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The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

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Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#141

Post by a_crc »

alexvoda wrote: post #56
WJW wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any air superiority combat drones operational yet? I won't argue that it seems likely that manned dogfights are going to die eventually, but that moment also seems at least a decade away. Until then a F-35 with long range missiles seems to be one of the more lethal things in the air today, even if it is rather expensive. NATO has like 20x the defense budget compared to Russia though, so it's fine not to hav…

The usefulness of long range missiles depends on the rules of engagement. If the F-35 will be allowed to shoot targets over the horizon based only on instruments, it will most probably work as intended. If visual confirmation will be required, it will be a boondoggle.

Could you expand on this? I'm struggling to imagine a realistic scenario where visual confirmation of a target would be a requirement. I also don't see why an F-35 is at a major disadvantage inside visual range of a target. (FYI Visual range is farther than short range air to air missiles and much farther than gun range.)

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#142

Post by sofixa »

mango7283 wrote: post #54
celticninja wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference seems to be capacity of crew. With an autoloader crew is down to 3, Russians opt to have 4 crew and a cheaper per unit tank. To the Russian Army soldiers have always been expendable.

? Russian tanks are the ones with autoloaders and 3 crew... Of the modern NATO tanks only the French use autoloaders and 3 crew, US and German tanks are 4 crew.

And French tanks have been using autoloaders since before WW2 (back then it was partly to offset demographic problems).

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#143

Post by simonh »

Pelic4n wrote: post #113
inglor wrote: post #83

Lots of outdated information here. I served in the IDF on something related and (obviously) can't disclose anything of military importance but do you really think for the last 16 years tank armor hasn't gotten (much) better to deal with these threats? Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin? The tank is not dead (well, not any more than large tan…

>Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin? If this exists, why did the USMC binned their tanks 2 years ago stating they weren't cost-effective anymore? I'll believe this exists when I'll see it, but so far we have seen $4M tanks defeated by $100K javelins with a 93% kill rate, and so far cope cages have done nothing against them.

The USMC had become a second land army, and decided they needed a mission and set of capabilities of their own. They've pivoted to facing off against China in the Pacific theatre and decided that tanks just don't fit into their requirements for that mission. If they do need tank support, the army has plenty.

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#144

Post by UncleMeat »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #44
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people vastly underestimate the importance of infantry support. A single soldier with an ATGM can take out a tank, but a single soldier with a gun can take out that single soldier and their ATGM. It's easy to forget that reality isn't a third-person shooter. When you're sitting in a steel box with an engine in the back and a cannon on the top, situational awareness will inevitably suffer to some degree, and n…

>I think people vastly underestimate the importance of infantry support Do you now what's funny? Even RTS videogames like the Command and Conquer series or Star-Craft made this point clear early in our childhoods. Tanks will be eaten alive by hoards of cheap disposable units, so you always had to support them with anti-infantry units if you wanted them to be useful in battle.

In the modern day, humans are not necessarily "cheap disposable units." At least for the US, it is not politically feasible to have 50,000-100,000 people die in a war anymore. 4,431 US soldiers were killed in Iraq. The calculus has changed and now dollars are cheaper than lives.

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#145

Post by _kbh_ »

542458 wrote: post #62
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people vastly underestimate the importance of infantry support. A single soldier with an ATGM can take out a tank, but a single soldier with a gun can take out that single soldier and their ATGM. It's easy to forget that reality isn't a third-person shooter. When you're sitting in a steel box with an engine in the back and a cannon on the top, situational awareness will inevitably suffer to some degree, and n…

I guess my dumb question is: with a Ukraine-style conflict where there’s a ton of ATGMs floating around, do even properly-supported tanks actually provide net value or do they just soak up friendly infantry resources that could be devoted to other things? The range on modern ATGMs is huge, measured in KMs - seems like you’d need a ton of infantry support to keep from getting picked off. If your enemy doesn’t have ATG…

Even with men on the ground how useful is a tank, when someone can use a remotely controlled ATGM that can hit targets upto ~5km away?.

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#146

Post by hef19898 »

usrbinbash wrote: post #105
hef19898 wrote: post #29

>> The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver. Doctrine and training are paramount, together with command and control that's what enabled the early German successes in WW1. And in the case of France a ton of luck. The article asks the right question: is the role of the tank still needed? A Javelin neutralizes a tank, under the right conditions, it doesn't replace it.

