On Killing Tanks
mwi.usma.edu
mwi.usma.edu
After the surrender, when the Serbs drove their undamaged tanks home, the "look how many you missed" attitude missed the point. They were undamaged because they had effectively suppressed, and hidden in underground car parks, etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia
You think you're fixing them - but really are they fixing you?
Also, it needs to keep an engine running to power its sensor and comms suite.
The wiki page you link even spells it out. They air campaign destroyed an order of magnitude less, maybe even as few as 3 tanks. They hit decoys or fuck all. Far from levelli g the playing field ethinic cleansing rate increased as the air campaign was waged.
The Kosovo air campaign was one of the most total an utter failures of recent times yet people still try and paint it as a success. Unbelievable.
The Wikipedia article [1] confirms the ninety-three figure.
"When it came to alleged hits, 93 tanks...were believed to have been disabled or destroyed with certainty.
The Department of Defence and Joint Chief of Staff had earlier provided a figure of 120 tanks...and a Newsweek piece published around a year later stated that only 14 tanks...had actually been obliterated...not that far from the Yugoslavs' own estimates of 13 tanks... However, this reporting was heavily criticised, as it was based on the number of vehicles found during the assessment of the Munitions Effectiveness Assessment Team, which wasn't interested in the effectiveness of anything but the ordnance, and surveyed sites that hadn't been visited in nearly three-months, at a time when the most recent of strikes were four-weeks old."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia#Mil...
Winning a war isn't about killing your enemies... It's about achieving your goals. You can't deny they were fully achieved, solely with air power. To me it sounds like anything but a defeat.
It is often psychologically more appealing to win battles rather than achieve long term goals. For instance someone wants to get to work faster, but instead they get in a fist fight with the driver in the car ahead of them because the driver was driving too slow.
Clausewitz hit the nail on the head when he said, "war is the continuation of policy by additional means". A rational strategy uses battles to achieve policy goals. Losing a battle by minimizing your own losses to win a war is rational with that context.
- In German "Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln" Politik with all its varied meaning: often translated into english as politics or policy or political.
If they tried to use the equipment to the fullest, they'd just lose it, as Saddam tried in 1991, and result would have been pretty much the same. In a way, it even benefitted Americans because it couldn't be told that they won the war by massacring Serbs (hardly 500 of Serbian military plus about same number of civilians were killed - if they tried to properly operate their military equipment it would be destroyed along with crews and mean a lot higher casualties).
Targeting a state owned radio and TV station is well with in the laws of war assuming of course the the radio/TV station is actively aiding the war effort. In this specific case NATO targeted this radio/TV building because it acted as an important command and control node to transmit orders to Serbian military forces.
You can read more about it in the U.N.'s report on the investigation of possible NATO warcrimes in the Kosovo war: 'Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia'
This report also claims with regard to targeting of power facilies
"74. Of the electrical power transformer stations targeted, one transformer station supplied power to the air defence co-ordination network while the other supplied power to the northern-sector operations centre. Both these facilities were key control elements in the FRY integrated air-defence system."
>Both of those things would cause uproar in the US media if an opponent of US geopolitical interests did them.
Russia and the Syrian targeted hospitals regularly for years and while it get coverage people in the US didn't care much able it. Hospitals are the most protected category of civilian infrastructure according to the laws of armed conflict and Russia bombed them so often there is a wikipedia article about it[1].
[0]: https://www.icty.org/sid/10052#IVB4
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93Syrian_hospita...
The winner / the stronger can stretch the fact and the criteria. I'm sure some Bin Laden people considered all the 9/11 targets as legitimate. This still doesn't make neither 9/11 nor deliberate bombing of civilian targets in Serbia right.
>Russia and the Syrian targeted hospitals regularly for years and while it get coverage people in the US didn't care much able it.
Probably true, but I'm just talking about the media uproar, whether or not the uproar had much effect among the US public.
The idea that targeting civilian infrastructure is ok because that infrastructure is also being used to support an opponent's military effort seems to me like a slippery slope.
