On Killing Tanks (2020)

https://mwi.usma.edu/on-killing-tanks/

by belter • 4 years ago

37 91 4 years ago

mwi.usma.edu

q_andrew• 4 years ago

I find the asymmetry of force in vehicle combat very interesting. If a single foot soldier can take out a tank that costs millions of dollars, is it even worth using a tank? Obviously there are tactics to avoid this but I bet it's a pain in the ass to out-maneuver.

spacemanmatt2• 4 years ago

Generally, yes, and tanks usually roll with air support if not also infantry. Russia's neglect of this armchair-strategist type knowledge is making headlines.

hef198984• 4 years ago

Tanks without infantry support are basically just targets. Especially in urban environments, the Turkish army showed that quite impressively in Syria (?) by loosing a couple of Leopard 2s.

sofixa5• 4 years ago

The Russians supposedly had a tank chassis with soft weapons ( machine guns, small cannon, grenade launchers) on top, to accompany tanks in urban environments, specifically due to lessons from Checnhya about the vulnerability of tanks against infantry defenses, especially in urban environments - BMPT. Supposedly the idea was to have them accompany tanks and support them. In reality, they are nowhere to be seen

josefresco• 4 years ago

I'm no expert but ....I guess it's similar to an aircraft carrier. Alone it's massively vulnerable from asymmetric attacks, but when properly protected can be powerful and effective.

liotier• 4 years ago

Yes. As in paper/rock/scissors, vulnerability is only part of the story. Glass has huge compressive strength but fails under very low tensile stress, diamond is the hardest material but will shatter easily under a (large) hammer...

cf141q53253• 4 years ago

To be fair, the protection in this case is the threat of retaliation.

simmonmt• 4 years ago

The same argument applies to airplanes, but both airplanes and tanks have certain advantages that on balance exceed the risk of them getting blown up.

cf141q53253• 4 years ago

It doesnt. Modern military aircraft fly too high for MANPADs (shoulder fired ones like Stinger). You require actual air defense systems, and new ones at that. Extremely pricey, restricted and very big.

I would also argue that the advantages of tanks no longer apply when you face anything but non state backed rebels, especially in urban environment. Syria showed it rather well with the few TOWs that the US provided to the rebels.

With drones it became check mate. All they are are giant defenseless targets, just look at Azerbaijan. They are not much use for anything but crushing civilians.

jeffreyrogers• 4 years ago

One on one a single soldier can take a tank, but war isn't one on one. First there isn't going to be one tank. There's going to be a bunch. The tanks are basically immune to small arms fire. Not true of an infantryman who is vulnerable to pretty much everything. So the guy with the Javalin has to steel his nerves while he hears the tanks coming towards him, then he has to pop up to take his shot and hope no one sees him and kills him. Then, even if he's successful he still might get killed afterwards. The tanks usually have infantry support as well. The article talks about the Javelin having greater range than infantry, but I doubt that is true in an urban environment (too many buildings).

spywaregorilla4• 4 years ago

The videos I've seen, which, probably do suffer from selection bias of what is filmable, show ukranians blasting tanks from extremely far away. Far away enough that I would reckon the tank drivers had no practical way to observe, or even counteract against the infantry,especially if they're under some amount of cover and hidden until they strike.

The guidance on these weapons seem very impressive. Most attacks seem to be hitting the tanks while they're on a highway.

The russian tanks are shitty, and have no infantry support. So its hard to draw conclusions about how his would work against a competent foe.

yyyk3• 4 years ago

The soldier's anti-tank missile also has costs, and it usually misses or hits without destroying the tank (or taken out by anti-missile active defence). When you add all these up, it turns out the tank/missile cost equation is close to balanced.

The tank's problem is less that it's vulnerable to anti-tank missile, but its high visibility, now relatively weak weapons and vulnerability to air assets (which is also high visibility again).

hnaccy• 4 years ago

The claimed kill rate for Javalin in practice is over 90%.

NLAWs are even cheaper and easier to use but don't know their estimated kill rate.

chipsa4• 4 years ago

Anti-missile active defense (Active Protection System) is still in it's infancy, especially with respect to tank based defenses. Many of them only work against direct attack, not top-attack missiles, and it's also common for them to effectively attack as giant shotguns to destroy the incoming target, which is bad for nearby infantry. They're also expensive, have sensors that must be maintained to be effective (which are sensors that can get shot at before the ATGM is launched), and can potentially be depleted in a specific sector of attack.

