When is a ‘tank’ not a tank? | Hacker News Reader

When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?

acoup.blog

194 pointspicture208 comments

When it comes to semantics there needs to be a clear separation between common and technical terms.

I once had someone try to argue can't use the word bison and buffalo interchangeably when sharing buffalo puns.

Bison is an old latin word for "wild ox". Buffalo is an old greek word also meaning wild ox. They've been used interchangeably for as long as greek and latin have been spoken together.

Some scientist coming along and naming some animal a "Bison bison" doesn't overwrite thousands of years of history.

Some of us take buffalo puns seriously. If a child of mine misnamed a buffalo for a cheap pun, I would only have two words for him, “bye son”.

or "die son"? okay, that joke is a bit too hybrid, maybe

I’m going to ask you to leave now, Dad

Yes, if one of my friends called a Bradley a tank that's close enough and I wouldn't bother to correct them. But if a reporter calls a Bradley a tank that shows that they're missing some basic "military 101" knowledge and it'll influence how much I trust what they're saying.

Both the Bradley and the Abrams are AFVs, the issue is that most people aren’t familiar with the term AFV and they think that anything with armor and a gun is a tank.

As far as the AFV totem pole goes then the “Tank” sits on top it’s designed to pretty much fight and kill everything else on the battlefield.

The MBT is an evolution of the Tank concept the reason why most nations don’t have multiple tank classes today is that modern technology allows one to build a highly mobile, heavily armored vehicle with just about the biggest gun around.

Whilst historically at least during the first 5-6 or so decades of the “Tank” you had to make compromises which lead to wider range of “Tank” classes.

Kill everything? MBTs aren't great at targeting flying targets. Helicopters in particular are a direct competitor to tanks for bringing mobile heavy firepower to the battlefield. And Gepards are good against those.

Combat roles are fuzzy and any attemp to define rigid, dogmatic named roles that will stand the test of time is doomed to fail if you ask me.

Of course the article only really addresses modern vehicles and explicitly avoids discussing many WW2 vehicles like the StuG or IS-152 because modern definitions don't really fit there. Many WW2 tanks had very thin armor relying more on speed, like the BT-7 or the M-18 Hellcat. Tank or not? Depends on who and when you ask.

I should’ve added on the ground, but MBTs today can also successfully target and shoot down helicopters too.

The Hellcat wasn’t a tank it was another class of AFVs called a tank destroyer which again also pretty much disappeared from the battlefield today.

Tho some European armies that their doctrine relies heavily on a dug in defensive war do still employ what you could class as a tank destroyer.

See? Declaring the Hellcat "not a tank" is one of those issues. According to the OP's definition, it's a tank, it's a tank according to any layperson that would see one, it has all the features of a tank (including a turret, even), and it fills a tank role: destroying other tanks. The only thing that makes it not-a-tank is its classification in US tank doctrine at the time. Because to at the time, to the US, a tank was an infantry support tank. But today, it would absolutely be considered a tank, if a lightly armoured one. But light tanks were still tanks according to all other WW2 combatants at the time.

And I have no problem with that, I think the whole tank not a tank debate is just pedantic.

As I originally said since most people aren’t familiar with the term AFV they pretty much consider anything that doesn’t look like a car and can shoot things a tank.

Self propelled artillery complicates thing especially artillery that can pretty much shoot as flat as a tank like the Paladin for example.

If you show a lay person a picture of the M109 they’ll call that a tank too.

The real issue is half of the original Mark 1 tanks only had machine guns and they where all lightly armored. It’s primary role was fighting infantry as a mobile machine gun platform, and so the AFV is just another tank. If anything an M1 Abrams is further from the initial definition than an AFV.

People want to fit their idea of a “tank” based on a small subset of them while ignore things like flame tanks which spits on the narrow definitions.

AFV encompasses everything from armored combat engineering vehicles to tanks.

And? The Mark IX, was ‘carrier’ tank Aka an APC. One was even considered an amphibious tank via flotation tanks and bilge pumps.

Various examples of radio tanks existed who’s job was communication a role which any modern AFV with a two way radio can fulfill.

The Renault FT was considered a French tank and looks closer to modern designs though with a machine gun rather than anything heavier. Except again a huge number of variants was created to fit a range of roles including laying cable.

Again an AFV is an umbrella term that covers any type of armored combat vehicle.

This would be probably the most correct term to use to describe a wide range of armored vehicles that is being shipped to Ukraine.

But I also don’t particularly have a problem with the media just using the term “Tank” as a catch all term.

I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear my point was tank as a term showed up early enough that roles weren’t clear. In other words it wasn’t descriptive or prescriptive.

People essentially defined the roles after the term was in use and then used those roles to redefine Tank. Which is fine, but hardly grounds for getting upset over slightly older and more ambiguous definition of the same word.

No, "bison" is not an old Latin word.

"Bison" appears only in a few late authors of the Roman Empire, as a Germanic loanword, corresponding to the modern German word "Wisent".

One of the few occurrences of the word "bison" in Latin appears in Pliny the Elder. He wrote that in Germany there are 2 kinds of wild oxen, "bisontes et uros", i.e. the European wood bison and the aurochs.

There is no doubt from the description from Pliny that "bison" was applied specifically to the European wood bison and not to any other kind of wild ox. The word "bison" is also appropriate for its close relative, the North-American bison.

Pliny the Elder adds there that "quibus ... volgus bubalorum nomen imponit", i.e. the ignorant masses call both kinds of wild oxen as buffaloes, even if the buffalo is a different kind of wild ox "which is native to Africa".

Pliny was right that the 3 kinds of wild oxen, European bison, aurochs and African buffalo have very different appearances and can be confused only by someone who has not seen them previously, so for each of them, their proper name should be used, not the name of an only distantly-related species.

Most early European colonists of America belonged to what Pliny called "volgus", i.e. uneducated people, who were not familiar with the already extinct, or mostly extinct, aurochs and bison, so they have also applied the less appropriate word "buffalo" to the American bison, in the same way as many Romans called the European bison as "buffalo".

The use of inappropriate words for naming unfamiliar animals encountered in the New World has been frequent, e.g. the jaguar had been frequently named as "tiger" in the past in some places of South-America.

In conclusion "bison" and "buffalo" have not been used interchangeably in Ancient Rome and Greece.

Only the word "buffalo" was known by most ancient Greeks and Romans.

After the Roman Empire expanded in the North until Germany, some Romans learned the word "bison" from some Germanic tribes, and the word was applied correctly to the European bison, by those who knew the word.

So there was no interchangeability. Either one used "buffalo" for all wild oxen, when no other word was known, or one used the correct word for each kind of wild ox.

> Pliny the Elder adds there that "quibus ... volgus bubalorum nomen imponit", i.e. the ignorant masses call both kinds of wild oxen as buffaloes, even if the buffalo is a different kind of wild ox "which is native to Africa".

Your argument that bison is not an old Latin word and they weren't used interchangeably is somewhat weakened by this ancient Roman source, writing almost 400 years before the end of the western empire, that says they were used interchangeably.

It's not often you get the "this is the most HN comment ever" feeling from a comment and then immediately from one of its replies as well.

As someone who studied Latin at high school and a semester of Ancient Greek at uni, I appreciated this exchange enormously. It's what brings me back to HN several times a day.

Like I have already said, Pliny the Elder is not a really ancient Roman source.

At most you can say that what he wrote dates to around the middle of the time covered by ancient Roman texts, which starts hundreds of years before Pliny the Elder (who wrote during the second half of the first century CE).

There are no occurrences of the word "bison" in any Latin or Greek texts earlier than the time when the Roman Empire reached contact with "Germania" and there is no doubt that this is an old Germanic word that was taken into Latin, to name an animal from "Germania", previously unknown to the Romans and Greeks.

I have actually quoted from Pliny, precisely because he says that they were not used interchangeably. I cannot see how one can interpret it otherwise.

So again, Pliny the Elder names 3 kinds of wild oxen, 2 kinds from Germany, bison and aurochs, and 1 kind from Africa, the African buffalo.

After describing some of their characteristics, he comments that the uneducated people know a single word "buffalo", i.e. the name of the African wild ox, so they apply this name to all kinds of wild oxen, including to the 2 kinds of German wild oxen.

The 2 words were clearly not interchangeable. There are 2 cases. A Roman or Greek who did not know the word "bison" could not interchange them. Romans or Greeks who knew the word "bison" would not interchange them, because they also knew that buffaloes are from Africa and bisons are from Germany.

I have no .. horse in this race, but I think I understand a point of disagreement in this discussion. You say:

> I have actually quoted from Pliny, precisely because he says that they were not used interchangeably. I cannot see how one can interpret it otherwise.

