The tank isn't dead because armies still need the capabilities the tank gives them. You need a long range direct fire weapon, capable of engaging armoured targets and infantry (canister or airburst rounds), with rapid engagement of multiple targets, low time to target, rapid reloads and follow up shots, and high survivability.
Lighter wheeled gun armed vehicles can be cheaper, but they don't have the survivability. They also can't go everywhere a tracked tank can go, such as jungle busting or just driving right through many kinds of buildings or cover. Missile have much longer flight times to target than gun rounds. A tank can move into position, fire, destroy it's target and be back in cover before a missile gets anywhere near it's target. The missiles are also vastly more expensive than tank rounds.
Yes tanks are vulnerable when not properly integrated with air support, artillery and infantry. They're still a lot more survivable than pretty much anything else that can provide the same capabilities though. One tank in the second Gulf War shrugged off 14 RPG hits, and overall tanks in that conflict amply proved their value, when used effectively.
The survivability property is the one being questioned right now. If you can attack a tank from 5 clicks away with a high probability of success then air support and infantry have to cover a really wide perimeter inviting the question if the resources spent on the tank can give better capabilities in other form.
I am too lazy to write anything cohesive. Here is starting point on things that will make the tank more survivable and persist it as a heavy weapon platform.
1. Hard-kill APS - active protection systems - mm AESA (fast, high resolution) miniature radar detecting threats and sending munitions to intercept them. See Arena, Trophy. Eventually, laser counter-drone systems for small swarms (see Israeli developments)
2. Soft-kill APS - smarter/highly-automated smoke deployment, IR smoke, radar chaff. Directed radar / IR blinders. (See T-90 systems failing in Ukraine atm)
3. Passive - lower signatures.
4. Target detection and automatic turret queuing - tanks have a lot of space, they can have sophisticated optics and computers that find targets (including OTH data from tethered drones) or find launches against them and can fire on that launch. This is less effective against fire and forget systems ala Javelin or systems like Stunga where the launch platform is away from the guidance system.
5. Trench sweepers and coupled 30mm cannons - tanks can airburst and clear trenches / buildings better.
6. Operating in fully jammed environments. This has NOT happened in Ukraine at all. Wide-area signal suppression seems like a myth in the current war.
Anyway, this is just basic stuff to look into. The tanks remains a "go fast, penetrate stuff, maneuver" platform.
One thing most people also forget is the cost of the firepower that comes with the platform. Smart/loitering munitions are still expensive, and still have a high time-to-target than direct fire or dumb mortars.
Better combined arms tactics and road march protocols will reduce the losses from these attacks. It's like the Russians became stupid. No bounding overwatch, no artillery prep, no jamming as you said. No air support, dumb attack helicopter usage. No effective recon, no proper ambush engagement. It's like you gave a bunch of military gear to drunk conscripts who were poorly trained...
A cohesive BCT would be able to decimate light infantry. Yes, there will always be losses in war, but this shouldn't be an effective strategy. And I also think that the video coverage is making everyone think that ATGMs are winning the war. In the 2014-2016 Donbass, the UA lost over 400 tanks, the majority to artillery. Yet that isn't captured on video as easily unless there's a drone correcting the artillery's fall.
Army has been the most despised and low-status part of Russian society for the last 30 years, and mandatory service has been something that anybody with any means tried to avoid like he'll for even longer. The only people who go into an army career are those who don't have any means or talents for anything else.
imho the failures observed caused by manpad in the ukrane theatre were directly attributable to an almost comically poor systems integration on the part of the aggressor and an unwillingness to commit longer range artillery and missile strikes to soften what were hardened infantry targets equipped with sixth generation anti-air and anti-tank weaponry.
Explain how the Bayraktar has been very effective targeting SAM systems? SAMs designed to destroy aircraft in this size range, and operating altitude?
Systems like TOR/Tunguska/Buk should be easily capable of detecting the Bayraktar and destroying it. It's not like Russia didn't see how it worked in the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict. They knew Ukraine had Bayraktar, but seemed completely unprepared to deal with it.
Frankly they seemed unprepared to deal with anything. I think it’s another case where half of them thought they were going on a training exercise, and the rest thought it would be over in 72 hours.
The Ukrainians have all the same SAM systems the Russians do, so are super familiar with their limitations. They’re also many times more motivated.
> almost comically poor systems integration on [Russia's part]
Russia's BTGs were explicitly designed to (a) consume minimal manpower (they were composed of non-coscript troops from their parent units), (b) consequently, to maximize lethality:person (tank co + 3x mech inf co + 2 AT co + artillery/anti-air), and (c) to minimize logistical support requirements (by deploying smaller units).
Essentially, they were built to win small-scale conflicts at a price Russia could afford.
Ukraine is not a small-scale conflict.
Consequently, the following chain of events (predictably) occurred: (1) Putin proposes 2003 military reforms [0], (2) Serdyukov realizes many of these in 2008 reforms [1], (3) optimistic appraisal of capabilities vs Ukraine leads to Army grandstanding, little strategic integration with different branches (e.g. VVS, VMF), (4) utter failure of real political intelligence mistakenly assumes Ukrainian population (esp urban) will not support government & defense, (6) infantry-light, manuever-oriented assault predictable bogs down in urban areas, without necessary troop count in assaulting units, (7) strategic approach is locked in, as a consequence of previous choices, (8) everyone involved at a command level scrambles to cover their ass and blame others.
If Russia had wanted to win the war they ended up getting, they should have never assaulted urban areas with BTGs.
They would have manuevered south from western Belarus, bisecting the country, and forced Moldova to declare neutrality and forbid weapons shipments. Then pick key infrastructure apart at leisure. Because that's the sort of thing the BTGs were built to do.
But presumably Russia didn't want to do that because it betrays the "this is all about Donbas (and the criminal Ukrainian government)" talking points, and it didn't think it would need to. Hindsight is 20/20.
The main reason cheap drones are effective is because they come from fast-moving consumer product lines instead of the slow-moving monolithic military industrial complex side.
There is nothing fundamentally indefensible about drone swarms, the complex just hasn't had enough time to react. You can bet that, if it doesn't already exist in secret somewhere in the US, there are many teams actively working on tank-mounted drone laser defense systems.