R0b0t1• 4 years ago

Tanks help anchor infantry to the front line. They are mobile fortification. But they are more for open field combat than for urban combat. You're not the only one seeing tanks as partially obsolete. Force projection via planes is typically much more important.

weinzierl2• 4 years ago

If a single foot soldier can take out a tank that costs millions of dollars, is it even worth using a tank?

A foot soldier with a weapon that costs a tenth of a million to fire. The asymmetry is given in Ukraine because they have enough Javelins but I doubt it exits to that degree in any conflict.

spywaregorilla4• 4 years ago

Ehh I think that's not quite right. A javelin costs a tenth of a million to fire, but you can just hand a few shots to a guy and send him on its way. As I understand it, it's pretty easy to use.

A russian T-90 costs ~$5M to buy, but also requires a crew of ~3 trained people, plus munitions, plus a good deal of fuel, and logistics support to move it around.

The asymmetry in Ukraine is first and foremost Russia having way more troops to burn. Economic and manpower held equal, rocket infantry certainly seem like they have a higher return than tanks on total operating costs

ineedasername• 4 years ago

They are still effective if deployed correctly. That entails using a "combined arms" approach where the tank is supported by infantry, stationary artillery, advanced recon, etc. Aerial support from helicopters can be very useful in spotting and taking out tank killing teams, although they have their own vulnerabilities: if the opposition has javelins they also probably have some type of SAM. But that's where recon and good Intel along with infantry come in: address the threats to heavy hitters like tanks and air support so those heavy hitters can do their job.

It's hard to know exactly what's gone wrong for Russia in Ukraine, but the reports we're getting point to a huge failure to properly implement combined arms & close support tactics. It seems Russia either didn't anticipate the need-- thought they'd flatten their way to Kyiv so fast it didn't matter-- or their forces consist too much of undertrained non-professional conscripts. The conscript tour of duty in Russia is really too short to hammer home complex tactics and discipline for this sort of thing. 12 months is just too little time to game out the variety of scenarios they might encounter, and so when the one they were (presumably) trained for in this invasion meets initial resistance they don't know how to react. And that's before the logistics issues enter into things... Unfortunately that means Russia may fall back to simply bombing things to rubble and picking up the pieces. It looks like their plan was to take the country & install a friendly government fast enough to keep infrastructure and cities mostly intact, but now that that has failed it looks like they're moving towards the "rubble" approach which does not require the same level of ground training and tactics. Air superiority and long range artillery by Russia can do that.

TekMol2• 4 years ago

I am surprised Ukrainians do not use remotely controlled mines.

I don't know anything about weapons. Would it be hard to create a detonator that is remote controlled?

Then one guy - let's call him the controller - could watch over a street in which a bunch of mines with such detonators are buried. As soon as an enemy vehicle is over the position of such a mine, the controllers selects it on his app and destroys the vehicle.

If the signal can be sent over a distance of - say - 100m or more, then that would be a very comfortable way of defense against tanks, wouldn't it?

spacemanmatt2• 4 years ago

My guess: It's just not worth trying to guess/hope where a tank will roll over your mines.

kspacewalk2• 4 years ago

I am surprised Ukrainians do not use remotely controlled mines.

They do use mines, not sure if remote controlled. E.g. https://twitter.com/nashaniva/status/1503762953148919809

TekMol2• 4 years ago

But then you have to either put it there shortly before an enemy vehicle will pass it, or you have to somehow make sure no friendly vehicles will ever pass it.

sklargh4• 4 years ago

This sort of exists but there is no network element as you’ve described. These are called off-route mines. They’re far cheaper than guided missiles but you need to accurately predict where the target will be. You’d also need to be much closer than you’d typically be with a rocket or missile.

Also see IEDs with EFPs, but I wouldn’t want to have a cell phone emitting on a battlefield.

hef198984• 4 years ago

Why use an app if a wire does the same job and doesn't need 5G? Just ask the Iraqi insurgents, it works quite well. And why do you think the Ukrainians are doing that? It seems they holding themselves quite well so far.

dboreham• 4 years ago

Tanks are heavily armored underneath.

You can only set a mine off once.

chrisseaton• 4 years ago

Tanks are heavily armored underneath.

Not a truthful statement.

They have very little armour underneath, and what they have is just basic metal - nothing technical. They have armour in the front, primarily.

https://i.redd.it/4enb88un2de71.jpg

This was a big problem in Afghanistan, and why vehicles designed urgently in that era look completely different to what we were using before.

njarboe• 4 years ago

What you are describing is what was called an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in the US/Iraq war[1]. Very effective against a superiorly equipped invading force. Works great against lightly armored vehicles like fuel trucks.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device

krisoft2• 4 years ago

It doesn't have to be improvised.