I believe the claim is that Pliny says that many people use the word "buffalo" to refer to both buffalo and bison (meaning, what other people call "bison"). 'jrumbut refers to precisely this as the words being used "interchangeably". You do not, using in part the following argument:

> A Roman or Greek who did not know the word "bison" could not interchange them.

I think this is an individual-based "interchangeable", where you say that an individual interchanges two words if, I guess, they use both words to mean the same thing. Your parent, however, refers to population-level interchangeable where if some people refer to a thing with one word and other people with another, then they are interchangeable.

For example, I think one would say that "eggplant" and "aubergine" are interchangeable even if no individual uses both words.

You are perfectly right.

The words that are interchangeable (i.e. synonymous) at the individual level are a strict subset of the words that are interchangeable (synonymous) at the population level.

In my opinion, when claiming that 2 words are "interchangeable" without any additional details, the expected meaning is that the words are "interchangeable" at the individual level.

When they are "interchangeable" at the population level, the expression "interchangeable words" does not seem appropriate, because you cannot interchange just the words, leaving everything else the same. You actually have to interchange 2 humans, who, when speaking about the same thing will use different words, like a British and an American, when speaking about something that is named differently across the ocean.

With buffalo and bison, even saying that they were interchangeable at the population-level seems a stretch, because they were never synonymous, even for different people.

For some people, "buffalo" meant "any kind of wild ox", while for other people "bison" meant "a specific kind of wild ox from Germany" (while for the latter "buffalo" meant "a specific kind of wild ox from Africa").

So even when considering the entire Roman and Greek population, it is very unlikely that it would have been possible to find 2 people who assigned identical meanings, the first to "bison", and the second to "buffalo".

The African buffalo described by Pliny was not the animal named now "African buffalo", which lives in more southern parts of Africa and which was probably unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

"Buffalo" is an old Greek word, which was much later borrowed into the Latin language. The word referred initially to some large kind of antelope from Egypt, and this is how the word was still used by Pliny (who e.g. mentioned that the body of a "buffalo" resembles more the body of a stag than the body of an ox).

Relatively late in the Greek history, after the expeditions of Alexander the Great, when the Greeks had learned a lot about the Indian animals, plants and minerals, the Greek word "buffalo" began to also be used for the Indian domestic buffalo, hence the modern usage of the word.

Many centuries later, after most people no longer had any knowledge about the African antelopes, but were familiar with the domestic buffaloes, the term "wild buffalo" began to be applied to the wild bovids resembling the Indian buffalo, including to the one named now "African buffalo".

In the case of the American bison, which is not similar to any kind of buffalo (in the modern sense), the name buffalo was applied by people for whom it had the old meaning of "any kind of wild ox".

I like the deep connection through time and space between Pliny and the word nerds of today.

Not too surprising though. Pliney the Elder wrote the first encyclopedia, so he necessarily must have written something about virtually everything there was to know at the time.

Or in the words of Moby Dick's Ishmael, "I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me".

But as QI fans know,

There's no such thing as a fish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish

> For example, a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish

But that assumes Jonah's fish was a whale. But we don't know.

But it might have been a whale: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/12/whale-mouth-...

It also misses the fact that Jonah didn’t speak modern English and so he couldn’t talk about “fish”.

> can't use the word bison and buffalo interchangeably when sharing buffalo puns.

Well, there is a difference. (put on accent) Yer can't wash yer hands in a buffalo.

With semantics, I believe there are three types of definitions: descriptive, classification schemes, and functional requirements.

Descriptive: It looks like a water tank carrier. No, it looks like a tractor.

Nomenclature and classification: In the interwar period, the British built infantry tanks like the Matilda and cruiser tanks like the Cruiser I.

Functional: Tanker tactics, after much experimentation, coalesced into two categories. Heavy tanks for shock action to break through enemy lines. Lighter tanks operating in a wolf pack formation would exploit the break through and destroy rear depots and cut off the enemy's lines of communication.

To be fair, there was a large amount of discussion of the great slaughter of buffalo in the USA, complete with pictures of pyramids of skulls, in my history books as a kid.

Of course, now we know that they're bison, not buffalo, but it was obvious that people at the time called them buffalo.

In the USA, a "tank" refers to a "main battle tank", or the M1 Abrams.

In Germany, "tank" is translated to "Panzer", which roughly means armored vehicles. So "Flugabwehrkanonepanzer" (aka: Flakpanzer) is a Panzer.

But a German-flakpanzer is NOT a USA-"tank".

----------

I think a lot of the confusion is the difference in languages. Panzer =/= tank, its just the closest word between the two languages, so we kinda sorta equate them.

USA's M2 Bradley is "not a tank", but probably would be classified as a German Panzer.

--------

The "proper name" is "Main Battle Tank", which does refer to a very specific kind of vehicle.

-------

This is reminding me very much of the "cube rule" for sandwiches. A "hot-dog" isn't a "sandwich", its a "taco" (hot-dogs have the starch covering 3x sides, with the "top" side open).

Other "tacos" include hot-dogs, subs, and slice-of-pies (pies are covered on 3 sides after all)

“Panzer” in a very general protective sense translates to “Armour”. Brustpanzer -> Chest armour. Even a turtle’s shell is a Panzer. Typically a hard enclosure protecting the main body of a thing. But not its extremities. A “helmet” is a “Helm”. Though any element can be “gepanzert”, or “armoured”.

It is important to note that Panzer mostly refers to protection from violence. A civilian car is never “gepanzert”, neither is a padded skateboarder. Unless you’re mocking something. A Chelsea tractor is an Hausfrauenpanzer. One exception I can think of is the Rückenpanzer, or spine protector.

In a contemporary military context, a Panzer is any armoured vehicle. The definition is indeed looser than in English. The equivalent of tank (or main battle tank, MBT) is Kampfpanzer. Fighting tank.

An IFV like the M2 is a Schützenpanzer. Shooter/gunner/rifleman’s tank.

But when using Panzer to describe a specific vehicle, as opposed to a general category, I too would expect it to refer to an MBT. But I could be wrong here.

Great response.

Panzer on its own translates to (an) "armoured" (thing).

I love the Chelsea tractor -> "Hausfrauenpanzer" allusion. The German might be translated as "The wife's tank" or "The missus' tank" or "Me bird's tank".

The English word tank is the outlier. It's a code word for the initial concept that has stuck and unfortunately ended up as the canonical name for the thing. The word tank in English really used to mean a vessel eg a water tank.

I lived in West Germany in the 1970s/80s ...

At the risk of getting shredded here for working in defense contracts on unmanned vehicles, I’m one of software engineers working on an unmanned tank. [0] If someone asks what I do my initial response was “recently I’ve been writing software for unmanned tanks” which was met with a lot of blank stares. Now I say something like “I work on tracked vehicles like what you would call a WWII tank” and that seems to go over better.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripsaw_(vehicle)

I imagine calling them "killer robots" is frowned upon in your industry.

Sure isn’t. Turns out most of them aren’t meant to fire artillery.

Edit: it’s also 100x more interesting than making a website or an app and arguing about which fotm framework to use.

> Edit: it’s also 100x more interesting than making a website or an app and arguing about which fotm framework to use.

I am not a pacifist. There are some people doing bad things, that need to be stopped. But there being many npm packages is one of the stupidest possible explanations for working on it.

Finding my work more interesting than nmp install is stupid?

Edit: I’m really kind of blown right now. You’ve decided my job interest is stupid. I’ve loved remote controlled cars since I was 4, I’m now in my late 30s. I get to program big remote controlled vehicles. I love it. But I guess that isn’t ok. ={{

I have faith in your ability to understand that I have not decided that your job interest is per se stupid, but that choosing to build weapons, because of a short-lived frontend landscape sounds exceptionally stupid.

Unmanned tank warfare sounds kinda humane actually. Instead of killing each other, tank crew members being cooked alive, etc, we just let the unmanned tanks duke it out kinda like a really expensive robotics competition. Of course reality doesn't really work like this but...

For the most part conventional armies don’t really fight one another that often anymore - it’s more common to have asymmetric warfare like western/russian involvement in the Middle East. These “tanks” will probably not target other “tanks”.

The early Ripsaw really does look like the first WWI tanks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_The_U.S._Army_-_...

> A civilian car is never “gepanzert”

There most definitely are civilian cars which count as "gepanzert": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderschutzfahrzeug - still falling under your definition of "protection from violence".

Also more commonly/colloquially called “Panzerlimousine” — armoured limousine.

Right. People might use the word "Panzer" and have MBTs in their mind. Because that is the most famous kind of armored vehicle. But as the word "Panzer" is used for any kind of armor, it is pretty obvious, that it doesn't describe an exact vehicle type and all precise terms are compound words containing Panzer, like Kampfpanzer (MBT), Flugabwehrpanzer (anti air tank), Schützenpanzer (APAC). There is even the category of the Radpanzer, which means wheeled tank. But my favorite by far is the Brückenlegepanzer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EdJcObHIPo which can lay a 20m bridge in 5 minutes without any support and also pick it up again.