I suspect that drones have been hard to target until now because they have a unique air signature far different from all previous air targets, not because they are fundamentally more "invisible" than a Predator or a helicopter. Given their unique shape, movement, noise, and radio profile, a CS grad could certainly cobble together a drone target acquisition system using some consumer-level optic systems combined with a radio antenna, radar, and microphone array.
And as we all know, quadcopter drones are exceedingly fragile and most of their profile is millimeter-thin plastic blades. Once you have the ability target them, you'd only need a moderately powered laser to completely disable them.
Also remote controlled ATGMs and I'm sure remote controlled machine guns and other stuff (the israelis already have a lot of remote controlled machine guns afik).
The tank may not be completely obsolete and indeed properly used like the US did and like Russia sadly probably re-learned it is a very useful tool.
More defensive automation will put even that "properly used" to the test.
I think we've just scratched the surface of what AI can do for defense; for offense also, but not as much. It's now in the realm of reality (think the mossad machine gun attack in Iran) to have systems that will autonomously attack any tank/vehicle/human, just waiting in ambush. It's orders of magnitued to have offensive AI driven tanks.
Imagine 1000 Mariupols, all automated with automated machine guns, AT missiles, drones and so on. Those do not require food, no water, no sleep, are not afraid to die.
Regardless, tanks are not what they used to be in WW2 -- modern tanks are extremely expensive and there are a lot of ways to kill tanks nowdays.
The battle will go back and forth, the tanks will get active protection, the ATGMs will get a lot faster, will used efps like the NLAW, but I think the writing is on the wall. Yeah, it was said before, just like it was said about the missile making dogfights obsolete -- a little early, but true eventually.
>> the missile making dogfights obsolete -- a little early, but true eventually.
Not true so. The US thought that in Vietnam, the F-4 (?) didn't have an on-board canon for that very reason. All new planes again have one, because dog fights turned out to be very much a thing. The Phoenix missile, and the F-14, have been built around the beyond-visual range idea. Both are out of service now. Beyond visual range works when you see the enemy but the enemy doesn't see you. If both parties see each other, the first shot will be beyond visual range, any survivors will find themselves in dog fight after that. And if both side use stealthy fighters, they won't see each other, or be able to engage each other, at distances beyond a dog fight.
That's a question we won't really know the answer to until we get a nice big shooting war between peer air forces again. So hopefully not in my lifetime. I think what they really learned was dropping guns is a gamble and when you don't /really/ have to control costs that much it's safer to include a limited gun in case you need it. AFAIK the current doctrine thinks dog fights are going to be a small part of air to air combat as both the f22 and f35 have less than 5 seconds of ammo.
That's one of the big challenges, isn't it? If an enemy catches a flight of F-35s / F-22s with enough numbers the result could be devastating. And the big limitation of stealth aircraft is payload. Have them carry more, on external hardpoints, and they loose stealth. Have them maintain stealth means carrying less. Having too large internal bays makes them useless as fighters. Quite a fascinating conundrum there.
The problem with this logic is both that Russia's tank building philosophy is very different than the US's (or Israel's) and that tanks and defensive systems have also improved (significantly) in the last 20 years but the article glosses over that and uses a conflict from 16 years ago and the Ukraine invasion as "proof" that Javelins can kill modern tanks.
I think the article is very measured about its approach to the purpose and continued value of tanks, and the specific failing of the Russian army in Ukraine:
> The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver. Where is the accompanying infantry with the tank formations, who are supposed to bust the ambushes executed by Ukrainian forces? Where are the suppressive mortar, artillery, and close air support fires? If the Russian Army was tactically skilled, then the Javelin and other ATGMs would be suppressed by artillery or air support and their surviving crews would be swept up by Russian infantry. Thus far, these key competencies seem to be lacking and Russian soldiers are paying a high price for their unpreparedness.
So has reactive armour and systems like Trophy. This argument has been made for many decades at this stage. This isn't just about vulnerability. Infantry are vulnerable to practically everything, sometimes they just drop dead all by themselves. It's also about capabilities. What are you going to use instead, and how is it better?
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 sure the Russians have lots a lot of vehicles to ATGMs, they have proved to be extremely effective weapons, especially against tanks moving forward in tight formations without infantry support. However nobody is looking at the terrible infantry casualties Russia has suffered, due to poor tactics, training and resupply, and concluding that infantry are obsolete.
Here's a video of a Ukrainian tank ambushing a Russian convoy. Seems like a pretty effective weapon system to me.
Javelins are designed to be used for more than destroying armor, it has other selectable operating modes. They are being used by the Ukrainians against non-armor vehicles and as direct-fire weapons (US infantry uses this mode a lot). It also has a mode for helicopters.
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.
Yeah, an anti-tank missile would be a pretty bad example of its category if it couldn't destroy a tank.
The point is that a properly equipped, prepared and trained military would have taken steps to use assets like tanks well and not marched them into oblivion, and perhaps researched and developed countermeasures to what is clearly a popular anti-tank missile system.
Such a military would also have conducted reconnaissance by drone, scouts, satellite etc. and concluded from the data gathered that driving a tank into [area with lots of unpacked Javelin crates] would perhaps be impractical, and focused on eliminating the munitions before playing the tank card.
The tank can wipe out infantry and survive anything with less-than-anti-tank weapons, the Javelin user can kill the tank, the sniper can kill the Javelin, the counter-sniper can kill the sniper, the artillery strike or sustained covering fire by infantry can cancel out the counter-sniper, etc.
The point is that simply driving tanks into a city full of people with anti-tank missile launchers and a strong inclination to attack invading tanks is not a good idea without mitigating the risk.
The existence of an anti-tank missile launcher does not make the tank irrelevant. Fighter jets still fly despite the existence of anti-aircraft missile systems.
What makes war technology irrelevant is whether it is prohibitively expensive to replace, assuming non-zero odds that the unit will be incapacitated/destroyed.
This is especially true against an opposing military force that has large amounts of existing man-made or natural shelter and cover, high motivation, *and* supplies/support from multiple wealthy countries, etc. that basically doesn't have to spend because it's defending with whatever it has, tooth and nail.