The air campaign did nothing. Boots on the ground saved lives.
NATO ground forces showing up, ended the conflict.
Strategic bombing didn’t have the effect on German production that annoying would have predicted. Nor did it on Iraq in the first gulf war. I think it had some efficacy against the Japanese shipbuilding capacity but am not certain. Certainly it had no effect on Japanese support for the war effort right up to the day the Emperor gave his famous 1945 radio address.
You missed the OP brilliant point, NATOs mission was to force Serbs to retreat and to stop tanks from wreaking havoc, NATO doesn't care that Serbia now has some 1960's tanks.
>>Far from levelli g the playing field ethinic cleansing rate increased as the air campaign was waged.
As if Serbs were gonna stop voluntarily
It completely failed in the objective.
However, the second NATO put boots on the ground the Serbs pulled out.
The air campaign was a total failure. Complete, abject, failure.
2. NATO attempted to use solely air power to stop them
3. Whilst the NATO air campaign was underway incidents of ethnic cleansing increased, not decreased
4. When NATO changed strategy and deployed land forces Serbia withdrew immediately, ending the Ethnic cleansing.
5. Not only did the air campaign fail at its stated goal of stopping ethnic cleansing it also had a miniscule rate of enemy assets destroyed making it a double failure.
European countries contributing soldiers to NATO were extremely averse to even one or two casualties. The result was that "pacts" were made with the enemy dividing up zones, allowing unimpeded ethnic cleansing.
Also, European NATO commanders would sideline their own country's troops to protect them.
Albania so mistrusted NATO that they imported anti-aircraft guns at the time to shoot NATO helicopters down.
NATO, er USA, has a lot of options to inflict pain and lots of it. A few Tomahwaks can cripple the best factory, power supply etc (they can link it to aiding the military so no war crime). They can escalate until the other side surrenders
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11753050
KFOR was a thing, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Force
To quote the KFOR Wikipedia page:
> KFOR entered Kosovo on 11 June 1999 two days after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1244. At the time, Kosovo was facing a grave humanitarian crisis, with military forces from Yugoslavia in action against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in daily engagements.
Note that daily engagements were ongoing at this point.
As far as German navies go (perhaps you were thinking of a different example) the Kriegmarine switched pretty heavily to subsurface ships, even for resupply in the “field” (ocean in this case). Not sure the extent of ocean going surface vessels except in the Baltic. Their empire was land based. The UK never lost control of the Mediterranean which definitely ultimately blocked German African activity and kept them from repelling allied supply for the battles in Mediterranean fronts. But had they built much surface shipping?
In japan the opposite was true: the IJN was dominant until at least late 1942 and as it was reduced it was less through this kind of battle and more due to losing ships and the reduction of manufacture of replacement due to bombing and supply line restrictions (my parents were both children in the middle of those “supply lines” in different areas of the pacific theatre during that war).
Curious about the falklands!
The Falklands War was similar in that the Argentine Navy had both a large cruiser (General Belgrano), as well as an aircraft carrier (Veinticinco de Mayo). The Belgrano was torpedoed with a large loss of life by HMS Conqueror, and after that the Argentine Navy stayed in port; though it's air wings fought well over the islands.
How to kill tanks when you don't, now that's a more interesting question.
By artillery I don't mean super ebganced guided missile systems by good old Howitzers 105, 155.
Pretty impressive that the ground pressure of a M1 abrams tank is less than half of my mountain bike with 2.6" tires.
On anywhere close to equal footing artillery is a pretty dangerous thing to shoot, as soon as your position is triangulated you'd best shut down and move.
Sure direct fire from tanks is 2-4km, but there are tank fired indirect fire weapons as well. Like say the XM1007. On equal footing I'd rather be in a tank (moving at say 20 mph on an unpredictable course and speed) than hoping for the best with artillery. After all even if you get lucky with 1 tank, there's never just one tank.