And there is overlap, like the TPz Fuchs[1]: It's a Transportpanzer (=> TPz), because it can transport troops, but also a Radpanzer, because it has wheels.

On the other hand, the MTW M113[2] was not called Schützenpanzer (APAC) in the german army, but Mannschaftstransportwagen (=> MTW), lit. squad transport vehicle. No hint in there that it's a armoured, tracked vehicle. However, the swiss called them Schützenpanzer.

German in the military is quite complicated :D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPz_Fuchs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M113_armored_personnel_carrier

And of course, the new Schützenpanzer Puma, while still being an APAC, has grown quite an impressive cannon. With its 35mm gun, it probably could hold itself well against the older russian MBTs, against everything else anyway.

A taco is mutually exclusive from a sandwich, because it’s made from folded piece of bread, rather than sliced / partially sliced which is what defines a sandwich.

Hot dogs and subs are sandwiches for this reason, as are burgers.

Also, “taco” is a term for a specific kind of folded bread dish - even quesadillas aren’t considered tacos.

A pie is not a sandwich, taco, or quesadilla. It’s a pie.

So if I took a single slice of bread, and I put Welch’s grape jelly on half of one side, then I put Peter Pan crunchy peanut butter on the other half of the same side (rectangular halves, not triangular halves), and then I carefully folded the slice of bread over in half along the line where the jelly meets the peanut butter, then what do I have?

I rest my case.

A pseudo sandwich

A pie surrounded by crust is a ravioli.

> A pie surrounded by crust is a ravioli.

Dumpling

Empanada

Screw all of you now I'm hungry and there's no empanada places around.

How long do I need to boil it?

> In the USA, a “tank” refers to a “main battle tank”, or the M1 Abrams.

That’s not true, though the only tanks in the current inventory in the US are MBTs. The term “tank” in the USA does encompass light tanks, like the (retired) M551 Sheridan, (canceled just before operational) M8 Buford, and the (in development) as-yet-undesignated product of the Mobile Protected Firepower project, not just MBTs.

Since the word "tank" was just a cover word used by the Brits, IMHO the Germans should have continued to use "Traktor" for theirs ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leichttraktor

This definition of the main battle tank is very much dependent on the current military doctrine of the host country. Each army is making its own trade offs of vehicle weight/armor vs speed vs caliber of the gun.

- In the US an MBT is very heavy and has a very long gun, in order destroy tanks that are very var away.

- In Russia an MBT is much lighter, so as not to get stuck in the mud.

- In Israel an MBT has a shorter gun and has more armor, because it really is mostly used for infantry support - but it also has to be able to stand against enemy tanks.

The US/NATO equivalent term for Panzer is an AFV which encompasses all armored fighting vehicles.

Panzer is just a better name than AFV.

I used to think Panzer was German for "Panther" :-)

> In the USA, a "tank" refers to a "main battle tank",

Lol, not sure if you’re trolling here, but that’s a recursive definition.

So "tank" is just a weasel word that poorly translates between cultures and languages. But "Main Battle Tank" translates correctly.

A German Flakpanzer could be called a "German Panzer", and you can translate that to mean "German Tank" in one sense, but a Flakpanzer is NOT what the USA would ever call a tank.

But if we start with the term "Main Battle Tank", or "MBT" instead, then no, the Flakpanzer is NOT a MBT. The German MBT is the Leopard 2.

------

So MBT is the more technical and proper term.

My reading was this should be read as "the colloquial term X is typically used to designate objects that fall in military jargon in the class Y".

That is: GP translates from colloquial to jargon. Since these are different, in particular, semantics of words change, this definition is not recursive.

He talks specifically about the etymology of the word Panzer, including its colloquial usage, in the linked article.

Tacos are definitely sandwiches. Or as I usually say it, sandwiches are tacos.

Cube-rule is pretty funny.

https://cuberule.com/

Specifically this picture: https://cuberule.com/assets/15_cube_rule.jpg

Of course, this rule is absurd, since it classifies hotdogs, pie, and subs as a "taco". I think the overall point remains, that no matter how you wish to "classify" things, you can always find a unique counter-example that messes up your classifications.

I never got that as the overall point because there are definitely classification systems (especially in math) that don't have counter-examples.

Hotdogs and tacos are the same, topologically speaking. We derive additional meaning between the two words because they're not the same due to bread and filling used, but topology doesn't care about that. It's entertaining because it's food and everyone has experience with that, but there's some serious math once you look into it!

I guess you could classify me as a structural purist - ingredient rebel on the sandwich alignment chart. I'm guessing you're a structural neutral - ingredient purist person.

>definitely classification systems (especially in math) that don't have counter-examples

Come on now, I want to get in an argument over the sorites paradox.

One thing ignored is the ingredients inside - a “taco” with one huge piece of chicken or steak would seem more like some other type of food.

> One thing ignored is the ingredients inside - a “taco” with one huge piece of chicken or steak would seem more like some other type of food.

A taco with one huge piece of fish inside is typically called a “fish taco”. One with a whole frankfurter inside is, apparently, a “taco de salchicha”.

So I’m not sure that your theory holds up.

> *A taco…with a whole frankfurter inside is, apparently, a “taco de salchicha”.

This brings back a bittersweet memory.

A couple of months ago I was looking through the fridge to fix something for dinner. I had neglected my shopping for a few days, but I did find some hot dogs, whole wheat tortillas, fresh sauerkraut, and crunchy whole grain Dijon mustard.

So we made hot dog tacos!

I pan-fried the hotdogs in a bit of olive oil, and warmed the tortillas one at a time in a dry pan. As each tortilla was ready, we spread the mustard on it, added a hot dog and plenty of sauerkraut, and rolled it up.

Maybe not authentic tacos de salchicha, but they were good!

Why is the memory bittersweet?

In a connection almost worthy of James Burke, we made the hot dog tacos on February 24, the day the Russian tanks started rolling into Ukraine.

My main issue with the rule is that it calls pumpkin pie bent toast, when it is obviously a missing category of type (2) where instead of being disjoint like the sandwich, the 2 pieces of starch are connected at an edge. Likewise there should probably be a category of type (3) where all pieces of starch are joined at a corner and a category of type (4) where it’s like a type (5) but with one of the sides removed. I believe with those three additions all rotationally-unique cube configurations would be accounted for by the rule.

Burgers are sandwiches. Many things are sandwiches. Earth is a sandwich since most of the time two slices of bread touch the ground at pretty-much-opposite sides[citation needed]

This reminds me of a decades-ago conversation with a casual friend, who called something a "battleship" - which to her meant "biggish navy ship with prominent gun turrets, that isn't an aircraft carrier". So something like the HMS Galatia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Galatea_(71) - would likely qualify. (Hint - the Galatia's main gun shells massed 50kg. Real battleships fired shells in the 500kg to 1500kg range.)

In retrospect, my correction to her should have taken the angle "That's kinda like calling a Chevy Cavalier a 'limo', or a 'Rolls-Royce'. Yes, it has 4 wheels, a hood, a trunk, a motor, it drives on roads... And the Chevy fans and salesmen are talking about how great it is...but NO, it NOT a limo, and NOT a Rolls-Royce."

> In retrospect, my correction to her should have taken the angle "That's kinda like calling a Chevy Cavalier a 'limo', or a 'Rolls-Royce'. Yes, it has 4 wheels, a hood, a trunk, a motor, it drives on roads... And the Chevy fans and salesmen are talking about how great it is...but NO, it NOT a limo, and NOT a Rolls-Royce."

As someone who does not drive, I would have a difficult time identifying vehicle types beyond half a dozen very broad categories. The only reason why I can do that much is because I am literally surrounded by them.

The only real difference with warships and tanks is that I hope I am never surrounded by warships and tanks.

The point is, the nuances of classification are typically of interest to people who have an above average interest in a topic.

have you considered that, perhaps, the average person has seen and driven many more cars (an everyday tool to billions of people) than warships? For what it's worth, even OP is annoyed at _journalists_ confusing tanks and similar armored vehicles, not at random people who have other concerns.

> even OP is annoyed at _journalists_ confusing tanks and similar armored vehicles

Never mind journalists, how about the German ambassador to the United States?

Although as the OP suggests, maybe less of the confusion and more of the deliberate misdirection.

> Although as the OP suggests, maybe less of the confusion and more of the deliberate misdirection.

Or, even simpler, a translation mistake - if that much, I'd rather call it an imprecision. The vehicle in question does in fact bear the word "Panzer" in its official German designation.

Oh, yes. Why should any journalist spend time & money on competent translation, when the typing "what does 'panzer' mean in English?" into some search engine gives them cool-sounding ideas for stories?