That isn't really fair, it is comparing 90's American tech which has presumably been updated over time to, essentially, minimally maintained Soviet tech. Maybe that last 7% is the tanks they've made since ~1990.
What we're seeing is that low cost precision guided munitions can engage tanks from beyond their direct fire range. Within direct fire range they can be engaged by even lower cost munitions fielded by light infantry and light vehicles. The tank also suffers from requiring large amounts of fuel, making supply line strikes more dangerous to armored advances.
The first point is the big one, the future of ground forces may not be built around gunned vehicles. Drone swarms can threaten entrenched infantry, ATGMs can destroy tanks from a distance. A "dumb" artillery round costs $1,000 and is accurate to 20 meters, recent "smart" artillery rounds cost $140,000, a switchblade costs $6000.
Then the drone swarm meets this and one or the other survives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8 (As an aside, it always fascinates me that arms manufacturers not only create ads and brochures but that they're often done rather well.)
A lot of the breathless enthusiasm for drones seems premature. SAMs didn't make aircraft obsolete, air to ground missiles from aircraft and helicopters didn't make tanks and other vehicles obsolete, and there's doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that adjustments won't be made by the various militaries to provide protection against drones.
Armies will start deploying jamming effectively, cutting off the ability to control the drones. For some reason, the Russian army (which had a reputation for excellence in ECM/ECCM) has been completely ineffective in this area during it's invasion of Ukraine.
Extreme summary, blame me if I missed something obviously important - unsupported tanks will die to infantry or artillery and have done so since shortly after the inception of the tank. Tanks are actually pretty cheap compared to replacing a human, it costs quite a lot to raise a modern human. The tank role still exists, but ratios of tanks to other fighting vehicles may change.
$4M tanks are defeated by a $40K NLAW. Much like cuirassiers cavalry who were rendered obsolete by muskets becoming rifles with increased penetration, it's not because tanks don't works, it's because it's so cheap to kill one and so expensive to make one.
Until very recently, 2 guys hiding in a bush couldn't kill a tank, you needed a predator drone, an helicopter or some other advanced system requiring heavy logistics. Now behind every bush and every road corner is a potential enemy able to defeat you. With >90% kill ratio for javelins, the tanks needs to be lucky for weeks on end to survive, and the ATGM needs to be lucky only once.
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 when there is a physical limit on the armor+weight+cost+logistical support equation for tanks.
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.
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 no amount of cameras will completely offset that.
>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.
To what degree do you think that Russia's losses in Afghanistan led to the fall of the Soviet Union?
Since 1945, Russia hasn't shown that it can accept a war of mass casualties without political fallout. Russian military doctrine may say that it can, but Putin would be unwise to assume so.
Siege tanks are grouped with marines and firebats for protection, Marines and medics run with medics for assistance. Have your infantry out front. Move to a location, plant your troops, put your tanks in siege mode, rain hellfire down upon aerial defenses and approaching units so your Battlecruisers can come in with their Vulture and Wraith support to decimate a base.
It takes a village. You know, to destroy the other guys village. But still. Villages.
The Javelin can kill tanks from what distance, up to four kilometers? (Officially, less so, but the Ukrainians seem to be pulling off more distant hits than what the vendor documentation says.)
No realistic amount of infantry support can shield you against weapons with such a huge range. An entire army could, but that is obviously too much.
The point is that a soldier with a Javelin is a much less visible target than a big vehicle. Even if he runs just 40 meters away between the firing of the missile and its impact, any return fire aimed at the original site will likely miss him. And there can be a hundred of such Javelin-equipped soldiers in range.
Do you know what you call 100 Javelin equipped soldiers in a group? A target rich environment. The paper/rock/scissors idea would have mortars ranging down on that group in a flash. Try running away while humping 45lbs of gear while under mortar fire.
The tank would need to actually find the ATGM team though. It's relatively easy to detect a tank in the vicinity - they're loud and big. It's a bit tougher to spot a couple of guys in a bush (or in a ditch, or behind a wall, or in a thicket, or any number of hiding places)
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 ATGMs, sure, a tank can provide a lot of value - but it seems like a safe assumption that a modern adversary will have them. Does the value equation still work?
Not sure I agree the $8.9M cost of an M1 Abrams is 'cheap'
And you don't just have the cost of the tank - there's also the cost of all the logistics needed to get the tank to the battlefield, no matter where it is in the world - and then to feed it a constant supply of fuel, ammo, spare parts and repair.
War is terrible for people. I want to state that because sometimes people fixate on technical systems.
Tanks are expensive, missiles that can defeat tanks are cheap. But the question is, what is a replacement good for a tank? What fills the role? What is the role?
Does it take a platoon to replace a tank?
The lifetime value of a human is only going up. Most soldiers go on to take jobs and contribute to the economy of a nation.
You could think of a tank saving the lives of the 3 people inside it, or the lives of the 10 or 20 people it would take to fill the role if the tank was not available. You could think of the days, hours, or minutes of fighting it might save, which might translate to many more lives saved.
Also consider the political cost of loss of life.
I don't think it is AT ALL clear how to evaluate the relative costs here. One would have to consider the mission at hand and the value of that mission.
Now I'm really curious what the cost of a modern U.S. soldier is. Recruitment and acquisition, training, outfitting, salary, food, etc. And if you build a tank once then you can park it in a warehouse nearly in perpetuity, whereas I expect humans require much more upkeep to retain skills and replace from turnover.
I'm guessing the total lifetime cost of a trained soldier is less than $8.9M but I wouldn't be suprised to find that the figures are comparable in the end.
On that topic: why Russian tanks are so vulnerable to these missiles and explode spectacularly [1]. Basically the canon auto-loads shells, and the shell storage is not in a different compartment than the turret.
None of these articles seem to mention WHY the tanks are designed this way (although I admit I just searched for keywords).
As far as I know, it is because the current gen of Russian tanks were designed for how they envisioned WW3 40 years ago [1]. Basically the tanks would follow nuclear strikes, and making humans load the ammunition would make them die a lot quicker from radiation, so they made an autoloader.
