On Killing Tanks (2020)
mwi.usma.edu
mwi.usma.edu
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
https://www.militaryimages.net/media/tank-traps.112392/full?...
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.
If they are in force then you get rolled.
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.
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.
Ie mobile platforms that are essentially defenceless on their own but carry large armament of drones and other electronic devices inside enemy territory that is meant to quickly take over surrounding space (surface and overhead) and do quick job of neutralising various threats like enemy personnel, drones, etc.
But I am not sure about that. Planes require a landing strip to start from and large hangars to store them and that drove the basic form of aircraft carrier.
There is no such limitation for electronic equipment and small drone carriers travelling on land. And I think, rather than presenting a single high value target to the enemy, it makes sense to have a lot of specialised units functioning as one through information systems that cannot be disabled with a single successful strike.
See: GD's TRX concept w/ loitering munitions and a tethered surveillance UAV
> [vs distributed systems]
See: USAF / USN Next Generation Air Dominance programs, or the European Future Combat Air System, which are declared as "systems of systems" to get the desired capabilities. We'll see how far they ultimately lean into distributed though.
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.
Which is why "no armor" to "some armor" suddenly becomes non-negotiable, given shrapnel's lethal radius.
But maybe future armor looks more like minimal armor, maximum speed, and substantial EW countermeasures?
Tactical mobility is a bit overrated, it's not like you can outrun an ATGM. Though a system with better operational and strategic mobility would certainly be valuable. Modern tanks can't cross a lot of bridges due to weight constraints, and can only be air transported in the largest aircraft. For reference: the C-5 galaxy, one of the largest cargo planes in existence, can carry 2 abrams tanks; the more common C-17 can carry 1; while the C-130 can't carry any (it could transport roughly 28% of an abrams). If you could get a decent armored fighting vehicle down to 20-30 tons that opens up a lot of operational and strategic transport options.
specifically, the Abrams is getting real heavy these days with all the upgrades, to the extent that it's becoming an operational problem. They can't be towed by their recovery vehicle anymore. They're too heavy for their carrier trucks/trailers. They can't use landing craft or bailey bridges. A lot of constructed bridges in the expected area of operations can't support them.
https://www.defensedaily.com/80-ton-abrams-heavy-support-veh...
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/australias-new-tanks-are-o...
“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...
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.
I also suspect they would fare little better than a lone T-80 wandering around an urban environment without competent infantry support. Also, BMPT was designed around the Grozny threat environment: antiarmor teams on rooftops raining down RPGs and Molotov cocktails from above. The Ukrainians haven't been forced to resort to those tactics (yet) as they have advanced Western weapons to employ from greater distances and with greater lethality.
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.
Not if they're doing combat air support they don't, unless they only use precision guided munitions or cruise missiles, which are expensive.
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.
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).
NLAWs are even cheaper and easier to use but don't know their estimated kill rate.
My point was that the tank isn't doomed there - if vulnerability to anti-tank missiles was the only issue, armies would research and deploy active defences everywhere and the tank would be important as it was.
I think the problems are elsewhere. When infantryman can deploy offensive power outranging the canon, one needs to ask why have the tank when the infantryman requires so much less logistics. If say, the tanks could use a heavy mobile laser, than the equation would be different.
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.
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
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.
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.
Tank-for-tank, the French tanks very clearly out-performed the German tanks.
But France was still conquered.
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?
They do use mines, not sure if remote controlled. E.g. https://twitter.com/nashaniva/status/1503762953148919809
Easier to use IEDs and mines when you're bunkering down and the fields are mud -- necessitating the use of a handful of roads.
I'd bet my hat that the reasons the Russians are surrounding the cities and blasting them down is because they know they'd run into tons of IEDs + NLAWs if they rolled into a city.
Also see IEDs with EFPs, but I wouldn’t want to have a cell phone emitting on a battlefield.
You can only set a mine off once.
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_explosive_device
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.
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.
Thing about war is, losses and fatalities are part of the game. Nobody is assuming to have a silver bullet that is undefeatable and invulnerable.
Submarine aircraft carriers were attempted before without much success, but drones can be drastically slower and do much more damage with modern missiles compared to old school unguided bomba, so we might see a return for them.
Edit: actually i thought about it, and drone carrier submarines would be risky. Surfacing to launch will make the submarine vulnerable ( satellites and what not); launching like a torpedo/missile from underwater might obfuscate that a bit, but for recovering the drones there's no way around it. Furthermore, actively controlling the drone would emit signals which can be detected by the enemies, and preplanned missions seem to be of limited utility in a naval environment
So, launch a flock of drones while submerged - these could be launched from a single canister containing many of them - and have them move to the target area while hiding in the radar echoes of the waves. Once there have them all pop up to their working height where they map the targets and direct missiles towards them and/or damage/destroy targets themselves. Remember those through-the-window missile strikes in the gulf wars? That thing, but more accurate and a lot cheaper.
Come to think of it, that launch canister can be attached to a torpedo engine so the sub can stay well out the way.
Because presumably they cost money ( more than a cruise missile in any case), and reuse would be practical. But indeed, cruise missiles are already in the hundreds of thousands USD price range per unit, so single use drones wouldn't be something extraordinary.
> Unit cost US$70,000[1]
Indeed that's very cheap and single-use is a no-brainer. The firepower isn't great though ( "equivalent to a 40mm grenade"), especially in a naval engagement ( the original discussion). You'd need more than that to sink an aircraft carrier; however if the idea is just to render temporarily inoperable, well targeted strikes ( against an aircraft carrier deck, a frigate/destroyer radar/missile launcher) could be enough-ish.
On 31 March 2021, AeroVironment was awarded a USD26.1 million contract by SOCOM for the Switchblade 600. The system addresses the United States Naval Special Warfare Command's Maritime Precision Engagement (MPE) requirement to engage asymmetric threats with Combatant Craft Medium (CCM) and Heavy (CCH) boats acting as host platforms.
[1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade#Switchbl...
It's why tanks came into being in the first place; they're quite capable against the average infantryman.