Back in Realityville...the Germans officially called this little baby a "Panzerschiff" -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_DVM_10_Bild-...

- and what % of native speakers of English would call it a tank?

When concatenating nouns in the german language the base noun is at the end. That ship has tank-like properties, it is not a tank that swims like a ship.

Ships similar to that one were a regular item in navies long before the British decided to call their secret new armored & treaded battlefield thingies with guns "water carriers", "water tanks", or "tanks", in an attempt to avoid the attention of spies.

The German term for gauntlets, in the sense of "hardened leather or metal glove, worn in hand-to-hand combat by knights" is "panzerhandschuhe".

What if, in German, the root meaning of "panzer" is something far closer to "armored" than to "motor-driven, treaded, all-terrain direct fires combat vehicle"?

It does, that's literally all discussed in OP.

I don't think the argument was, that you should call it a competent translation. Only that there is a charitable interpretation. Yes I'd agree it's done intentionally, but not out of incompetence.

> The vehicle in question does in fact bear the word "Panzer" in its official German designation

So does the German word for "bulletproof glass"[0], and that's not "a tank" either!

[0] https://dict.leo.org/german-english/Panzerglas

The difference is that the base noun is at the end.

"Panzerglas" literally translates as "armored glass"

"Glaspanzer" would be a "glass tank"

And the Gepard's official designation is "Flugabwehrkanonenpanzer" - "anti-air cannon tank"

> The difference is that the base noun is at the end

The German [base]noun "Panzer" cannot simply be translated to the English "tank"[0] without context, and specifically the noun "Flugabwehrkanonenpanzer" shouldn't be translated to any kind of tank.

Unless of course one thinks any vehicle with tracks and a gun is a tank(?)

> The Flugabwehrkanonenpanzer Gepard ("anti-aircraft armoured fighting vehicle 'Cheetah'", better known as the Flakpanzer Gepard) is an all-weather-capable German self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG)[1]

Like the Bradley[2], it's an armoured fighting vehicle.[3]

[0] https://dict.leo.org/german-english/panzer [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured_fighting_vehicle

Yes - it's a translation mistake because (as is often the case the words in different languages) the words do not cover exactly the same concepts. Therefore I see little reason to assume that it's "deliberate misdirection" as you wrote in your original comment.

Even OP admits that language and culture matters, so taking a foreign ambassador to task for not adhering to the American purist's definition, might be somewhat unreasonable.

There is quite some reason to assume, that when the German politics selected the "Gepard" as the first armored system which they would announce to be delivered to the Ukraine, they were playing exactly on this uncertainty. They could claim that they deliver "Tanks" to Ukraine, but chose an anti-air system. Which, ironically, from all German armored weapon system alledgedly is the most difficult to use (complex, 70ies style electronics). The Gepard is a Flugabwehrpanzer, and most people would just understand "Panzer". Of course that isn't even wrong as you consider that it shares the platform with the German MBT of that time, the Leopard 1. And for everything but a MBT it is probably more deadly due to the 1000+ rounds per minute it can shoot out of its 25mm machine guns.

Hanlon’s Razor.

Modern German culture frowns upon anything military. Zero-knowledge is common. That includes ambassadors and politicians. The war has made some to start to learn. Media is making jokes about them.

> Modern German culture frowns upon anything military. Zero-knowledge is common. That includes ambassadors and politicians.

Not just the Germans.

Remember all those comments in the West (from people with apparently no military experience) calling for NATO to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine in early March?

Then Biden and Stoltenberg explained what a no-fly zone actually is[0]. (Spoiler: it's not just a press release.)

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/04/politics/blinken-stoltenb...

I do remember calls for a no-fly zone by the excellent Ukrainian PR work. I don't remember any significant calls for it by others, possibly in the form of forwarding the request. I do assume that it was obvious to most that a no-fly zone would imply killing Russian aircraft. Planes get shot down at borders in times of peace, so that might not to be that much of problem.

However, to establish a minimum of safety for NATO aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone SAM sites on Russian soil would need to be disabled. Doing so would surely be considered crossing a border (literally an figuratively).

> I don't remember any significant calls for it by others

At least one US Senator did[0][1] although judging by the Twitter responses it seems he lacks foreign policy experience (I'm putting that very mildly...)

[0] https://www.rickscott.senate.gov/2022/3/sen-rick-scott-biden... [1] https://twitter.com/SenRickScott/status/1504108727871623168

Major subject from about 1880 to 1955, then irrelevant.

It may come back. Un-armored warships no longer dare get near an enemy shore. They can be killed by something mounted on a truck. The Admiral Makarov is the second Russian warship to be taken out by a missile or torpedo launched from shore.

Naval terms for fighting ships are notoriously fluid. These days you've got destroyers that are far bigger than frigates, and nearly the same size as cruisers.

True. But when the journalists (who laypeople mostly learn about such things from) are very biased toward using the most grandiose terms and interpretations of things that they can get away with - it's no surprise that laypeople have no understanding of even the basic vocabulary.

I think part of the issue is the word "battleship" which laypeople think just means a "warship", but is actually a specific category of warships.

Funny thing: The "not a tank" Gepard actually is essentially a Leopard 1 MBT with a different turret. So it's the quintessential example for the definition the author uses: The role has changed and thus did the turret, but the rest of the car stayed the same.

"If I was pressed for a hard definition, I’d say that a tank is a heavily armored and tracked combat vehicle whose purpose is to offer powerful direct fire capabilities against a range of enemy targets."

That's nice but what do you keep your tropical fish in?

An aquarium of course!

Which can be turned into a tank: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-this-fish-ou...

I suppose you can still keep it in an older style pre-WW2 tank.

My pond.

I used to argue in semantic disputes, but they're really only meaningful in a court of law. Outside of that, it's mostly opinion (a waste of time imho)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute

I'd argue it's not mostly opinion. This article is pretty bread-and-butter Brett Deveraux. His general thing is that he picks a topic, and gets really pedantic about in order to motivate (and provide a framework for) explaining some interesting aspect of military doctrine or history.

In this article, he digs into tank/not-tank in order to fuel a discussion of the development of military doctrine around armored vehicles, including explaining the problems that different kinds of them are trying to solve, and even describing how different semantic distinctions used by other countries helps to highlight differences in their military thinking.

I suppose whether or not one thinks that's a waste of time is ultimately down to how much of an interest one takes in military topics. But I'd be hard-pressed to concede that the author's choice to dig into semantics is a waste of time in and of itself. It's quite self-evidently a clever and effective expository tactic.

Thanks, now I get it. Programmers have these kinds of arguments all the time.

> tank/not-tank My college roommate used to joke that in the Air Force, gate guards would draw a picture of a tank on their hands and that’s what they’re doing when they salute people in: “Tank? Not-tank”

The analysis is interesting but "not a tank" is a distraction.

Names are boring. Names are useful after the thing is defined in a useful way, not before.

And yet most arguments you will _ever_ have are because different people mean related but different things when using the same word. So having, especially public, discussion without having the understanding of where the terms come from, what they refer to and what else can be referred to by them (so sources of misunderstanding) is a problem. Which is _exactly_ the point of the TFA

Names are interesting. They combine many kinds of history.

this guy put the fact that he's a gigantic pedant right up front in the blog title, what'd you expect? let him go and do the pedantry thing, it's instructive

That's why I qualified "waste of time" with "in my humble opinion."

What I didn't say is that's it's a giant trap that I fall into when organizing my files and that's what I meant when I said it was a waste of time.

Well, it is a “Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry”, after all.

Vehicles without rotatable turrets were generally called Assault Guns or Tank Destroyers during WW2.

Most definitions of tanks rely on a heavily armored, tracked platform and a fully rotatable turret with armament capable of killing other similarly armored and armed vehicles.

Not as familiar with German assault guns, but it's worth noting that the American term "tank destroyer" was, like a tank as discussed in the article, a role-based term. The M18 Hellcat[0] was a tank destroyer, and looked much like a tank, but the M5 3-inch gun[1] was also a tank destroyer even though it was more similar to an artillery piece than a tank.

American tank destroyers, regardless of technical characteristics, were meant to wait for an enemy armored push, then respond to that, freeing up the actual tanks to go off and do their own thing. This was a result of prewar planning seeing that tanks might not be able to mount a good enough gun and have enough armor, but in the event it turned out that the M4's gun was good enough and enemy tank-only pushes didn't happen enough that the tanks couldn't respond to them, so the tank destroyer wound up as more of an assault gun.

If you're interested in reading more about American tank destroyers, Gabel, Christopher R. (September 1985), "Seek, strike, and destroy: U.S. Army tank destroyer doctrine in World War II"[2] is not terribly long and is well written

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M18_Hellcat [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-inch_gun_M5 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110601200445/http://www.cgsc.e...