The suggestion from this source[1] is that an autoloader makes the tank much smaller (harder to hit). He also claims being smaller makes them cheaper to produce. The intended use case was going to be somewhere in Europe, only 2-3 days from factory to front line. They were designed in an era before smart weapons. No amount of refactoring/refreshing on the current chassis is going to allow you to refactor out such a fundamental design choice.
I don't know if I buy that, I find it a lot more likely to be because russian tanks are significantly smaller than their western counter parts. I think it's a space saving measure.
The article I read it in (in independent Polish press, cannot find it now) said physical exertion makes you more susceptible to radiation, and cited figures around the weight of shells which are apparently quite heavy.
It doesn't, the autoloader is right in the crew compartment (which is the whole problem with munition cook offs killing the crew and ejecting the turret). The thing that keeps NBC out while the breech is open for loading is positive air pressure inside the tank.
This argument only makes sense if the turret is entirely unmanned.
Possibly that the higher number of crew & higher average effort means the internal resources can not last as long, and thus the NBC seal has to be broken sooner?
According to the wiki, an autoloader also improves smoke removal, which would also help maintain a safe NBC-isolated interior space.
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.
It depends on who you watch - on Russian telegram channels there's also an endless supply of videos where Ukrainian stuff blows up by missile, drone or captured intact.
It's a large-scale conflict so one can cherry-pick enough footage to support any narrative.
The Ukrainian tanks are Russian made, so would have exactly the same vulnerability. But the Ukrainians being mostly on the defensive and vastly outnumbered, I don't know that they rely on them as much Russia does.
The American Bradley stores rounds in a separate armored compartment behind the loader. If the compartment gets hit and the rounds cook off, the blast is redirected out the top of the tank away from the crew compartment which makes the vehicle much more survivable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Bradley: "The use of aluminum armor and the storage of large quantities of ammunition in the vehicle initially raised questions about its combat survivability."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams: "The M1 Abrams...introduced several innovative features, including a multifuel turbine engine, sophisticated Chobham composite armor, a computer fire control system, separate ammunition storage in a blow-out compartment"
In the Abrams shells are stored in a separate armoured compartment and are individually fed to the loader as needed. The loader might have a shell fed and in hand ready to reload the gun, so that's one shell in the compartment at the ready over the one loaded in the gun at any given time. There just isn't space for more shells lying around.
(In Russian, numeric determiners 2-4 place the noun in genitive singular and numeric determiners 5+ place the noun in genitive plural. One book, two of book, three of book, four of book, five of books.)
I think we will see the tanks in future battlefields still but rather than cannons they will be using more electronic warfare and will be providing indirect fire with "smart" weapons. Essentially they will be multi role armoured vehicles with high manoeuvrability e.g. (British Ajax Scout Vehicle)
Or my sci-fi'ish theory of a "drone tank"
Why?
* Governments have high demands from defence and at the same time want low costs.
* Military doesn't want an infantryman any more; they want a soldier who can perform several other roles. Same goes for vehicles.
* The concept of modular vehicles with the same chassis is becoming popular.
* Everyone who was taught or believed cold war military tactics is retiring or will be soon. So new doctrines will emerge.
Considering drones are more expendable than humans we're more likely to see high volume swarms of low cost, lightly armored drones. Armor will likely be reserved for any humans who need to be in close proximity to the firefight.
I'd imagine what you'll really have is a primary tank with a human "field support" technician/operator and a bunch of unnamed machines that are at the front doing most of the physical fighting. Humans are expensive and Russia (most Western countries really) was already suffering from a shortage of young workers.
I'd be shocked if canons went away though. The end goal of warfare is to cause enough chaos/destruction that your enemy's choices are constrained to what you want. Without physical violence there's no sense going out into the field in the first place.
The ultimate faraday cage match, where swarms of autonomous surface and air vehicles jam, cook, and subvert the circuits of the opposition into oblivion
> I think we will see the tanks in future battlefields still but rather than cannons they will be using more electronic warfare and will be providing indirect fire with "smart" weapons.
But why would such capabilities need to be installed on the heavy chassis of a tank?
Electronic warfare and smart weaponry benefit alot from mobility and redundant systems that can operate even when front-line-logistics are interrupted. Tanks offer neither, they are slow, hard to repair, and burn fuel like noones business.
The only advantage a tank offers is, well, being tank-y, and as modern ATGM systems have demonstrated in Ukraine, that advantage isn't what it used to be.
Reinforcement Learning will shine. From starcraft, even with all the handicaps, AlphaStar was capable of out maneuvering and outdoing humans in micro(management) without breaking a sweat! Now remove those limitations and let the stuff run on the hardware the US military has access to and you have a truly lethal swarm.
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 tank charges are probably dead and ww2 style combat is dead? We likely won't see anything like in desert storm or the Yom Kippur war again).
>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.
I did not work for the USMC and the strategic goals of the IDF (land defense, small area) are very different so I can't answer for sure. In many modern battle scenarios (specifically urban warfare scenarios) tanks aren't of much use so I totally see binning them in favor of better combined arms.
Also again: you are taking Russian armor survivability as proof for US armor survivability against the same threat. I totally get if you take my comments here with a (big) grain of salt because I can't provide citations and I'm not making any direct claims about US armor survivability against Javelins (and you'll note you won't find any videos/info online about that because of classification).
I read that the USMC ditched their tanks in preparation for a conflict with China in the South China Sea. In that environment, tanks don't really fit in an island-hopping scenario. In the place of the armor and aviation units they got rid of, they are looking at things like HIMARS systems. The U.S. Army on the other hand has kept it's tanks.
>> 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.
I saw some tanker on twitter explaining just how bad the Russian tactics with their tanks are. Poor training, poor logistics, and undermanned. Tanks get such poor gas mileage that they need tons of support. Extremely effective weapons when used properly but clearly Russia is not doing that.
Thr Turkish army lost a couple of top of the line Leopard 2s in Syria some years ago for the exact same reason: lack of infantry support.
Seems that the "West", spearheaded by the US, has the most experienced military in the world at the moment. 20 years of counter insurgency warfare and some more conventional wars before that seriously helped a lot. Just how much is at display in Ukraine, first by the, so far, Russian failures and second by the preparation and performance of the Ukrainians, which where supported, cinsulted and equiped by NATO for years by now.