Even air superiority isn't as useful as it was. A drone up in the air for 5 minutes with a targeting laser can ruin your day.
Seems pretty weird these days to be investing in tanks, but not investing in the A-10 Warthog.
http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html: ”the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field”
As recent events in Syria (by "recent" I mean January-February of this year) have shown drone-guided artillery strikes are almost the perfect deterrent against tanks or any form of technicals on the ground, to be honest. There were even videos of Russian strikes hitting two guys on a motorcycle. Don't see tanks having any chance against that combo (i.e. artillery + drones), unless helped by air-support. There are countless examples on Twitter, this is one of them, involving the Turkish Army [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/123333691043478323...
There are systems like Archer that fire and move long before the shell lands, but its still ratcheting up?
> The system functions as follows. The observer determines the target location (e.g. map coordinates or bearing and distance from their own position), ensures that their laser target designator can 'mark' the target and requests or orders a fire mission against the target using Krasnopol. A gun is then aimed at the target location and a guided shell is fired. The firing unit uses their 1A35K command device to send a signal via a communications link confirming the firing of the projectile to the 1A35I observation post device with the observer. The laser target designator is then used to illuminate the target and the in-flight projectile detects the radiant laser energy reflected by the target and the navigation system steers the shell towards the point of greatest incident energy—the designated target with top attack pattern. The iris of the optical seeker head is protected by a cap which is ejected by a mechanical timer upon firing.
Low visibility conditions are of course a deterrent against this type of attack.
> The laser target designator is then used to illuminate the target and the in-flight projectile detects the radiant laser energy reflected by the target and the navigation system steers the shell towards the point of greatest incident energy—the designated target with top attack pattern
I think means that the shell basically hits where the drone-laser points at any one moment, not where the drone-laser was pointing when the shell was first fired. Which means that if the target moves then the laser can still remain focused on it for the shell to hit said target, even if the target is moving.
The counter-battery fire uses radar to calculate where incoming shells are fired from and shoots at that point.
But now the original artillery tries to move away from that point before the counter fire hits it.
That counter fire isn't laser guided.
Is the counter-fire mobile as well? Has it moved from its original point of counter-fire?
If not, there's only a couple rounds of this before counter-fire ends.
Or the counter-fire is protected by a C-RAM system like Phalanx, Iron Dome, MANTIS, or Porcupine/DRACO.
Every counter has a counter. It's turtles all the way down.
Then it's an artillery vs artillery battle, and the side with the best artillery wins (ignoring for the moment airspace superiority), which only adds to the point that tanks are mostly obsolete, they're not part of the conversation at all. I do agree that tanks do look cool and that they create more jobs and help preserve more technical know-how in times of peace, but out on today's fronts it looks like they're not as needed as before.
But at 30Km range even a classic shell becomes hard to precisely track. A guided shell just makes it worse. At long range a counter shot would basically be a blind shot because the target area is large enough to be considered unacceptable.
A defense system in nullification phase needs to know really one thing: Bearing. Once it knows the direction to the incoming munitions, it fills the air along that direction with metal as quickly as possible. Some distance information is important for timing and relative velocity is important for acquisition of targets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
Now, I speak from relative ignorance of a whole bunch of possible technologies that actually could back-project and actively sense shooters. I'd welcome an education on that. I base my assumptions on the "payload" model that most military aquistions take, in which you can't necessarily do the integrated sensing, computation, and real-time display that would be required to back-project an incoming shell or rocket onto local topology to provide an actionable estimate of the firer's location. I'm less skeptical of close-in / nonballistic, especially given TFA's claims, and very skeptical of longer-range / ballistic attacks.
On this, I'm fascinated by the smart-munitions arms race described in the future pistol duels from Count to a Trillion, where a series of countermeasures, decoys, and guided munitions would be pre-loaded in an attempt to outsmart your opponent.
The max effective range of a M1A2 is 3,500m. Max effective range of a Howitzer (155) is 18,000m.
You don't set up artillery where you'll be overrun by tanks.