Was the Panzer II a tank?

Because the Panzer II only weighed 9 tons. So the modern M2 Bradley has more armor _and_ a bigger gun. (Panzer II has a 20mm primary gun, M2 Bradley has a 30mm primary gun)

--------

I think the issue is that WW2 had definitions for tanks (light-tank, medium-tank, and heavy-tank). But today, armored-vehicles are classified by their tactics. (Ex: M2 Bradley would be a "WW2 Medium Tank", but the M2 Bradley's tactics / expected use case is really "IFV", infantry fighting vehicle).

Back in Ww2 days, there weren't many kinds of armored vehicles, and the systems of classification (and tactics) were just not very well defined yet.

Because today's wars are more complicated and have forced a change in military language to keep up with.

Case in point: I'd argue that the "modern Panzer II" is maybe something like the M113 APC (yeah... not really modern but...). With a 20mm gun, only ~12 tons of weight, the M113 APC would be a "light tank" in terms of WW2 terminology.

Of course, M113 is an "APC", not a tank. Panzer 2 wasn't a troop carrier either. But I think this example shows how the language has changed in the past 80 years, due to the change in armored-vehicle tactics.

If you want to call a Bradley a tank, I don’t think that matters. But if it’s carrying troops to disgorge at a location then it is now no longer a tank but closer to an IFV or APC. It doesn’t change the definition of what a tank is.

> Was the Panzer II a tank

Yes, but definitions change with time. If you asked someone to describe a car, most people would probably include features that are absent from early car design.

> Because the Panzer II only weighed 9 tons.

How is that of any relevance to GP’s comment?

Panzer II has almost no armor. 9 tons is ridiculously small.

The M113 APC has thicker armor than a Panzer II. If we take the phrase:

> Most definitions of tanks rely on a heavily armored, tracked platform and a fully rotatable turret with armament capable of killing other similarly armored and armed vehicles.

Then M113 APC "is a tank". (Big enough gun to kill other M113 APCs, armored and tracked, rotatable turret)

-------

My overall point is that "WW2 terminology sucks", especially when describing modern vehicles.

As a technical nitpick, the M2 Bradley has a 25mm main gun, not 30mm.

Except American tank destroyers did have rotating turrets and would be called tank by any reasonable person. Also, the S-tank is a dead ringer for German WW2 tank destroyers, and even fights in a very similar way (defensive/ambush) but is considered a tank. And then there's the Russian IS-152, ISU-152, ISU-122 which can be heavily armoured direct fire front-line fighters, but can also raise their guns for indirect artillery support.

I'm not in any armed forces so I am clueless when it comes to this.

Why do we still use tanks in modern times?

They seem useless in anything urban. They are easy targets for aircraft and jawlines. They need support vehicles for fuel and ammo. The only positive thing I see is that they can traverse unpaved terrain.

Being so vulnerable why are they not remote controlled? Human lives cheaper than the tech required? They don't even need to be autonomous, just remote controlled.

An armor officer can answer this better than I can:

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

If you're watching the videos from Ukraine - the Russians are pretty much doing it all wrong. You do not send tanks into cities unless they're following infantry who are clearing houses & rooftops. You do not leave your tanks parked in a nice neat line on a country road. When your unit comes under fire, you do not just sit there.

Why are the Russians doing these things when they know it's bad for their health? They don't have much of an NCO cadre. In a modern military, the NCOs have the experience and the authority to make sure stuff happens rapidly and correctly. They will have made sure the junior enlisted know how to operate and maintain their weapon & gear, and are able to do the mission without fucking up.

They move in lines because that's a mine-cleared path. And they move on roads at the north because other terrain is mud that even tanks get stuck on.

They're also sticking to higher roads in many areas because the fields around them have been flooded by the defenders

Are the tanks useful or should they just not bring tanks at all? Or are the tanks the best choice now because they utterly failed at preparing useful vehicles?

Yes, tanks are useful; a well integrated force can use them to great effect. But Russia's military has no concept of how to do that. They're doomed whether they bring tanks or not.

Putin is pulling Russian troops out of Syria[1], and obviously those troops are going to Ukraine. That's one of several signs that Russia is committed; they aren't going to stop. I expect to see large scale Russian mobilization soon, possibly starting in earnest on Monday with "victory" day.

It's going to take between 1-2 months for that mobilization to yield men in the lines. By then much of the advanced heavy weaponry that Ukraine is receiving will be operational with trained crews and ample ammunition. The scale of Russian casualties will be catastrophic.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/14/world/russia-syria-withdrawal...

Based on what I've seen Ukraine doing, Russia is forced to use tanks.

Ukraine is well dug in, and has been building out concrete-bunkers for the last 8 years (ever since Russia annexed Crimea and started to invade the Donbas region, Ukraine has been preparing). That's THICK concrete walls, well dug in sniper spots all over the place, underground networks, etc. etc.

Going into those areas without any armor will just get you sniped. Furthermore, going in by foot means walking and/or running, which is really slow.

--------------

So you go in with say, an APC (20mm thick armor), right? Since APCs are vehicles, they can run at 30mph to 50mph, so they're actually fast enough to go in.

Well, wrong. Ukraine has 50-cal machine guns and 50-cal sniper-rifles that shreads right through that armor. So even with an armored personnel carrier, they just die. Cheaper anti-tank rounds (AT4) also blow them up no problem.

Well... how about going in with an IFV? (less armor than APC, but more gun). Still the same problem, IFVs lose to that heavy machine-gun fire, and the 30mm autocannon of IFVs (BMP-2 and other such platforms) isn't big enough to punch through the concrete-bunkers the Ukrainians are hiding behind.

--------

So what does Russia do? They send in the tanks. 200mm+ thick armor with advanced geometry and anti-CE protection systems (reactive armor). (A sideways shot against a tank needs 500+mm penetration to harm the tank, thanks to the "geometry" of the tank). That thick armor is immune to sniper-fire and enemy machine-guns, even large machine guns and even 30mm autocannons.

And that's when the Ukrainians pull out Javelins and NLAWs and then blow up the tank (tandem-charge, blowing up the reactive armor with a "fake explosion" and then hitting the tank with a 600mm+ penetrating shot near simultaneously)

But still, the tank at least has a 120mm cannon to blow up bunkers while they're on the frontlines, so the tank actually made progress against the enemy bunker.

they shouldn't be there at all, I'm not going to provide advice on how they could be any more evil

I've heard this before. How can an army function without NCOs? Do they really have no sergeants or equivalent at all?

While tanks are still necessary, your observations are not wrong - the US Marine Corps decided to get rid of tanks fairly recently:

https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/flashpoints/2020/03/26/the-...

Quite prescient considering what we are seeing in Ukraine a couple years later with tanks being vulnerable especially when deployed so haphazardly by Russian Federation.

Bottom line - war games in 2018 showed that tanks and other armored vehicles in-range of near-peer drones, Anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs) were quite vulnerable - exactly like we're seeing in Ukraine.

There were other factors but the top marine decided no more tank battalions and greatly reduced artillery (among other changes).

Instead, these divestitures will be replaced by:

1. Precision long range fires (Naval Strike Missile\Joint Strike Missile (NSM\JSM), and possibly Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA))

2. Unmanned lethal air and ground systems.

That tells you what the war games revealed as being effective in future combat.

Marines got rid of tanks because Marines are focusing on a China vs Taiwan hypothetical conflict, where tanks would be nearly useless.

China vs Taiwan would be largely about establishing control of islands, and maybe a few beach-assaults.

Tanks don't work well on sand, and the 80-ton M1 Abrams is too heavy to fit on an assault-boat.

------

US Army has constantly developed tanks (and anti-tank weapons) because the tank remains a major battlefield player in Europe (Hypothetical... no wait... the now real Russia vs Ukraine situation)

> The Corps says heavy ground armor will still be provided by the Army.

That sounds more to me like the US Military decided it'd be more cost-efficient to only have the Army be responsible for tanks, and have the Marines be more focused on an amphibious role.

So it's all human ground personnel, missiles, and aircraft basically now (for land)?

As others have put it, it isn’t about a tank’s vulnerabilities but its capabilities. A vital distinction.

Horses were made (mostly) superfluous by lorries because the latter proved more capable.

Humans are excessively vulnerable. Anything will put us out of action. And we’re expensive to replace too. But because there’s nothing more capable than a human at certain things, so we’re still expected to face flying pieces of metal.

So far nothing can project force and hold terrain on land quite like a tank does. Javelin teams in buggies can’t. Neither can a drone. But a fast and protected box with a fearsome boomstick on one end does. Especially when used by well trained personnel and employed in a sane manner.

