks from enemy infantry ATGM groups. Everything that makes enemy infantry with ATGMs more effective tank hunters makes infantry screening the tanks more effective at countering them.
There is nothing wrong with "The infantry screen the tanks from enemy infantry". Screening is just the act of keeping two things separated. It does not matter which side of the from they appear. Either way is correct. If you want to go the protection route, "The infantry protect the tanks from enemy infantry" is obviously intended over "The infantry protect the enemy infantry from the tanks".
> There is nothing wrong with "The infantry screen the tanks from enemy infantry". Screening is just the act of keeping two things separated. It does not matter which side of the from they appear. Either way is correct.
It isn’t! I’m a professional in this field.
You're confusing a screen with a guard or cover force. Different tactical actions.
Good for you! Most of us are not professionals in this field and are using average people language. Adjusting to your audience is a thing. If it is wrong in professional speak, just realize you are not likely talking to other professionals and mention that something has a specific meaning in your field. People will just take that tidbit of information.
There's no point in screening the threat where there is nothing to be threatened, so in practice screening moves with the formation.
But in any case, it seems you just want to double down on that fine hnews tradition of utterly valueless semantic quibbling, which I will not participate in further.
The Abrams A1 got like half a mile to the gallon didn't it? How many miles can they move before you have to park them next to a giant, unarmored gas can?
US armor formations are based around a 12 hour resupply cycle. This is why an armored brigade is not just the tanks and such, it's also all the logistics equipment they need to sustain operations. That said, logistics is a strength of the US military, and something that is a severe challenge in Ukraine atm.
I’ll see if I can find a link, but there’s a small program the army is running for unmanned tanks, and the RCV-M is electric with a diesel genset to charge the batteries, range of ~450 miles I think?
Not really. The tanks are outside the armor and just blow up if they get a direct hit. Shockingly enough the people who design gas tanks for tanks thought of the possibility the tank might get shot by something.
TIL that the energy content of 33k gallons of gas is equivalent to a 1 kiloton bomb. I am probably on a list now for trying to figure out the explosive power of a Javelin missile, which I did not find.
Right. There were similar discussions about whether the tank has a future after many of them were destroyed in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The main issues were crappy Russian equipment and poor tactics.
There isnt a silver bullet for every situation and condition, but a moveable metal box that can target heat-emitting targets in its line of sight is useful. As long as its potential is fully utilised like machine assisted target aquisiton and liquidation (ai assisted optics + firing)
It is very hard for tanks to be effective in the age of cheap UAVs.