People ITT talking about using the tank main gun as counter bat are confusing indirect fire with direct. Tanks cannot elevate the main gun like artillery (unless we're talking about mobile artillery).
When infantry kills tanks (not using air or fire support) usually requires near line of sight for targeting (TOW, Javelin). If you shoot and scoot you're still within the max effective range of the main gun (but hopefully outside max effective range for the coaxial). Therefore, if the APS gives the TC (tank commander) a POO (point of origin) he's going to swing the main gun around and blast them, as there's little cover you can find that will protect you from a tank round.
These TOW jockeys in Syria get such good kills on video because they're near max effective range for the TOW, in daylight (everything in the desert has roughly the same surface temp) challenging the sensors, shooting at old ass tanks. Count the flight time of the TOWs you see in those videos. Look where they're shooting from. Look what they're shooting at!
Unlike planes, tanks can work just fine in the dark or in bad weather. Smoke screens can be deployed to conceal movement.
Artillery and planes need good spotting too, which means that targeting a moving and unpredictable target is hard.
During the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia the Serbs effectively hid most of their armour in forests and churches, so it is possible even to hide from even the most high-tech adversary.
In most wars in recent history you have one side with lots of relatively high tech weaponry going against guerrilla forces fighting with relatively unsophisticated stuff but hiding among civilians, thus making the use of all that high tech weaponry a bit controversial. E.g. Syria is a good example of that.
WW II was probably the last conflict where all sides basically removed the gloves and fought with everything they had where everything on both sides included some very scary options. I live in what got rebuilt after WW II destroyed Berlin. There wasn't much left here. Other cities got it worse.
Tanks still have a role because in most conflicts, the other side would lack the means to defend against them. But they'd be relatively useless against someone with rockets & an airforce. But they are awesome for dominating a chaotic battlefield without that. Basically, in the Gulf wars, the US took out the iraqi airforce in no time and after that basically tanks rolled in pretty much without opposition. I don't think any US tanks were lost at all. Much of the conventional troops ended up surrendering.
I think that would actually be the Iran-Iraq War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War
Tank combat, air combat involving a wide range of aircraft, bombing raids, ballistic missile strikes, naval combat, trench warfare and chemical weapon use all took place during the war from 1980 to 1988.
I acknowledge the hedge of "pretty much" and use this moment to commemorate the Battle of 73 Easting, Toujours Pret.
"G Troop lost one M3 Bradley to Iraqi IFV fire and one soldier, Sergeant Nels A. Moller, the gunner of the Bradley, was killed. The Bradley's TOW launcher was inoperative, and the 25mm Bushmaster Cannon had jammed. While the crew was attempting to get the cannon back in action, an Iraqi BMP-1 which was thought to be disabled with a tank shell punched through its armor, fired and hit the vehicle's turret with 73 mm cannon fire. Moller died instantly and the remainder of the crew evacuated the damaged vehicle."
Also, the real story is that a squad of Apaches in the air was ambushed and destroyed early in the Iraq war from ground fire. Half crashed and half made it back, but with too much damage to fly again.
As Wellington said ” It has been a damned serious business. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”
Even a WWII era armoured force would've been able to inflict higher losses than Iraqi army of the Gulf War period.
This is true
> Even a WWII era armoured force would've been able to inflict higher losses than Iraqi army of the Gulf War period.
This isn't. The gun on the T55 tank used by the Iraqis couldn't penetrate the armour of a M1 Abrams. No WWII tank was anywhere near as well gunned as a T55.
The Iraqi army in Gulf War 1 was actually pretty good. They were well armed and experienced (they'd fought the Iran/Iraq war). Airpower was the big difference though.
1. Quite the opposite. Look for the accounts of some of tank battalions being sent to the field without food, ammo, and fuel, and only being deployed at the very last moment in a hurry. I am not talking about their reserves here, but their main force.
They also had new officers up to a colonel rank simply having no real military training.
Both of these has been quite usual for the Iraqi army. I has been the case since Iran-Iraq war.