Some armies have what they call "off-route mines". They are essentially a shaped charge projector coupled with a triggering mechanism. If employed by the kind of folks who care about civilian casualties there are smarter triggering mechanism which are unlikely to be triggered by someone walking by, or even driving by in something less heavy than a tank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=praws6uM--A

knolan• 4 years ago

This would seem to be a better response to an occupying force which must patrol captured land, as per Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now it seems the difficult terrain is doing a lot of immobilisation making them sitting ducks.

krisoft2• 4 years ago

I am surprised Ukrainians do not use remotely controlled mines.

What makes you think they don't?

If the signal can be sent over a distance of - say - 100m or more, then that would be a very comfortable way of defense against tanks, wouldn't it?

Nothing is comfortable in a war.

ahepp2• 4 years ago

My understanding is it’s fairly easy to detect and jam this kind of signal

fasteddie31003• 4 years ago

I think tanks are becoming a liability more than an asset in modern combat. I personally would rather be an infantry member with an e-bike, a personal recon drone, and a long range rifle.

hef198984• 4 years ago

Until you encounter tanks supported by helicopters and infantry.

Ourgon6• 4 years ago

OK, add some rocket launchers or drone-bombs to the equipment to take care of those. Manned tanks will go the way of the dodo, they are too vulnerable. The same will probably happen to carrier groups once hypersonic projectiles are common and accurate enough.

selectodude2• 4 years ago

Tanks are an asset in a lot of situations. Most nations don't go to toe to toe with tanks against Javelin missiles or NLAWs. It's important to remember though that NLAWs are like $30,000 per shot. Javelins are like $200k/shot. Most nations don't have hardware like that.

Ourgon6• 4 years ago

It is still cheaper to blow up an adversary's hardware with those than it is to fight them with your own tanks.

falcolas• 4 years ago

Such an infantryman would be quite vulnerable to a tank. Out sped (tanks can go > 80kph on terrain even fat-tired e-bikes would balk at), out gunned (excluding the cannon, there's also typically an anti-personnel mounted machine gun), out ranged (tanks can hit over 8k away), and without the anti-tank missiles, unable to damage a tank.

It's why tanks came into being in the first place; they're quite capable against the average infantryman.

bell-cot3• 4 years ago

Back in WWII, the U.S.'s Sherman tanks were somewhat infamously vulnerable to late-war German anti-tank weapons (and the German tanks' main guns). But soldier casualty rates were far, far higher in U.S. infantry units than in U.S. armored units.

neonate• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/tvKzW

perlgeek• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/tvKzW since the original URL doesn't load right now.

sklargh4• 4 years ago

I don’t think the the utility of a tank is completely obviated. At a minimum, a heavy force needs them to assault and breach at speed under fire. The Russians are not exactly offering a tour de force in optimal support of their heavy armor. I will take their user error in favor of the good guys but don’t want to draw a broader lesson about the utility of the tank quite yet.

120mm cannon rounds are cheaper and more plentiful than guided missiles, which means a lot.

That said, it’s getting harder and harder to understand a scenario in which tanks can be employed successfully against a motivated, competent defender with plentiful ATGM and loitering munition stocks.

kitrose• 4 years ago

Works great while your infantry platoon has the missiles to pop one or two unsupported.

If they are in force then you get rolled.

sklargh4• 4 years ago

Yeah a well employed heavy armor element, particularly supported by dismounted infantry and SHORAD is going to stomp an infantry element that has exhausted anti tank rocket/missile stocks. Not debating that for a second.

lmilcin2• 4 years ago

I don’t think the the utility of a tank is completely obviated.

The whole point of tank, as the word suggests, is to be able to survive enemy fire.

With proliferation of easy to carry weapons that can pierce any tank it is largely relegated to being heavy, costly and fragile mobile cannon that needs a lot of support to stay alive. There are much better devices that can fill those roles.

You should no longer assume that you can ambush anything with your tanks -- with live overhead feed it is easy to spot any tanks encroaching on your position and place any antitank in the right spot.

And then you have drones that you can basically point and shoot any tank from.