A few points that in the course of being typed out turned into a small essay:

Modern conventional warfare is extremely deadly: essentially, if a target can be seen it can be destroyed. Anything in the open will eventually be destroyed. Tanks are not especially more vulnerable to this danger than any other ground vehicle; they are larger, more visible targets, but that is somewhat offset by their armor. If you're looking at all the wrecked Russian T-72s in Ukraine and asking "why have tanks?" you could just as easily look at all the wrecked BMPs and BMDs and ask "why have infantry fighting vehicles?" or at all the wrecked supply convoys and ask "why have trucks?" The answer of course is because you need the mobility and firepower that vehicles provide, but the trade off is that the battlefield is very, very deadly for vehicles.

Tanks cannot take the lead in urban operations because the terrain is too restricted and their situational awareness too low. But, their direct firepower can be essential in urban operations: think of a rifle squad pinned down by sniper fire from the upper floors of a building at the end of the block, which is something a tank can easily destroy with minimal risk.

As the above point alludes to, tanks and infantry fight more effectively as a team than they can separately. Depending on the mission, terrain, and enemy disposition, a tank can be a more effective weapon than infantry, and vice-versa. But by having both working together, they are able to compensate for the others weaknesses. In the course of a battle, the more effective arm at a given moment is liable to change back and forth multiple times: sometimes the infantry will be making the main effort, sometimes the tanks; sometimes the infantry will be maneuvering while the tanks support by fire, sometimes the tanks maneuver while the infantry supports by fire.

The Russians have been particularly bad at this last point in Ukraine. Partly, this appears to a be a result of their infantry formations being significantly understrength; even if they were at full strength, their TOEs (Table of Organization and Equipment) for various infantry unit types suggest notably less strength than their western counterparts. The Battalion Tactical Group organization, as an ad hoc formation, also means that the infantry and armor in a given BTG have probably never trained to fight together as a team: it makes a big difference to go to war with people you've trained as a team with for months/years than with people you met two weeks ago.

I think the big takeaway from Ukraine is not that tanks are especially vulnerable on contemporary battlefield, but that unprepared and disorganized Russian tankers are going to die as quickly as the rest of the Russian army when confronting a tough, well-trained, determined opponent equipped with weapons specifically engineered to destroy their vehicles.

Right, a key phrase here is "combined arms": nothing for capturing/holding at all on the modern battlefield combines speed, survivability, scale and effectiveness into a single package. It's all about each piece reinforcing the others, constantly making use of their own strengths and covering for the weaknesses of other pieces (and being covered in turn) and shifting to react to the opponents. Having all the various forces well trained together, with the autonomy to react fast to changing events at their own level, a good regular supply of information/theater oversight, and with a solid logistics chain behind them is vital. Without logistics, intel and trained, smooth combined arms effectiveness plummets no matter what else there is.

As a layman with some interest in military history due to decades of playing strategy games:

That sentiment has been popular since the Gulf War, at least. I think the public perception has been shaped by American doctrine. It emphasizes throwing massive amounts of money and technology at the enemy, in order to avoid casualties that could make the war unpopular at home. When the US goes to war, it tends to spend more money than the entire economy of the other side. If the war drags on, that level of spending may continue for years. Almost nobody else can afford that.

Cheap(ish) drones and missiles have worked great for Ukraine in defense. However, Ukrainian forces have not had similar success in offensive operations. Ukraine continues asking for boring old-fashioned tanks and artillery, probably because their generals believe that can help them take back lost territory. They could probably achieve similar results with aircraft and precision munitions, but that would require outspending Russia, which is not happening even with all the military aid from the West.

Tanks are still cost-effective, but they are also vulnerable. You can lower casualties by using less cost-effective weapons systems, but only if you are economically superior to the enemy and willing to spend the money. That option is out of the table if you are in an all-out war against an economic peer or a superior enemy.

> Ukraine continues asking for boring old-fashioned tanks and artillery, probably because their generals believe that can help them take back lost territory.

Ukraine has explicitly asked for Western aircraft, F-15s and F-16s in particular, and UAVs such as Reapers. Those requests were public knowledge 5 weeks ago.

Ukraine's command believe tanks and artillery will conquer territory because that's actually happening on a daily basis, most recently around Kharkiv. They believe better artillery will enable offensive operations in late May or June, and they're correct. Right now Russia has an indirect firepower advantage they're using to advance slowly in Donbas. When that advantage vanishes because the enemy has longer range, more mobile and accurate weapons they will fold and territory will be ceded back to Ukraine.

In the short term, Russia has the military advantage. In the medium term, Ukraine will probably gain the advantage, but it's unclear if it will be sufficient to drive the Russian forces out quickly enough. Because in the long term, Ukrainian economy and infrastructure are collapsing, and they still have something like 35 million civilians to feed.

Fossil fuels are particularly problematic. If Ukraine can't import energy from Russia, Belarus, or over the Black Sea, the only remaining choice is Europe. But Europe is facing a shortage of its own, because most countries are trying to phase out energy imports from Russia. If they can't buy enough for their own needs, they may not share enough with Ukraine.

> Why do we still use tanks in modern times?

Because a 120mm gun blows everything up. 120mm guns can do things such as:

1. High-explosive rounds (Chemical Energy, or CE) -- 50lbs of high-explosives delivered to a target will kill almost anything, even if that "thing" is hiding behind a tree, concrete, or even behind tank-armor.

2. Discarding Sabot / Kinetic Energy rounds (KE for short) -- 50 lbs of depleted-uranium darts flying at Mach 1.6 destroys a lot of things, in ways that are complementary to #1. You can shoot through entire houses with these darts.

3. Canister rounds -- 50lbs of "shotgun pellets" can clear 500+ meters. Yes, an entire-football field can be covered by a *SINGULAR* "tank shotgun" blast.

Kinetic-energy rounds travel faster but have higher-penetration at short-distances (because KE rounds have more room for explosives to "launch" the shell). However, KE-rounds are supersonic and therefore get hit by a lot of air-resistance/drag.

CE-rounds in contrast, travel much slower, but pack a lot of "explosives" at the end of their shot. As such, CE-rounds start off with much less penetration (bad at short-distances), but can be lobbed 3000 meters and still have just as much deadliness (since most of the "damage" of CE-rounds comes from the explosive, air-resistance literally doesn't matter aside from being computationally-difficult to aim. But modern computers can compensate easily these days)

---------

These are the three main-types of ammo that a 120mm gun uses (aka, a tank gun). Now some questions.

1. 120mm guns weigh something like 10-tons -- How do you move them? With a big engine.

2. But a big engine + the gun itself is a sitting duck against even a 50-cal sniper rifle. We should cover the engine + gun in armor, to protect the crew and equipment.

3. But armor weighs a lot (especially depleted uranium armor). So we need a *bigger* engine. But the bigger-engine needs more armor to protect it. Etc. etc. etc.

Eventually, we end up putting a LOT of armor, to cover the HUGE engine and the HUGE gun all together.

That's about it. You need tanks to destroy enemy bunkers (what else are you going to shoot? AT4 / Javelins? Those heavy and slow weapons only have 1 or 2 shots. Tanks have *40* shots, more than enough to overrun any bunker you come across).

-------

Tanks are your biggest gun on the battlefield. They have armor as minor amounts of protection, not to actually be immune to enemies (though in practice, the armor is so thick they're immune to many smaller weapons). But the #1 purpose of any tank is to fire its big 120mm gun as often as possible on the front lines.

Tank crews are __NOT__ used as "cover" or "shields" in the modern battlefield. They are just grounded large-gun platforms.

-------

> They seem useless in anything urban.

Wrong. Tanks are the only weapon large enough to damage enemy houses, bunkers, or other fortifications. If the enemy is hiding behind a concrete wall, the Tank-gun can shoot right *through* it and kill everyone on the other side.

Buttoned up tanks don't know where the enemy is however. (Tanks have night-vision and thermal-vision sensors, but can only focus those sights on a narrow line of vision) Tank crews rely upon friendly infantry to search for enemies. Tanks have awful visibility, but their big-gun is unparalleled on the battlefield.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U61Hrn1JZWQ

Turns out that in practical urban combat, a lot of enemies hide behind concrete walls. What exactly is your battle-plan for that?

Tanks can provide air-burst (shoot over the wall, explode, rain fragments DOWN upon the enemy), or *THROUGH* the wall. Tanks are exceptionally flexible weapons.

> Discarding Sabot / Kinetic Energy rounds (KE for short) -- 50 lbs of depleted-uranium darts flying at Mach 1.6 destroys a lot of things,

Er, they have a muzzle velocity in the range of 1.6 km/s or 1600 m/s, about Mach 5.

As an aside, AFAIK the Rheinmetall 120mm used on the M1 and Leo2 tanks only have sabots and HEAT shells, no canister rounds or plain HE.

All nullified when a single drone can take out tanks AND do most of the other things you listed. Tanks are just not the future of urban warfare.