2. Saddam was regularly purging his own armed forces.
Though, I heard that he gave amnesty to officers he purged a day before the invasion, and ordered them back into ranks, but you can imagine how that panic move went.
3. Saddam was sitting still for nearly a year, while US was building up more, and more forces in Saudi Arabia. His officers knew they will loose, and they saw Saddam being paralysed with fear all that time, and getting crazier by the day.
That greatly demoralised his few remaining competent officers, some of whom cashed out his treasury, and flew to places like London.
> The gun on the T55 tank used by the Iraqis couldn't penetrate the armour of a M1 Abrams.
Certainly, nothing at the time could've penetrated M1 front armour, but skirts and side armour even of the latest tanks are vulnerable to WW2 era weapons.
It would've been a universally correct decision for a tank force commander to push for flanking attacks, envelopments, and close up skirmishes, rather than allowing a superior force engage them in a frontal attack from outside of their return fire range.
Iraqi army did few lacklustre offensive attempts, with January 29 attack by their 5th Iraqi mechanised being the most serious one, but still botched. From then on, their morale collapsed, and it was a turkey shoot.
I was saying that if US were to attack a force with WW2 era level of preparedness, experience, and tactics, they could've taken more losses.
It would have still been difficult for the Iraqis to do much. The Iraqi T-72 tanks (the best they had) didn't include night vision systems. Also the M1 could engage far outside of T-72 effective range.
Preparedness and tactics go a long way. But the equipment disparity was overwhelming.
Maybe India vs China in the 60s.
The US will probably develop some countermeasures, but so much of the military complex is invested in impressive looking tanks/aircraft/ships and will have substantial political inertia.
The surface Navy is practically obsolete. They are deploying laser point defense that allegedly doesn't suck, but that won't stop a fleet of 1000 drone subs that just need one or two torpedos to hit, or a barrage of antiship missles.
If the US doesn't sell, other NATO countries and Russia/China will.
Radio jamming won't stop laser mesh network communication. They can lie in wait in bushes and activate right under forces.
At least if modern warfare (conventional) devolves into starcraft-esque massive drone vs drone flotilla conflicts, it might cut down on human troop life loss, and maybe even "collateral damage".
But that never seems to happen.
Smart men. No doubt US psy-opps played a part, they must've understood weeks ahead and talked among themselves that it is over, and no worth dying for Saddam (who is not even in our tribe :)) . No doubt top Generals were probably contacted offered X and Y if they surrendered. Giving a General a suitcase of cash is much cheaper than the bullets spent, without adding equipment and lives lost.
> A single Krasnopol shell costs around $35 000. That's significantly less that the cost of a single US GPS-guided Excalibur. Although the Excalibur has nearly twice the range and is more reliable.
Couldn't quickly find the cost for a single Excalibur shell, maybe someone else can fill in the information.
Seems like that is the case, yes, at least from what I could read on the wiki page I linked in a comment above [1]
> drone + artillery, do you have a link to more details?
Not necessarily what you asked for but this targeted Google search [2] (which is in fact a /r/syriancivilwar search) can give you an idea of what the Russian implementation of this technology can do (I didn't catch the name of the Turkish/NATO implementation of it on the other side).
Looking at this tweet [3] from 2 days ago it seems that the technology has evolved quite rapidly, that poster is linking to a tweet from late 2017 when the Russians were still in the early test phase of it all. [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system)
[2] https://www.google.com/search?ei=DcV4XoXYLrGhmwXRoZ_oBg&q=Kr...
[3] https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1241088031974662149
[4] https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/931856689309110272
GLMRS [0] - 'the 70km sniper' - is a precision indirect fire weapon.
[0] https://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/uk-complex-weapons/guided-mul...
Abu Tow (nom de guerre) is racking up kills in Syria, and from the videos I've seen none of those tanks are sporting APS.