I am pretty sure this is the last war where we see large number of tanks involved. Every country that is watching this is click spamming to buy as many drones as possible.

ethbr04• 4 years ago

Tanks have always co-evolved against their threats. The reason top armor is weak is because the primary threat when the bulk of these designs were originated (60s/70s) was from other tanks or direct-fire guns. Precision indirect fire munitions weren't yet a major threat.

So, when you're rearchitecting a tank today, you're going to protect it against the now-dominant threats.

At its base, a tank is a propulsion system, a gun, and a set of survivability options.

The first two are always going to be relatively expensive, in quantity. So the last gets defined and scaled to meet the expected threat.

ethbr04• 4 years ago

Acoup's trench warfare series(?) had an excellent note re: armored vehicles. That dug-in (non-mobile) infantry was extremely difficult to dislodge (in the strategic sense, even if employed as a defense in depth tactically) but infantry out in the open was much more vulnerable.

And by definition, infantry must be out in the open as it advances; distinct from when it defends.

Consequently, the purpose of armored vehicles (tanks, APCs/IFVs, SPGs) is not to trump infantry, but to provide the minimal survivable armor for the soldiers inside to allow them to advance.

And toss firepower on there, because why not, if you've already got an engine?

So, as ugly as the fact is, the important thing is a tank's utility to survive long enough to support an advance. Not survive against all odds.

openasocket3• 4 years ago

And, just like how infantry have to use cover and concealment to move on the battlefield, tanks do as well. Tanks like to be in a position where they are well covered and only the turret is exposed, called the hull-down position: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull-down

belter2• 4 years ago

By the contrary, according to the article and the latest data, Tanks have the advantage. It's just, fortunately, Russian incompetence and Ukrainian combat skill we are seeing.

“Trophy exceeded our expectations,” said Col. Dean. “Unlike prior APS tests…we were shooting actual threats at actual vehicles. I’m happy to say I kept trying to kill an Abrams tank about 48 times and failed every time.”

https://breakingdefense.com/2017/10/army-accelerates-armor-s...

sklargh4• 4 years ago

I agree with the first paragraph’s notes on Russian incompetence and Ukrainian capability. I said as much.

APS is a must but it’s not a panacea. You need to emit, detect and survive a second or third shot. I expect loitering munitions are probably outside of most APS system’s velocity gates+engagement envelopes. I also wonder how survivable and jam resistant APS sensors are.

Finally the way this guy is talking about it…it sounds a little too good to be true.

Again, not discounting APS, the Israelis do this for real - APS makes the problem harder but not unsolvable.

mgarfias• 4 years ago

What about spider tanks?

ruddct• 4 years ago

Reminds me of a trip to the DPRK side of the Korean DMZ a few years back. As you close in on the DMZ the roads get narrower, then narrower, then you start to see brutalist-looking concrete sidewalls, sculptures, & overhead signs all over the place.

We all thought they were sculptures (there's a lot of brutalist concrete in the DPRK). Turns out they're tank traps! You can see a few pics at the top of this article[0], they're pretty neat.

[0]https://99percentinvisible.org/article/hostile-terrain-tank-...

EDIT: Looks like South Korea may have these near the DMZ too!

tyingq2• 4 years ago

Page from an old book showing some different types of tank traps:

https://www.militaryimages.net/media/tank-traps.112392/full?...

openasocket3• 4 years ago

I don't think tanks are going away anytime soon. Nothing else offers the same degree of mobility, armor, and firepower. Sure, a Javelin is cheaper than a tank, but a bullet is cheaper than a soldier and we don't talk about infantry being obsolete. People think of tanks as just lumbering around the battlefield shooting at targets, but they employ fire-and-maneuver tactics the same as infantry. So in combat a tank will be moving from cover to cover, with additional tanks providing suppressive fires from protected positions. Tanks don't move around on their own, they are always fighting as part of at least a platoon (a platoon is 3-4 tanks depending on the country) of other tanks, and almost always with infantry support.

I think improvements in APS and maybe some new reactive armor will be enough to keep the balance between ATGM and tank more or less in the same place it was in the 1980s.

jpmattia3• 4 years ago

I used to work on infrared imagers long ago in the late 80s, so I still sometimes notice obscure technical details about IR. Many modern anti-tank weapons were designed back in the 90s and then battle-tested over the next decades. So like aircraft and spacecraft, a lot of the electronics is quite antiquated by modern standards.