There is an issue with that, being efficient in conter insurgency warfare doesn't necessarily translate into High Intensity warfare. Infantry support for armor is one, but things like maneuvers, operating under contested skies, EW, etc.
When were NATO troops under heavy sustained artillery barrages?
I m quite impressed by the attrition in both troops, ammo, and material. More than Wunderwaffen, i think the lesson is more in trained personel reserves, as well as stockpiles.
You mean reactive armor? The Leopard doesn't have active armor (or reactive like Kontakt-5 etc). It's been tested with Trophy APS, but the Turks didn't have that.
On the note of logistics, the turrrets on these lose their rifling after a few hundred rounds, they need to be replaced in field after this or they just become much less precise. Same with artillery.
I do not know for tanks, but for artillery, it tends to be much higher (few thousands) It is quite variable depending on if you re firing full charges, firing when the tube is hot, etc.
The only NATO tank with a rifled cannon is the Challenger 2. The Brits preferred HEASH ammo, a rifled cannon improved accuracy. It took some development to get HEAT and SABOTs that can be fired from a rifled cannon. No idea what the Russian tanks are using.
EDIT: Just looked, the T-72 has a 125 mm smoothbore cannon.
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.
> the need of protected offensive destructive power (a tank)
Offensive destructive power can be provided by air support, long range self-guiding weapons and drone weaponry as well.
I also don't believe that ATGMs mean "Tanks are already obsolete". But I do think they are under threat of becoming so, because: ATGMs will get better, as will drones. Meanwhile, a tank will always be a big hunk of metal moving comparatively slowly on the ground.
Air support is as vulnerable to MANPADs as tanks are to a Javelin, that's one of the (potential) reasons why neither side has air dominance over Ukraine. And long-range guided weapons are awfully expensive. And they need eyes on the ground. And they cannot carry infantry into battle, nor can infantry hide behind them.
EDIT: The point is that a tank will be made obsolete by weapon system that replaces the tanks function on the battlefield. And not by a system that can destroy a tank. Because those anti-tank systems exist since WW1. Initially the Germans were not that impressed by tanks, large caliber rifles and re-purposed field guns worked just fine against the first tanks the French and British used. Nobody stopped tank, or anti-tank weapon, development then so. I don't see a reason why anybody would stop tank development just because we have impressive Javelin footage. If anything, tanks will improve to increase protection against ATGMs and drones. As will tactics and doctrine.
> Air support is as vulnerable to MANPADs as tanks are to a Javelin
They are not, the fact the Russians have lost so many planes is a testament to their inability to suppress the Ukrainian air defense.
Fighters are capable of flying far higher than MANPAD ceilings the only reason to fly that low is to employ visually guided weapons under cloud cover or to attempt to hide behind the terrain against longer range air defense systems.
Both of these issues can be resolved. By suppressing the enemy long range air defense and by employing laser guided weapons along with ground based designators.
Also fighters can evade missiles, google f16 dodges 6 sams for an extreme example.
Is it really though? There are some really good active protection systems like Israel's TROPHY which do a pretty good job taking out incoming sabot style (tank shell, javelin, RPG) warheads. The modern incarnation[1] (M1A2 SEPv2) of the US Abrams tanks all have it
A sabot round is really two parts, right? You have the shaped charge that blows up exterior armor and then a small penetrator, generally the size and shape roughly of a pencil, that goes in and makes a tiny hole.
Active protection systems like Trophy are designed to pre-detonate that shaped charge so that they actual sabot penetrator just bounces off the normal armor, or is hit by ERA (explosive reactive armor). I'm sure APS work better against most ATGMs than sabots, but fundamentally, many of them are designed similarly. Sans maybe there are no depleted uranium ATGMs.
modern APFSDS rounds work purely through kinetic energy penetration and don't contain any explosive charge. The penetrator is usually around an inch in diameter, and maybe 30 inches long. I doubt Trophy can target these rounds effectively since velocity is just too high, something like mach 5 (compared to a javelin's paltry 140 m/s).
A TROPHY system wouldn't screw up the APFSDS round's bearing and structural stability? I know it's moving really fast, but how effective is it should the tip be broken off, or the round begin to tumble in flight before hitting the tank at a broadside angle?
IF the APS system (Trophy or Arena) could hit the sabot in time, yes, it would diminish its penetration capability substantially. Whether it can react fast enough to do so is doubtful. 3500mph projectiles are tough to counter. There have been plans to try to deflect it via armor so the tip gets shattered and the energy dissipated, but I'm not sure how effective that is with current armor tech.
I said sabot style… meaning explosive shaped charge to take out external armor, and usually a small (usually titanium) penetrator. An RPG just has the shaped charge aspect. Trophy was designed exactly to kill stuff like rpgs.
I also should have been clearer, there are other options. The Brits like this idea of HESH. This works against both tank armor (though less than APFSDS rounds) and fortifications alike. This way the tanks can carry just one type of armor instead o f having to manage a mix. HESH has persisted because the Brits like rifled barrels, and doing a sabot round with a rifled barrel has proven quite difficult.
Good essay. I would like to have seen a little history of Soviet/Pact/Russian thought besides American and Israeli. After all the Soviet Army was probably the most all in on tanks in the Cold War.
The way _Russia_ uses tanks has been dead... basically since 1972 and the advent of the A10. Here a $23 munition, fired quickly, could chew up an armor column. Don't forget the Javelin is still $250k, it's not exactly cheap.
Tanks must be supported by infantry teams. Without capable mortar teams, rifle teams, automatic weapons teams, they are sitting ducks, as Russia has proven.
Nope. Maybe slightly better than the SU-25s have, and Maverick etc might make them able to stand off a bit from all the manpads, but the A-10 would be an easy kill for any fighters/SAMS.
The gist of the article which I agree a lot seems to be.
Nothing has significantly changed since the 80s-90s, ATGMs have gotten better but they were still a huge problem back then and the solution seems to be the same, better recon, more artillery.
Drones don't represent something new but really precision strikes at a discount, capabilities only available to major powers once are now "buy off the shelf".