Deep Battle doctrine bore a heavy resemblance to Mongol strategic methods, substituting tanks, motorized troop carriers, artillery, and airplanes for Mongol horse archers, lancers, and field artillery. The Red Army even went so far as to copy Subutai's use of smokescreens on the battlefield to cover troop movements.
> Though unknown to the west for many centuries, Subutai's exploits were first featured by the British military theorist B. H. Liddell Hart in his book Great Captains Unveiled after World War I. Liddell Hart used the example of the Mongols under Genghis and Subutai to demonstrate how a new mechanized army could ideally fight using the principles of mobility, dispersion, surprise, and indirect means. Though he gained little support in Britain, Liddell Hart's books were read in Germany, whose armies during the initial 1940–41 invasions of France and Russia bore an astonishing similarity to the campaigns of Subutai, 700 years earlier. In particular, Erwin Rommel and George Patton were avid students of Mongol campaigns
They're covered here in part 4 of a longer series, just scroll down a bit. https://acoup.blog/2020/02/28/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
The Brits ended up motorized mostly because of 1) the US supplying them, and 2) they left many of their horses on the continent when they pulled back from Dunkirk. The US sent tons of jeeps to the USSR too.
Interesting read by the way. It's crazy to see what sort of smart inventions are created in this arms race between David and Goliath.
Using tanks for COIN and FIBU is quite different
FIBU = ?
Fighting In Someone's House, and Causing Havoc In Public Spaces.
More like 3 km. They've had kills out to 4 km.
It would run circles around any MBT, easier to maintain, and cheaper.
Not that I would want to sit in an urban ambush, but as a tank killer, why not?
(literally a story about how a light personnel carrier became a pseudo-MBT)
> It would run circles around any MBT, easier to maintain, and cheaper.
That's the idea, but in practice lightly armored IFVs were too vulnerable to guerrilla warfare tactics or technicals, so they have mostly evolved to be more like tanks or in some cases literally based on tank chassis.
War is Boring, The War Nerd or some other outlet expanded upon this idea a few years back. Based on long range desert patrols used by the Brits in WW2, later in Oman, and then in the Gulf Wars. Only works in mostly symmetrical theatres and in specific environments. Hunting Desert Foxes for example.
> too vulnerable to guerrilla warfare tactics or technicals
Yes. Probably not for clearing a Baghdad street. Of course, some genius will apply the same tactics to Urban areas. Because it's cheap and readily available. And see his soldiers shredded. A bit like the Land Rover Snatch.
They aren't that slow.
It’s not just a tank. It’s all the logistics that go in to supporting one.
An entire division of experienced and well equipped troops pretty much neutralised with some gritty powder in the right places....
Actually, on that note I think in the next decade we'll see work on developing unmanned tanks, which I personally think will be a major game changer. A large portion of the internal volume of a tank is for the crew. Remove the crew and you can significantly reduce the volume of the tank, reducing the surface area, so you can provide the same amount of protection with much less armor by weight. You can get an unmanned vehicle with the same armor and firepower of a main battle tank with half the weight and significantly reduced size. There would be some trade offs (an unmanned system will necessarily have worse situational awareness, so the tank would probably need to operate alongside infantry teams or a manned vehicle) but I think that will help keep tanks on the battlefield for decades to come
The Russian T14 Armata[1] is a strong nod in that direction. The turret is unmanned and fully automatic; the crew of 3 is hosted in a well protected capsule in the front hull.
This ensures both low top weight & visibility, just as well as improved survivability for the crew.
--
I think that will be the biggest challenge with unmanned armored vehicles, the reduced situational awareness. You can put all the cameras you want on the tops of the tank, a remote operator will have to deal with the limited bandwidth (can't have full 60fps 4K resolution in 360 degrees simultaneously on a satellite link) and increased latency. At first this can be helped by using it as a fire support vehicle for infantry, where the infantry can be their eyes and ears. Eventually there can be enhanced automation to help reduce the workload of remote operators (not automatically firing, but having the system continuously scan around it and tracking the movement of all visible people and vehicles so the operator doesn't have to) and fusing that data with that of other tanks and even UAVs overhead.