But if a military investment worth several million dollars (a tank) can be neutralized by something that is an order of magnitude cheaper to produce (an ATGM), then how can it fulfill its intended role?

Read the submitted article for details, but it comes basically down to the need of protected offensive destructive power (a tank) to get infantry close enough to engage the target. Without said tank, the infantry will be eliminated by enemy artillery and static defenses. So the trick is to protect the tanks. That is done by suppressing enemy positions with artillery and air support. And to protect your air assets, you need artillery to suppress enemy anti-air positions.

Basically, it is doctrine and some technical solutions (Javelins attack tanks from the top as opposed horizontally like older anti-tank missiles) that will enable the tank to do its job.

It's curious so, that nobody asks these questions when it comes to fighter aircraft and helicopters. Because those are vulnerable to manpads as well, and the war in Ukraine shows this pretty clearly. I guess burned out tank make for better footage then some small pieces or debris in some field that only experts can tell which aircraft it used to be once.

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#147

Post by Pelic4n »

simonh wrote: post #125
Pelic4n wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reported kill rate of javelins fired against tanks in Ukraine is 93%. Just saying.

The numbers don't add up. The US has sent 7,000 javelins to Ukraine and overall they're been sent 30,000 anti-tank weapons and Ukraine is asking for hundreds more per day. It seems unlikely those javelins have killed 6,510 (.93 * 7000) Russian tanks, or that they will be destroying hundreds more per day. Many of the drone videos released by the Ukrainians show tanks hit by ATGMs but not actually being destroyed. For…

Source for the 93% figure: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr/status/1499470411964235781

On the video, the ukrainian tank is of course performing an effective ambush. I don't pretend I have the answers, but I wonder how would perform a bunch of infantry with NLAWs striking the column from multiple places at once, for cheaper than the tank, able to engage multiple targets at once, much less spottable, and so on.

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#148

Post by sofixa »

greedo wrote: post #110
pirate787 wrote: post #13

The truly obsolete weapons platform is the $1.2 trillion manned F-35 program. A multi-role fighter that is too expensive to fly in this new combat space and cannot survive the multitude of anti-air missiles. The drone air war is a numbers game and unmanned fighters are both cheaper and have better operational specs.

And here come the F-35 haters... The F-35 is fine. It's designed to be a replacement to the F-16 with a good level of stealth. NO fighter is 100% immune to SAMs, but the F-35 can survive on the modern battlefield against S300/S400 etc just fine. It would be cleaning up in Ukraine right now as long as the airbases it flew from were protected. And what "unmanned fighters" are out there right now? Some low performance d…

> but the F-35 can survive on the modern battlefield against S300/S400 etc. just fine

I don't think you could possibly know this. NATO countries have S-300s and the F-35 was probably tested against it, but it's highly unlikely it was tested against an actual latest gen S-400 in fighting condition ( if such a thing even exists, Russian military readiness is dubious at best).

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#149

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #144
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think people vastly underestimate the importance of infantry support Do you now what's funny? Even RTS videogames like the Command and Conquer series or Star-Craft made this point clear early in our childhoods. Tanks will be eaten alive by hoards of cheap disposable units, so you always had to support them with anti-infantry units if you wanted them to be useful in battle.

In the modern day, humans are not necessarily "cheap disposable units." At least for the US, it is not politically feasible to have 50,000-100,000 people die in a war anymore. 4,431 US soldiers were killed in Iraq. The calculus has changed and now dollars are cheaper than lives.

>humans are not necessarily "cheap disposable units"

Putin and most of the Russian military doctrine would beg to differ.

Re: The tank is dead: Long live the javelin, the switchblade, the ... ?

#150

Post by fork1 »

Pelic4n wrote: post #123
fork1 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy hiding in a bush was able to defeat tanks since the invention of HEAT in WW2. Before that, they were other ways as well.

Correction: A guy hiding in a bush wasn't able to reliably defeat tanks before. Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper whe…

I would be wary of those numbers. There is a heavy selection bias, as we don't see the videos where the AT weapons fails, where the operator gets shot, etc. We'll have better information once the fog of war lifts.
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