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Does the Tank Have a Future?

economist.com

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Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#121

Post by toast0 »

prometheus76 wrote: post #14
metabagel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say it the other way around - once the tank stocks are depleted, anti-tank weapons can still play a devastating role (against other armored or unarmored vehicles).

You could say it the other way around, but the complexity of the electronics in the anti-tank weapons have proven to be difficult to produce in large quantities because of the chip shortage, but also because of the high level of experience and knowledge required to continue to make them. Tanks are much less reliant on complex electronics and manufacturing capability in order to be effective on the battlefield. The US…

> The US Defense Dept. has said it will take at least ten years to rebuild the stock of anti-tank weapons that have been used in Ukraine in the last five months.

Reponding to this and some of your other comments elsewhere... These anti-tank weapons may be the best anti-tank weapons, but they're not the only ones. If all of these are used, there are plenty of other ways to destroy tanks, so it's important, but not required to have a large stock of them.

You could probably increase the rate of manufacture of these, but there's also value in having ten continuous years of manufacturing instead of long time periods between batches.

I may be overly cynical, but in some ways, this war seems like a warehouse clearance event. It seems like everyone is finding their old stockpiles of Soviet era equipment and sending it to Ukraine to be used and/or destroyed. And presumably afterwards, it'll be time for the military industrial complexes to turn back on and build new stockpiles. Add in a few field demos of new equipment too.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#122

Post by Jistern »

breadloaf wrote: post #16

Yes it does. See "The Chieftain: No, The Tank Is Not Dead" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8 TLDW: Tank has a task on a battlefield and fact that you can easily kill it won't take that task away. Same goes for infantry and they are not going away either. On the other hand we don't see battleships anymore, because big guns were replaced by precise missiles with much more range.

Your comment is extremely misleading.

Modern militaries are rapidly transforming into what was science fiction, say, 50 years ago: almost exclusively remote-controlled robots and primarily (or even exclusively) autonomous robots.

If you call small, unmanned, armored vehicles "tanks" you are misleading people.

In modern militaries, whether it be surface ships, submarines, airplanes, tanks, etc.... within another few decades, people almost certainly won't be inside of them. People will control them remotely and/or algorithms/artificial intelligence will control them.

What we are seeing in Ukraine is Russia and NATO disposing obsolete military weapons in a disgusting farce of a war. Washington and Moscow should have divided up Ukraine like they did much of Europe in the waning days of World War II.

There was no need for a single bullet to be fired, let alone mortars and missiles. Washington antagonized Moscow ceaselessly. Eventually, Moscow took the bait. It's tragedy that could have, and should have been avoided.

Nonetheless, just because these days you see men in tanks fighting in Ukraine on your phone or laptop, don't think that "Tanks are still relevant in modern warfare!" They aren't. Tanks, by which I mean large vehicles with people inside of them, are obsolete in modern warfare.

People who claim tanks are still viable in modern warfare are either fools, liars, or manipulative purveyors of falsehoods who enjoy twisting words by referring to small, unmanned robots as "tanks."

The Economist.com is yet another legacy media property that regularly engages in obvious yellow journalism in a doomed struggle to remain profitable. Articles with headlines like, "Does the Tank Have a Future?" are clickbait.

I didn't take the bait; I didn't read the article. Why should I have? A better article would have been, "Does Economist.com Have a Future?"

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#123

Post by notahacker »

int_19h wrote: post #99
whimsicalism wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If war was the predictable outcome, Ukraine should probably have been more dovish towards Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East, ie. not banning Russian language, not shelling cities. Obviously what Russia has done is reprehensible, but if Ukraine saw war as incoming I don't see why they took these aggravating steps.

Russian language isn't banned anywhere in Ukraine. Indeed, 5 minutes of combat footage from the Ukrainian side will quickly show that the majority of their armed forces speak Russian. Even Russians themselves reflected on this, noting that most volunteer forces they have faced so far come not from the Western (majority-Ukrainian-speaking) regions of Ukraine, but rather from Kharkiv, Dnipro etc. Their explanation is t…

And anyway, the Ukrainian population did take those steps when most of them voted for a political outsider from a Russian speaking background seen as sympathetic to Russian speaking culture and somewhat willing to negotiate better relations with the "independent Republics". Putin interpreted that as a sign of weakness...

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#124

Post by calcifer »

causi wrote: post #12
metabagel wrote: post #2

Fantastic visuals accompanying the article!

They're slick but not terribly accurate. For example, the top-attack angle for the Javelin is depicted as far more vertical than it actually is. It's actually only about 50 degrees, which means it doesn't perform as much better than the NLAW as the specs would suggest thanks to the NLAW's 90 degree top attack.