The TB-2 with a couple of MAM missiles does the same job as an f4 with a couple of walleyes.
The only difference being the f4 cost 2 million dollars in 1965 while the TB-2 costs 2 million dollars now.
Not even $2M. Have you seen the footage of the UA/TDF using civilian quadrotor drones to drop anti-tank hand grenades on vehicles? As long as the radio spectrum is open, these type of attacks will be very hard to stop.
Tell that to the tanks being destroyed as I described. These drones are dropping RKG-1600 grenades on to the top of Russia's top tanks and destroying them.
Something I've been thinking about is that with the emergence of weapons like the NLAW and Javelin, the Secret Service probably will have to rethink the security of the
US president.
I'm not sure the country of three hundred million guns needs advanced weapons. The President might be heavily secured, but as we saw on Jan 6 it's possible to overrun the security of Congress. Then there are all the various state buildings.
There are a lot of Americans who talk up the "right" to armed resistance against their government. There are also an alarmingly large number of mass shootings in America. It's almost surprising that these rarely overlap and you get people shooting up their school, university, a nightclub, or random people in Las Vegas rather than directed terrorism towards the actual government.
>but as we saw on Jan 6 it's possible to overrun the security of Congress
The Capitol Police, despite being both armed and trained to use their arms, inexplicably did not use their weapons until something like 90 minutes into the riot. The only fatality from the riot, one unarmed protester, was the result.
The Capitol Police is wholly under the control of Congress. Keep that in mind as you read this Time article <https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/>, which specifically discusses how leftist groups that also had planned protests at the Capitol that day were specifically told to stand down.
>On June 14, 2017, during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, Virginia, James Hodgkinson shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika. A ten-minute shootout took place between Hodgkinson and officers from the Capitol and Alexandria Police before officers shot Hodgkinson, who died from his wounds later that day at the George Washington University Hospital.[7][8] Scalise and Mika were taken to nearby hospitals where they underwent surgery.[9]
Hodgkinson was a left-wing political activist[10][11] from Belleville, Illinois, while Scalise was a Republican member of Congress. The Virginia Attorney General concluded Hodgkinson's attack was "an act of terrorism... fueled by rage against Republican legislators".[12] Scalise was the first sitting member of Congress to have been shot since Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011.[13]
In a 2021 report, the FBI classified the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism, and the perpetrator of the shooting as a "domestic violent extremist" with a "personalized violent ideology."
Unlike firearms, the critical and expensive part of these weapons is the round, not the launcher. And they're being used up at a huge rate.
What exactly is the worry scenario, that after the war is over the Ukranian state, newly forged in adversity, will immediately lose operational control over its units which will then decide they aren't imminently going to need these weapons for homeland defence, so they can sell them on the black market?
The gear is lying scattered on the ground everywhere. Total chaos - that's war. These weapons will be spirited away and sold to nefarious actors. Airlines, world leaders etc.
Trophy and similar weapons work by sending a cloud shard of metal shards in the direction of the target. Given that a presidential convoy will often be in the presence of large amounts of civilians, using active defense system may mean shredding a couple dozen voters (possibly on live television). I can't imagine many politicians being very happy about that.
I think DIY weapons would be the more dangerous threat btw. A sharpened stick on one of those racing drones could rest on top of (say) a small shack until the target comes by, then strike extremely quickly.
It's not so much for when it actually happens, but publicly driving around in a car that will kill bystanders when attacked is still a no-no from a PR perspective. Just imagine how many attack ads you could create off that one thing alone.
No need for heavy weapons, a pistol or a rifle and a picked time will still get you a decent shot at anyone in government. It's almost as if they're not actually scared of the population they live with. Its not like the President / etc are actually all that important. The Government is more than them, and will live on and continue doing the objectionable stuff regardless.
Huh?! Have you seen the security detail of the US president? They're very afraid of their citizens – or at least of the occasional nutjob. And rightly so, as evidenced by the various assassination attempts in the last decades.
> Its not like the President / etc are actually all that important. The Government is more than them, and will live on and continue doing the objectionable stuff regardless.
The US president is a very important symbol and therefore a potential target, even though the whole of the US government consists of much more than just that one person.
What if we don't actually hear about assassinations of people making actual decisions or their relatives? Like most people still believe Anders Breivik killed a bunch of random kids on the island, while in fact, many of them were children of prominent politicians
I don't think the article pays enough attention to drones. It does mention their importance, and the possibility that they will do away with armor altogether -- and then says, "well, we don't yet know if that's right, so tanks are probably still important." Seems to me that whether or not that is right is the big question.
> The 1967 Arab-Israeli War was the first conflict since World War II that saw the large-scale employment of tank formations on a mobile battlefield
Anyone with a mild knowledge of history knows about the huge tank battle that took place between India and Pakistan in 1965. Hard to take the article without any reference to that conflict.
People conclude that tanks (sometimes, armour in general) are obsolete because the most modern anti-tank weapons defeat exactly the 70s tanks they were designed to defeat in the 90s. If anything, when someone makes this point, it tells you they are clueless.
While the names of the Russian tanks deployed in Ukraine sound like the gear we grew up fearing during the Cold War (T-72/T-80 etc), they really aren't the same anymore than the M1 is still the same as first deployed in 1980.
For example, the T-72B3M Obr. 2016 is a thoroughly modern tank, though obviously based on the T-72. Modern fire-control, modern vision equipment, solid ERA, good cannon.
Where it is failing is in how it's being used, even ignoring the lack of appropriate infantry/artillery support. This is a tank that has thermal day/night sights (not IR spotlights). It should be able to see someone lurking with an NLAW or RPG, but they are continually being sniped.
So why? Well, perhaps the thermal sights suck, or were stripped out at depot by some corrupt quartermaster. Or perhaps the crews are so poorly trained they can't take advantage of them. Or perhaps a lot of the ATGM kills we see are abandoned vehicles that are just getting destroyed.
Also, during the 2014 Donbass war, the UA lost roughly 400 MBTs, the majority of which were lost to mortars and artillery, not ATGMs. We see the videos of the Javelin/NlAW strikes, but we don't see hardly as much artillery. Artillery is the king of war...
