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csours

Perun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUyAPQEb01Q

Chieftain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8

Bernard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY

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.

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$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.

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

Correction: A guy hiding in a bush wasn't able to reliably defeat tanks before.

Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper 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.

Yes, the Warcraft II and III tank units get scrapped real quick if you don't protect them!

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

>humans are not necessarily "cheap disposable units"

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

"Not necessarily."

It depends on the nation and their political situation.

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.

Yeah, you don't make units, you make battalions.

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.

A tank can engage at similar distances.

If it knows what/where exactly to engage...

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.

I was an armored vehicle officer in the USMC. ATGMs are a long standing threat.

There’s no scenario where hundreds of Javelins are sitting in one infantry company. It’s the type of thing that only makes sense on paper.

Would be much more worried about evolution of loitering fires with drones.

As of today, hundreds are out of question, yes.

But there may be cheaper and better models one day. This war has shown that ATGMs, MANPADs and their ilk have a huge potential, which means that a lot of countries and companies are going to pour resources into R&D. This usually means an overall improvement in capabilities and possibly a reduced price tag.

As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse. Russia still cannot do that, but for rich Western countries, it is an absolutely realistic option.

Price tag is a small part of it.

Have you ever humped a combat load? It sucks. You’re rolling out with 40 lbs of stuff hanging off you before we even talk sustainment.

Javelin has gotta be 40-50 lbs. Add that on. Want an extra missile? Add another 30 or so.

Now suppose you don’t run into any armor, this is why every infantryman doesn’t/won’t carry one. Maybe 1 per squad, if we want to be super aggressive maybe 1 per fireteam. But that’s now a machine gun they’ve left out, what if they really needed more suppression?

It’s a trade off and humans aren’t capable of bringing all the nice to haves to every fight. This is why there won’t be hundreds in a company.

Most of the weight is in the missiles themselves at 35 lbs (15.9kg) the targeting unit is only 14 lbs (6.4kg). So for defensive scenarios or preset ambushes the missiles could be brought in via vehicle and prestaged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin

Not to go in circles here, so the ultimate point here is same as the article: there have and will continue to be a threat / counter threat environment and will continue to evolve.

What we are witnessing from Russia is not how armor should be employed. Armor is not suddenly obsoleted due to tech that’s been out for decades. That take is probably overly simplistic and wrong.

By the way, I’m a big proponent of FD2030.

Only 14lbs for the CLU. That's HEAVY. Someone still needs to hump that around, plus the missiles. Plus all the battle rattle gear. The Army did away with the 11H MOS, so now everyone is either an 11B or 11C. Stuff gets heavy, and rarely gets lighter.

>>>But there may be cheaper and better models one day.

And when that "one day" comes around, the tank engineers will have outfitted every vehicle with Trophy-style active protection systems AND laser anti-missile/anti-drone remote weapons stations on the turrets.

>>>As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse.

Interesting that you mention night vision. We used to swear by equipping our infantry with IR lasers as well, for pinpoint accuracy during night combat. Now that more of our adversaries are using night vision, we are swinging back towards NOT using IR lasers because the active emission is just like the old Murphy's Law adage: "tracers point both ways".

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.

I said "in range", not "in a group". Given the range, that can mean several square kilometers if the terrain is right.

In no way can 100 men cover several square kilometers of terrain in anything close to an effective manner. That's roughly a company sized unit, and they "might" be able to have a 800m frontage, but that depends on how they're equipped. If they're light infantry with limited transportation, not a chance.

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?

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

It's hard to say what net value means in a Ukraine-style conflict.

I think that's a good oversimplification of Bernard. To oversimplify Chieftan:

A tank performs a critical role. You can't replace it until you have something else performing that role.

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.

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