It's an article meant for the general public. I think the visuals demonstrate the "it comes from above" nature of it quite well enough.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#125

Post by jacquesm »

horsawlarway wrote: post #50
prometheus76 wrote: post #7

Judging by the current situation, it seems that there are more resources for building tanks than there are for building anti-tank weapons. Once the anti-tank weapon stocks have been depleted, tanks still play a devastating role in warfare. EDIT: I'm just relaying what I read in several articles about the difficulties in making anti-tank weapons because they rely on rare-earth minerals and because they rely on silicon…

I don't understand this comment. The anti-tank weaponry is an order of magnitude less expensive than the tank (some is several orders). The M1A2 Abrams has a unit cost of around 10 million USD (numbers from 2016, so likely higher now). The drones currently destroying tanks in Ukraine (Bayraktar TB2) had a unit price of around 5 million, although some estimates are as low as 1-2 million per unit delivered to Ukraine a…

That's the expensive drones. But there are plenty of kills attributed to octocopters dropping modified anti-tank grenades.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#126

Post by throwaway1492 »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #108

Tanks used correctly and in sufficient mass produces something called the Shock Effect of Armor . Smart munitions are getting more and more effective, but it's really hard to calmly lob missiles at a charging unit of tanks supported by artillery, infantry, CAS, etc. " Principle: armor in strength produces decisive shock effect The psychological shock effect that comes to troops on the receiving end of a massed armore…

Former US Army 19k here. Tanks are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, expensive to operate, hard to transport and require certain levels of infrastructure to operate in theater (bridges to support their weight). With current threats they are bound to become even heavier (and require more fuel).

While I am all for seeing the rise of Bolo's, and I love shock effect as much as the next enthusiast, the ability of a $500 drone with the equivalent of a RKG-3 grenade to take one out is really the only relevant part of the question. Tanks are dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RKG-3_anti-tank_grenade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_universe

Edit to add; "expensive to operate" was a bit of an understatement, the logistical support required for a tank company is tremendous, totally preposperous; 1000s of gallons of fuel a day, 3 types of ammo, support equipment and personnel.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#127

Post by ckozlowski »

topspin wrote: post #78

Tanks were created to cope with two dominant threats: small arms and artillery shrapnel; the WW1 battlefield of machine guns and massed artillery. They've been improved to cope with some new threats since, but the number of threats are multiplying rapidly. The cost and complexity of tanks is exploding trying to deal with all of militarized model airplanes (Bayraktar et al.), guided artillery rounds (BONUS), long rang…

I think that's a slightly skewed way of looking at it. While there's some nuggets of truth there, the better way to look at a tank is that it provides highly mobile firepower, combined with enough protection to get in there and do it's job. And that job is to support the infantry by, as you stated so well, "blow holes in things" (Quickly, might add!)

But it never was meant to operate on it's own. And when it did, it was either lost in large numbers (Russian tank charges in WWII) or was in all actuality a fluke (Your Blitzkrieg example. See The Chieftan's video on the Battle of France in WWII on why this was such a reckless thing to do, followed by reading on the Battle of The Bulge on why it didn't work a second time.)

Tanks unsupported by infantry are a liability. However, infantry, unsupported by tanks, can be a liability as well when attacking an opponent who's well fortified and/or has heavy weapons. When tanks, infantry, and artillery work together (combined arms theory), then the danger posed by ATGMs and the like is greatly reduced. Armies have been reminded of this numerous times last century, and each time a renewed emphasis on combined arms fixes the balance.

Lastly, and I feel this point is missing in a lot of arguments: ATGMs like Javelin, mines, guided mortars, etc and all but the heaviest drones are defensive and supporting weapons. For ATGMs and RPGs, these weapons exist to prevent infantry from being overrun. (And as the Russians are being reminded, they can be quite good at this.) They are not offensive weapons. That is the reason the tank remains. It's offensive.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#128

Post by The_Colonel »

whimsicalism wrote: post #52
the_af wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to understand how "we" could not have prepared sufficiently. This conflict in Europe isn't a spur of the moment thing. Arguably it could have been in the making since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but even if you don't go that far back, then at least from 2014. It certainly didn't come out of the blue! I'll make my comment more assertive: I think "we" (for almost any value of "we") prepared for this.…

If war was the predictable outcome, Ukraine should probably have been more dovish towards Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East, ie. not banning Russian language, not shelling cities. Obviously what Russia has done is reprehensible, but if Ukraine saw war as incoming I don't see why they took these aggravating steps.

It's said to see such misinformation here.

> [not] banning Russian language

Russian isn't banned in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians use Russian in their day to day life just fine. You can hear Russian spoken by Ukrainians on the battlefield.

> not shelling cities

Check photos from Donetsk in e.g. 2020, city ~10 kilometers from the frontline. Does it look destroyed? No, it looks like any peacetime city.

There were artillery exchanges between both sides targeting military fortifications. Civilian casualties in the last few years have been minimal.

But this doesn't really matter either way. Putin doesn't care about civilian casualties, otherwise why would he start this war?

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#129

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

breadloaf wrote: post #16

Yes it does. See "The Chieftain: No, The Tank Is Not Dead" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8 TLDW: Tank has a task on a battlefield and fact that you can easily kill it won't take that task away. Same goes for infantry and they are not going away either. On the other hand we don't see battleships anymore, because big guns were replaced by precise missiles with much more range.

I always thought that battleships were ursurped by carriers. Aircraft killed the battleships.
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