Most of this we won't know until the conflict has quieted down, and after action reports are gathered.
Tanks aren't obsolete by any means, but the reasons for the high losses are multivariate, a nd not due to old armor being destroyed by "modern" (30 year old Javelin) anti-tank weapons.
It's not that simple though, If you fired a a few Javelins against an Abrams with a Trophy system you'd still be at risk from one of the multiple shots over time. And even if the rounds don't cook off, if the EFP goes through the crew compartment, everyone is toast from blast wounds.
I think the main gun on an MBT will be replaced by rocket systems on smaller lighter, faster vehicles like the Boxer CRV family.
Edit just to add,
The secrets out that the idea behind Javelin and NLAW is sound. Expect there to be a proliferation of reasonably cheap weapons in this category being developed and built by everyone.
The secret has been out for 40+ years. The Sagger decimated Israeli tanks in the Sinai in 1973 until the IDF started using combined arms tactics. The TOW (and to a much lesser extent, the Dragon) gave NATO the ability to blunt a potential Soviet invasion of Europe. The Hellfire (and to a lesser extent, the TOW) dominated Iraq during the Desert Storm, and during the Iraq invasion in 2003. The Javelin itself is almost 30 years old in design.
The only reason we're hearing so much talk about the Javelin/NLAW is because of cheap cellphone videos capturing so much of the war in Ukraine. (And extremely poor Russian tactics...)
You can't sum up highly complex topics in one sentence? Shit! ;-)
On a more serious note, I would have counted the Russians in the group of competent armies. Maybe they were during the cold war, Afghanistan is not really a good measure. Maybe they were not, no way to ever find out. All being said, I'm happy that we never found out so far. Because one thing is sure, finding out involves turning whatever region is used to find out into a war zone.
I don't think you get much sustainability using guided rocket systems. You need something to shoot at suspected targets in bushes, windows and stuff and expensive rockets wont do. You will run out of them. Dumb ammo is plenty.
The Russian tank with the most losses in Ukraine is the T-72B3 obr.2016. This is the most recent variant of the T-72 that the Russians use (and started production in 2016) and has the same armour as the T-90MS which started production in 2017.
The only more advanced tank Russia has is the T-14, but it likely has less then 20 of those and due to the sanctions wont be able to make anymore, so its unlikely to be fielded in Ukraine.
Rah. USMC austerity is fundamental to the corps, from what is supplied to individual Marines, all the way up to expenditures on larger tactical equipment, with the notable exception of the Osprey.
No, it's because they need money for new tactical missiles, and standoff weapons.
And because US marines conceded on the idea of fighting China amphibiously. Honestly, the idea to take, and hold those tiny islandlets in the South Sea by force landing is ridiculous.
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No tank, or just anything will "live" if being sent into a know killbox, and Russians keep doing that repeatedly. This is what's happening in Ukraine now. Literally this: a clueless battalion sized force wades into a killbox, gets annihilated to last few men, next day, another battalion is sent to exactly the same spot...
Russians could've easily lost as much with modern, or other kind of military hardware than tanks.
Most Russian tanks were disabled by artillery, and missiles, not in tank vs. tank battles. No tank in the world would survive a 40kg missile, or an artillery shell hitting its roof. So, the quality of hardware is irrelevant.
Most of Russian military hardware losses are not from battles, but from soldiers routing, and abandoning their vehicles, which are LATER destroyed, or captured.
What is really telling is extremely low quality is the Russian military leadership.
The key here is to understand that losses do not come from 40kg missiles themselves, but from Russian generals knowingly sending their troops into ATGM, and artillery killboxes, and from Russian troops knowing their generals intentions, and acting accordingly (routing upon first battle damage)
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In the context of above, it's very clear that amphibious landing in the age of satellite reconnaissance, infrared optics, 100km artillery projectiles, and antiship missiles is not a smart way to wage war today
Modern war is no longer military show, resemble more criminal-based guerrilla. Traditional military technique can work or not much depending on combatant motivation more than mere material superiority.
Given that modern war should be centered toward war crimes, witch means using civilian stuff to disguise forces, mass kill people with poisoned water without damaging significantly the infra, use and abuse modern IT crap vulnerabilities do disable infra (like electric grid, connected vehicles etc) without physical damage, spread disinformation with the best possible ability etc.
That's why, for instance, in Ukraine Russia can't really arrive to a quick victory. Such immoral and criminal pattern is nothing new: WWI was a combat between armies, civilians are evacuated before combats, non-combatant on the front line was a bit respected etc, WWII change the game hitting civilians without any morale, hitting ambulances, putting military in hospitals etc. Now we do not even use State's official army preferring mercenaries with formally no flag and no code of conduct, engaging rule: "do what you want but win".
In such scenario try to be civil is not doable, the sole option is show equal behaviors, not encouraging criminals and violence per se, but mastering it to crush enemy forces and push civilians of all sides against the combatant because being unable to distinguish between them any unknown human being can be an enemy so a legit target for all sides.
Reaching such level of brutality means creating just bloodbaths where public opinion will rise at a certain point against the war itself. At that point no gear will work, the force of the crowd could not be stopped.
That's the modern strategy no one admit of course, but many practice shamefully.
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.
The US wants 2,456 F-35s that’s just a lot of freaking aircraft. It’s actually extremely well designed for this kind of combat. Stealth alone is overrated, but these things get to fight back and they don’t fight alone. Sam sites, manned or unmanned aircraft etc are targets. It’s exactly the same stupid expensive avionics and training programs that make the F-35 so expensive that make it effective.
The US can soften things up with cruse missiles and the F-22 or it’s successors, the F-35’s job is to crush what remains and it does that very well. Difficult enough to fight that you need expensive and therefore difficult to replace weapons systems while still being affordable enough to be plentiful.
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 drones? Sure. But unmanned fighters that can engage in A2A combat are non-existent. Most current drones have the performance of a Cessna 172.
How many AA missiles does an F-35 hold, 10? 20 Cessnas would certainly be able to take down a lone F-35 in favourable conditions. Quantity has a quality of it's own.
This is ridiculous. A Cessna 172 might be able to suicide into a parked F-35, but the idea that 20 would be able to engage it in a dogfight and win just shows a complete lack of aerospace knowledge.