> All nullified when a single drone can take out tanks AND do most of the other things you listed.

There is no drone that carries the same level of explosiveness as a singular tank round.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U61Hrn1JZWQ

A tank can fire 40 of these at you in something like 5 minutes.

I'm not sure what kind of drone-platform exists to deliver 40x 50lb shells to the enemy 3000 meters at 500+ mph like a bunch of CE-rounds being fired from a tank-gun.

-------

Drones will change warfare. But drones are *NOT* a tank. They just don't have anything close to the destructive potential

You can't just "ignore" enemy concrete walls like a tank can. See this particular timestamp of the video: https://youtu.be/U61Hrn1JZWQ?t=67

Double-reinforced concrete walls / bunkers stand no chance against a typical tank round. What is a drone supposed to do against that?

-------

That above is a CE-round. Tanks can switch-it-up and shoot a SABOT round instead, if they need greater penetrating power (but less explosives): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnWCLJXwtsE

As you can see, the "tank" is a platform for a tank-commander to sit and think about which round to use for any given situation. The tank isn't "just" a sabot gun or a HE-gun, its *BOTH*, with an intelligent tank-commander choosing their loadout and firepower for every target they come across.

If the enemy is hiding behind 4 concrete walls, Sabot round to punch through all of it. If the enemy is just behind one concrete wall (but is very far away, like 3km or longer), HE round.

How many concrete walls can one drone get through? https://youtu.be/GnWCLJXwtsE?t=76

I think the person you were replying to is pointing out, no one NEEDS the giant gun when they can buy 20 drones that each can take out what the giant gun can, AND a tank for what a tank costs.

The drone can just fly around the concrete wall and blow up the things on the other side, it doesn’t need to go through.

Drones aren’t going to change warfare. They already have. The ones who haven’t woken up to that are the charred bodies on the battlefield right now.

> The drone can just fly around the concrete wall and blow up the things on the other side, it doesn’t need to go through.

Ukrainians are sitting inside of bunkers with 8-inch concrete doors and 8-inch thick concrete all around. How exactly are you "flying around" that?

Now sure, Russians are absolute crap with tactics and maybe drones are all you need to kill the Russians. But I'm looking at things from the Ukrainian side as well. Ukraine is defending so well that I'm not sure if anything *EXCEPT* a 120mm gun can push into their positions.

That's the thing: Ukraine is forcing Russia to advance with tanks. But Ukraine has a solid anti-tank strategy, so we see a lot of dead Russian tanks. But the alternative (ie: assaulting those Ukrainian bunkers with lol no armor) is probably a worse idea!

-------

Russian positions are just poorly dug dirt trenches right now. Of course tanks are unnecessary (for now). But if the Russians were actually as good as the Ukrainians (ie: bringing in that thick Concrete to reinforce their positions), then Ukraine would be forced to use tanks.

Ukrainian positions in the Donbas region have so much concrete, that they ask for artillery support and shell *themselves*, confident that their bunkers can stand up to the abuse. (Air-burst artillery shot at your own bunkers will never harm the bunker, while unarmored enemies trying to storm the bunker would all die at the front-door.)

This kind of defense practically requires a tank: you need the armor to protect yourself from airburst artillery, and you need the 120mm gun to punch through the 8-inches of concrete that the Ukrainians are hiding behind. Except Ukrainians __ALSO__ have anti-tank munitions, and just blow up the tank.

Its not exactly easy to figure out how to push into the Ukrainian positions. But the tanks seem necessary (even though they take high casualties).

Its not like drones have much armor. Airburst artillery would also destroy drones (airburst artillery covers something like 10,000 sq-meters in shrapnel per shot). Drones running into those positions would also be destroyed by this simple tactic.

A drone shooting a missile at said bunker, or flying up to the bunker and detonating a HEAT warhead it is carrying, or flying a new drone in when the old one gets hit by shrapnel all work great in these examples by the way.

Fabricating a kamikaze drone with HEAT warhead on it is a $10k or less affair.

Tanks are expensive, heavy sitting ducks. The only reason they haven’t been completely obsoleted is manufacturing drones hasn’t caught up yet.

They’re like horses in WW1 being used to charge machine guns in this fight.

In most of these cases you don’t even need a drone to do the dirty work though. Just one to find the bunker or whatever and let artillery or a cruise middle do the rest.

Those drones can be less than $5k, but they do get more expensive if you want to be able to pilot them from the other side of the planet or whatever.

The Hellfire missile is a 100Lb bomb, HE type only. 2 tank rounds are already roughly the same power, except Hellfire missiles are $100,000+ each.

HE is different from SABOT too. If the enemy is behind 2 walls (a bunker with multiple rooms inside), the SABOT would be better than pretty much any amount of HE type missile or round.

Of course, bunker buster bombs exist, but those are way more expensive and require air superiority to use.

------

> Just one to find the bunker or whatever and let artillery or a cruise middle do the rest.

Artillery can't shoot SABOT rounds either. Cruise missiles are $1+ million weapons.

An enemy bunker is just the kind of situations where tanks are needed. With a good design, bunkers offer protection from above (artillery or even air force bombs), and force a direct fire engagement.

No one is getting near an enemy bunker with an intact tank unless they’ve already lost now.

But keep believing tanks are relevant. It’ll be awhile before they get phased out regardless, same as a bunch of other kit.

Tanks easily and accurately fires from 3000+ meter distances (at least, HEAT rounds do). That's well in excess of even an advanced NLAW antitank missile, let alone AT4 or Panzerfaust 3. Only the Javelin missile has a similar standoff range.

Tanks don't "get close" to the enemy, unless they want to. Tanks are full of advanced firing computers, thermal vision, and night vision suites.

-------

I was somewhat hoping that in this Russia vs Ukraine war, we'd see more active-protection-systems, like the Israeli "Trophy" system. Except apparently neither Russia nor Ukraine has the tech.

It turns out that CE-warheads (like the Javelin, NLAW, AT4, Panzerfaust, or maybe even HEAT warheads from an enemy tank) have a weakness to shotguns on an aimbot. That's all the "Trophy" system is: when they see a 500+ mph rocket or shell going towards the tank, they shoot a shotgun at the thing, which disables most CE-rounds.

KE-warheads are traveling too fast with too much momentum. The shotgun may "deflect" the SABOT a little bit and might help, but I don't think there's much expectation for Israel's Trophy to kill SABOTs / KE-type projectiles.

I'd expect that a drone, traveling at only 100mph (ex: Switchblade 600) would lose to a tweaked Trophy APS (designed to shoot a shotgun at also 100mph objects). After all, if its reliably destroying CE-rounds at 500mph, it almost certainly can track and destroy a 100mph object like Switchblade 600.

> There is no drone that carries the same level of explosiveness as a singular tank round.

Yes. That seems to be why Ukrainian drones and Javelin missiles are having such an easy go of popping the turrets off of Russian tanks. You need just a small explosion to get thing started, and then the tank's onboard supply of explosives does the rest of the job for you.

> A tank can fire 40 of these at you in something like 5 minutes.

Once it gets into position. The major limitations of tanks here are that they are direct-fire platforms, and that they are big and noisy and difficult to hide. That's a real problem if you're up against an enemy with modern indirect fire capabilities, or effective anti-tank small arms.

> You need just a small explosion to get thing started, and then the tank's onboard supply of explosives does the rest of the job for you.

As mentioned in the article, the T-72/80/90 are uniquely vulnerable to this failure mode due to their carousel autoloader. Ammo cookoff in any MBT means you and your vehicle probably won't go to battle today, but at least it's not an immediate death sentence in most Western tanks.

Case in point, here's a M1-Abrams (USA's main-battle-tank) cooking off test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay7bOG2nD6k

You can see them purposefully light the tank's ammunition bay on fire. No damage to the internal components or the crew.

I'm sure the crew is sweating and feeling "a bit warm", but they'll survive. Its just that Russian tanks are hilariously vulnerable to this problem.

------

Russia's doctrine / theory for their tanks is to make them *smaller* instead. Russian tanks weigh the same but have no compartmentalization. This means that Russian tanks can navigate smaller roads, and also that Russian tanks can hide in ditches (or other terrain) too small for M1 Abrams to hide in.

In effect, Russians "accepted" the cook-off problem, but hoped that a competent crew could hide from the enemy better. Hard to say if it works, because it looks like the Russian crews are horribly trained and have low morale in this fight.

I think I can agree with the theory, or at least see that there's a beneficial tradeoff here.

https://i.redd.it/mtwtamct1t821.jpg

That's a lot smaller for the T72 compared to the M1 Abrams. If the crew could take advantage of the T72's smaller size, the crew very well could be more survivable on the modern battlefield.

It will be interesting to see the effect of the Panzerhaubitze 2000 might bring to the battle which should be given to the Ukraine soon. Way more powerful than a MBT and with 10x the range it could be really painful for the Russians, especially when combined with precise reconnaisance (drones, satellite imaginery).