For example: The Javelin shoulder-fired missile that we are currently reading about in Ukraine was put into service in the late 90s. It finds its way to the target using an infrared focal-plane array with a resolution of 64x64 [1]. Part of the reason that the resolution is so small: A room-temperature object will have peak E&M radiation around 8-12 microns, and mercury-cadmium-telluride imagers were optimal for that wavelength range in the 90s. However, processing of the materials was pretty difficult back then, so 64x64 was pretty much all you could manage while achieving a usable yield.

Eventually the current generation will be replaced, and that will presumably include a serious upgrade to the IR resolution. It's hard to imagine that won't affect the usefulness of tanks in the coming decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin#Focal_plane_ar...

tyingq2• 4 years ago

It does seem like high resolution would make a big difference. If you look at pictures of tanks that are pretty fully covered with reactive armor, there are still lots of gaps of varying sizes for things like hatches, view ports, exhaust, between reactive armor modules, and so on. So a high res focal plane could direct the weapon into one of many sweet spots.

chipsa4• 4 years ago

I think the point of higher resolution isn't to necessarily hit the sweet spots, but rather to better improve countermeasure rejection.

livueta2• 4 years ago

Sorry if this is a dumb question:

Reading your link, it sounds like the HgCdTe-based FPAs are primarily an electrochemical thing, akin to the microchannel plate approach of traditional analog image intensification.

My impression of more modern IR-spectrum imaging (Teledyne/BAE/L3 stuff) was that it is basically a bolometer sensor behind vanadium/germanium-doped glass, then somehow hooked up to a cmos sensor.

So, modern sensors are still partially based in an electrochemical process, just a different one that's more amenable to improvements in manufacturing process or something?

I'm thinking of some of the new stuff that can deliver 1920x1080 60hz output - that'd definitely help with targeting.

jpmattia3• 4 years ago

it sounds like the HgCdTe-based FPAs are primarily an electrochemical thing

HgCdTe is a semiconductor like Si or GaAs, but it has a much smaller bandgap.

My impression of more modern IR-spectrum imaging (Teledyne/BAE/L3 stuff) was that it is basically a bolometer sensor

Bolometers rely on heating. HgCdTe (& CMOS imagers) rely on photon generation of electron-hole pairs, which is an altogether different mechanism.

behind vanadium/germanium-doped glass

The most common reason for putting Ge in front of an IR imager is to filter out more energetic photons (ie, visible light), since those will also be detected by most IR imagers.

I'm thinking of some of the new stuff that can deliver 1920x1080 60hz output - that'd definitely help with targeting.

Yes. State of the art is UHD, eg https://www.teledyneimaging.com/en/aerospace-and-defense/pro... The issue will be the product cycle, which for the military is extremely long.

tlavoie• 4 years ago

Is this also why civilian IR devices are typically slow and/or very low resolution, or alternately very expensive?

My fire department thermal imaging cameras are a few thousand CAD. A smaller, palm-sized one from FLIR is several hundred dollars, but the frame rate is very low. I have a Seek model that plugs into my phone, and while very inexpensive, it's definitely at the tail end of capability. (Still fun though.)

In comparison, I have had a tour of a medical transport helicopter, and got to try the pilot's NVG goggles. It's light intensification rather than IR, but an impressive upgrade from the Starlight scope I got to use in the 80s.

jpmattia3• 4 years ago

Is this also why civilian IR devices are typically slow and/or very low resolution, or alternately very expensive?

I haven't followed the professional/consumer market in IR, but as a general statement: The materials systems that you need for IR imaging are different than the CMOS imagers used for visible light (ie, silicon). The IR materials don't have anywhere near the economic or manufacturing scale, so I'd expect that you'll pay more for IR imagers, or will have to accept lower resolution/frame rates.

alksjdalkj• 4 years ago

I feel like most commenters here didn't read the article - in many cases a single soldier /can't/ take out a modern tank because of their active protection systems.

belter2• 4 years ago

Yes, that is the premise of the article. And even a whole team with several missiles might not defeat some of these systems. It seems the Russians did not deploy their tanks with these. I wonder if that is what Russia requested from the Chinese. They seem to have a system whose capabilities are untested so far.

bell-cot3• 4 years ago

Properly employed, tanks are a weapon of fast movement, maneuver, and rapid exploitation of breakthroughs. German commanders spent most of the Battle of France (1940) in a semi-panic over how many tanks they were losing. By the end, 1/3 of all the tanks the German Army started the battle with were total losses, and another 1/3 were "out of action, awaiting major repairs".

Tank-for-tank, the French tanks very clearly out-performed the German tanks.

But France was still conquered.

On Killing Tanks (2020)

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