Dogfighting is a thing of the past. 20 Cessnas approaching from different directions, with decently ranged AA missiles ( which is the point of the discussion, OP compared drone performances to a Cessna, and everyone is going in on the allegory, but the real question is if slow drones would be able to tackle an F-35, and the answer is it will depend on their armament, but probably) could overwhelm an F-35.
> 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).
Any SAM can shoot down any stealth fighter or bomber given the right conditions. Stealth isn't 100% invisibility. The US lost an F-117 in Bosnia due to both poor operational tactics and a clever foe.
You do realize that the S400 is just an upgraded S300, right? Hence it's original name of S300 PMU-3?
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 have the cheapest weapons available.
F-35 unit prices are not high and keep getting lower due to the sheer scale of production. Many 4.5 gen fighters are actually more expensive yet less capable than the F-35. Most anti-F-35 arguments are "informed" by the likes of Pierre Sprey.
Which systems are out there that are actually comparable to the JSF? Both the Eurofighter and the Rafale are one gen older (not sure if that actually matters that much so). Which leaves the Russian and Chinese planes, for which cost is hard to come by.
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.)
The AIM-54 Phoenix was used 2 times with exactly zero kills, because of ID concerns[1]. You don't just go around firing missiles to radar tracks you can't identify.
[1] by the US, Iran has used it more with more success.
The article you linked makes it sound like sensor and rocketry failures on some platforms that were retired 15 years ago, nothing to do with a general fear of BVR missile use. Also I believe the willingness to engage unidentified radar tracks has more to do with the nature of the conflict. I doubt the same restraint would be shown in a war against a near peer foe.
Roughly, because the stealthier an aircraft is the less maneuverable it an be. Also, you need ammunition for a dog fight, which is mostly carried on the wings negating any stealth characteristics. And large internal bays make an aircraft less maneuverable.
There was not a lot of air-to-air combat between near-peer air forces going on in the last decades, was there? What little air combat we had was between top notch fighters and crew, supported by AWACS and all the fancy stuff that comes with it, against badly trained and coordinated almost obsolete fighters. Anti-air systems were the main concern.
> Are there any air superiority combat drones operational yet?
From what I have seen reported every major player is working on "loyal wingmen".
Autonomous drones that would fly along manned aircraft. That way you supposedly get the best of both worlds, the situational awareness and judgement of a human along the expendability of a drone.
Yes I know everyone wants such drones, but AFAIK nobody has them other than a few prototypes. Developing a prototype far enough to get to an fully operational platform (including things like logistics, training the operators and mechanics, developing doctrines, etc etc etc) can take decades.
Finland also just recently signed a deal for 64 F35s after several years of research and comparing alternatives. I'm fairly confident that if there was some significant problem, they would have picked something else.
No offense but there's a huge difference between tiny Finland and pretty small Alaska and the giant Canadian North. Finland has a large border shared with Russia but it's nothing compared to the massive mostly undefended coastline along the arctic ocean that Canada shares with Russia. An absolutely potentially huge operating theatre.
It might need a landing parachute on short or icy runways. The other concerns mentioned is that stealth is compromised with drop tanks which are needed for range. There might be other concerns?
Question: how many Anti-Tank-Guided-Missile systems are used in street crime, robberies, domestic violence, or accidents involving civilians, per year?
Don't get why you're being downvoted - as a half-Croat I completely understand your point (for the non-Balkan people: former Yugoslavia is your to-go source if you need any kind of weapon if you can't get one legally, there is an enormous amount of stuff from the 90s wars floating around).
In the end we are at a trade-off situation: Either we don't send weapons to Ukraine and let Putin take over, raze the country and genocide off the population (they are already setting up "filtration camps" and forcibly relocating Ukrainians to Siberia [1]), and risk that the Baltic states or Poland becomes the next target for Putin. Or we send weapons to Ukraine, blow the invasion forces to pieces, and risk that the weapons will be sold off later on to the highest bidders.
Personally I prefer the latter: no one should be forced to live under Putin's dictatorship and the post-WW2 world order was explicitly created to condemn Nazi-style landgrab operations. If the price of that will be that some ammo gets diverted off to some other warlord, that's bad but acceptable because the alternative is so much worse.
Good point, I just thought on the impact of the weapons in overall low-level criminality or regional conflicts, but I guess if enough Stingers [1] spill around it could have serious consequences on the safety of air travel all around.
The IFF system of the Stinger weapon system is surprisingly robust, and non-trivial to circumvent. It essentially prevents you from locking on to any vehicle equipped with an IFF transmitter (meaning if you point a western-made Stinger at a western commercial aircraft, it won't let you fire at it). As such, I doubt there will be any significant impact from "unsecured" Stinger systems floating around, though that does not negate similar consequences from non-IFF-equipped weapon systems.
Look at the former Yugoslavian countries. The German right-wing terror group "NSU" is suspected to have used weapons from that area [1], the Charlie Hebdo and Paris terrorists did the same [2].
It is entirely reasonable that, similar to the aftermath of the 90s wars, weapons from Ukraine will turn up in every major conflict zone - especially because the current supply from the Balkan is all 30 years old decrepit shit, whereas Ukraine (rightfully) got the very best of the best of Western weaponry.
The stuff the NSU was using can be bought either at Munich main train station (if you know who and how to ask) or just across the Polish border. They used a single Makarov, mostly. And those were basically available for a 5 DM back when the Soviets retreated from the former DDR.
Lighter wheeled gun armed vehicles can be cheaper, but they don't have the survivability. They also can't go everywhere a tracked tank can go, such as jungle busting or just driving right through many kinds of buildings or cover. Missile have much longer flight times to target than gun rounds. A tank can move into position, fire, destroy it's target and be back in cover before a missile gets anywhere near it's target. The missiles are also vastly more expensive than tank rounds.
Yes tanks are vulnerable when not properly integrated with air support, artillery and infantry. They're still a lot more survivable than pretty much anything else that can provide the same capabilities though. One tank in the second Gulf War shrugged off 14 RPG hits, and overall tanks in that conflict amply proved their value, when used effectively.