Remove any one of those components, and tanks are sitting ducks.
The game has horrible UX, but:
1. The game does the best (?) job I've seen of any game at simulating a wide variety of historical vehicles, shells, and armor.
2. The game has a low barrier to entry: no fast twitch reactions, and slow gameplay.
3. It has a fairly fun meta to improve within.
4. The community loosely associated around it can be both fun and informative: PhlyDaily, The Chieftain's Hatch, RedEffect, Potential History, and Lindybeige
Its also easier to imagine infantry falling back on indirect fire, where they identify targets for artillery and aircraft.
RPGs etc made cheaply-equipped soldiers able to take on expensive tanks. But now extremely expensive tanks are becoming immune to them, and the next step for soldiers is also expensive.
The goal with the slats is to catch and mangle the incoming warhead, so that it either fails to detonate, or doesn't form the penetrating jet.
It will, ah, be highly incentivised to shoot back. And it won't be shooting at you with blanks.
Pretty much all the tactics listed in TFA seem to be desperation moves.
And some amazing videos of the Trophy APS system mentioned in the article doing their thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aA9HsmLHBQ
When things get scarce, the only natural solution is to fight it out. Natural selection is very mean and nasty.
Going against tanks as an infantry unit is a tough spot. Tanks are significantly faster, more lethal, and harder to kill than any light-infantry unit. In a defense, light infantry uses engagement area development to attempt to even the odds. Engagement area development is similar to building a defense in depth. A quick summary:
0. Analyze the enemy composition and disposition to determine likely avenues of approach. After that, build your engagement areas on those approaches.
1. When the enemy is far away, attempt to disrupt or turn their movement into the engagement area. This is typically a combination of scouts, artillery, or obstacles to channel the enemy into the engagement area.
2. Once the enemy is in the engagement area, keep them there (fix) as long as possible. Use priority targets and sectors of fire to efficiently concentrate fires on the most valuable targets which almost certainly includes tanks.
3. Finally, you block the enemy with obstacles to move to secondary positions.
The author's first tactic of a trial shot of engaging at range is part of step 1. The goal is to force the enemy to change their movement, slow them down, or disable the active protection measures. This is a bit more difficult with a TOW missile than with a Javelin. Modern tanks will auto-rotate if you laser range find them directly. Since a tank round travels significantly faster than a TOW missile, a tank can kill you before the TOW missile reaches them. Since a TOW is guided by an operator via a wire, the missle with then miss.
The second tactic of multiple missiles would go in step 2. To avoid firing excessive missiles at targets, one technique is to "shard" the engagement area so subordinate units are responsible for parts of it.
The third tactic of using grenade launchers and mortars is questionable. We were taught that tanks are basically invulnerable to indirect fire (mortars and artillery). I don't think a 60mm mortar would have any significant effect on a tank unless you score a direct hit. The precision on indirect fire isn't good enough to directly hit a tank. Hoping to trigger the tank's active defense measure is a long shot. Also, if you're using a M320 grenade launcher with a max effective range of 320m against a tank, you're going to die soon unless you have some other significant advantage like urban terrain. The MK19 automatic grenade launcher is a much better weapon for trying to prematurely damage the tank's defense with a range of 1500m.
Btw how many wars did the USA win due to its huge military spending? Oh yes, the number is exactly zero.
USSR had a plan to move 20000 tanks and 80000 units of support armour into Europe all at once with a very idea that no low intensity aerial, mine warfare or guerrilla anti-tank campaign can stop it all before all airfields and commando bases are overwhelmed.
To force nato into the most costly trades possible, early on.
They wanted to force nato to field their heaviest military assets to the frontlines at the time when nuclear rockets will be flying left and right.
And they would attack over very wide fronts for the first few days, before they concentrate their forces, thus concealing their breakthrough trajectory until the most costly trades are done.
Not that hard to nuke the passage that they'd be forced to take for a land invasion. That was NATO planning in the 60s and 70s