Mobile artillery with guided shells can perform many of the tasks tanks are used for while at a standoff distance.

Except tanks do the same thing with unguided shells.

So the tank rounds are something like $500 each. In contrast, guided artillery shells are $100,000 or so each.

I mean, Tomahawk cruise missiles ($1+ million bucks) probably have more destructive potential and accuracy than anything discussed here. But they're just too expensive to really be used as a bread-and-butter tactic.

-------

The artillery game is important for sure. But there's advantages to a direct-fire system that directly engages with the enemy. Besides, artillery + tanks work together as a team, a force multiplier. Tanks can call for artillery support after all.

EDIT: Case in point, a tank can approach the front-lines, and use its thermal-imaging / night-vision to be an artillery-spotter from 3+km away from the target. The tank can also survive "closer" to the enemy (danger close, if you will).

>So the tank rounds are something like $500 each.

I was surprised that the military could get anything for $500, so I looked up tank round prices. They are more like $5000-$10000 (M829A4).

> M829A4

That's using depleted uranium though, so I'm not surprised that's an expensive round.

I'm looking up the M830 (HEAT), which is "just" explosives (with a bit of electronics), and that's closer to $1000.

So my $500 estimate was definitely under the price of USA's ammo... but I'm pretty sure Russian ammo is cheaper.

So I've been studying WW1 a lot recently and part of the problem that resulted in the mass slaughters early in the war we're the result of many of the technological advances in warfare not being tested at any significant scale forany years prior to the war.

I've been wondering what it will be like when the next big war hits and what are the technologies that will change the battle field that haven't been considered yet and drones are on of the biggest changes I think we'll see on the modern battlefield the next time two sizeable opponents go at it.

I think you've hit the nail on the head for part of it is the ability of drones to take out tanks is going to be huge, tanks are expensive, bulky and hard to conceal and have limited visibility and range. They are going to be sitting ducks for cheap drones.

As an aside everytime I read about the description of the battleships of WW1 I can't help but think of the fighter and stealth planes of our current era, massive expensive constructions who require a massive supply chain in terms of men and equipment to be effective, can only be deployed in specific situations and are championed by an officers core that doesn't realize their time has passed. After all what good does having general air superiority do for you if any random platoon can establish temporary tatical air superiority by hauling around a drone with em to complete their mission and bugger off while your Fighter is just taking off 500 miles away.

>They are going to be sitting ducks for cheap drones.

exactly https://youtu.be/BxaG4YdsHTg?t=31 - unspecialized small drone (22 V at 80 A) just dumping what seems to be like small mortar rounds onto the Russian tanks.

To the comment below - the upper armor is much thinner. You don't even need an RPG warhead here. Small mortar may do it if it hits over engine behind turret. It easily can also be just a small shaped charge bomblet from a disassembled cluster Smerch warhead for example. Such a bomblet pierces 5 inch RMA - well enough to take out the tank from the top.

I don't think the mortar rounds would have done any damage to those tanks. A much bigger threat would be artillery spotting though

> I think you've hit the nail on the head for part of it is the ability of drones to take out tanks is going to be huge, tanks are expensive, bulky and hard to conceal and have limited visibility and range. They are going to be sitting ducks for cheap drones.

https://imgur.com/a/FOclOMt

This tank can kill you from 3km away. Frankly, I don't think you'd see them. This is called "turret down" position, the tank is purposefully hiding behind a hill, and only the tank-commander is sticking out the top to see you.

The tank-commander has thermal and night-vision binoculars. He absolutely can see you. Just like a deadly-sniper, except with a 120mm cannon.

The tank will drive up the hill to stick its turret out (going from "turret-down position" into "hull down position"), fire a shot with computerized accuracy. The bullet will travel at mach 5, hypersonic. The shell will hit you before you even hear it.

-------

And you're telling me, that your weapon of choice against this tactic is a drone that moves at 50mph? Even a 500mph+ anti-tank rocket / missile could have trouble hitting the tank if they're playing "peek-a-boo" behind hills like this, they may not give you enough time to even lock on to fire your missile.

Case in point: at 500mph, your missile will reach the 3km-away tank in 12-seconds. More than enough time for the tank-commander to retreat behind the hill.

That's if your missile even has that kind of range (NLAW only has 1000meter range)

Your 50mph drone btw, will take 2-minutes to reach the enemy tank. The battle is long over at that point. The tank probably isn't even in that hill anymore.

> Tanks are just not the future of urban warfare

The recent events shows what the tanks is the urban warfare machine. It is only thing what can suppress and/or eliminate singular units operating from the high-rise apartments.

You need a bigger gun than infantry carry, but (as the article discusses) that doesn't necessarily mean a tank.

< 50 mm is just not enough. Anything bigger needs a proper armouring to have a chance to survive against AT weapons and nobody fields tank destroyers WWII-style anymore. So this leaves only one platform with armouring and big enough punch - tanks. Just look at videos in r/combatfootage, IFVs have a tough time there and constantly need to retreat and even tanks have a mines and AT thrown at them.

they're working on the drone tanks

https://www.thedefensepost.com/2020/12/21/us-army-drone-tank...

While this is all true, it's a lot of eggs (or a very big egg) in one basket. Tanks are powerful, but not invulnerable, as the past two months have shown. The usefulness of a tank is always a balance between what it can dish out and how vulnerable it is. Especially in close terrain (urban, forest) they're very vulnerable to infantry with anti-tank weapons, whereas in the open field, they're vulnerable to air attacks. Whether or not a tank is useful depends on how well you can defend against those threats.

This is why for many attacks, missiles or drones are more practical than tanks. Those are expensive per shot, but cheap to deploy and lose. In heavy fighting, the relative cheapness of individual shots makes a tank more affordable, but the deployment itself, especially if you want to give the tank the protection it needs, is quite expensive.

TL;DR: don't ask what they can do to the tank. Ask what the tank can do to them.

Also, every single piece of military equipment can be destroyed about as easily as a tank if it's not integrated within some sensible mission. Maybe the method is more expensive for aircraft and for ships, but so are those pieces of equipment.

> Being so vulnerable why are they not remote controlled?

They are working on that - remote controlled ground vehicle with customizable upper part, one option with a cannon turret, another option with launch tubes for suicide drones:

https://inf.news/en/military/c1587c15c63e5b9801ebb4e49a7fe2f...

AFAIK, the US military assumes that in combat with near-peers, the electromagnetic spectrum will be a battleground itself and units will not be able to use it. Everything must be able to operate offline, autonomously, and that includes soldiers who can't reach commanders for orders.

Remote control isn't going to work reliably at any significant range in a hostile electromagnetic environment.

I would argue that tanks have already been de-emphasized in western military doctrine from their heydays. That can be seen for example in programs like the M8 tank getting perpetually cancelled and instead more mobile platforms like Stryker getting preferred.

> Why do we still use tanks in modern times?

Actually not clear that we should be. The Ukraine experience is raising a lot of questions about the survivability of tanks against modern anti-tank missiles.

There are even civilian city tanks: SUVs… ok enough with the satire.

I disagree with the author. What is a panzer is also a tank to the layman, and language changes with its (incorrect) usage. See also the last paragraph.

Tank doctrine or tank building parts make a tank. Bergungstiger is a tank. Not having („tank“) tracks, but armor, wheels and anti-tank weapons, is still a tank. ``Jagdpanzer‘‘s (mostly front armored, no-turret tanks) are tanks.

There is not even a definition for „salad“ that we as humankind can agree on, but: if we see it, we know if it is a salad, tank, or both.

Hm, I don't think you disagree with the author, whose definition of "tank" in the article is basically "vehicle whose primary purpose is to engage ground targets with a direct-fire cannon while keeping the crew alive" (as opposed to, in particular, vehicles whose primary purpose is to transport and give fire support to infantry).

For germans like me, IFVs and armored artillery cars are tanks.

If every tank was an MBT, why add „main battle“ to the word at all?

So I think there are subtypes of tanks when we have subtypes of panzers.

As the article explains, there used to exist light tanks and heavy tanks until advancement of technology made the distinction obsolete and we ended up with only the "main battle" type of tank combining maneuverability, armor and firepower in a single package. As the article also explains, German "panzer" and English "tank" simply have different meanings, at least pedantically speaking. Translations aren’t always 1:1. (My native language actually follows the German convention.)

You can buy the Gurkha LAPV[1] as a civilian, and I would argue it's at least as much a tank as some of the light troop transport tanks from the cold war. And it's quite the SUV. :D

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

"everyone’s favorite kind of armored fighting vehicle"

Both the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts have proved without a shred of doubt that Tanks are effectively Suicide Cans that have little relevance in modern warfare. They only look good in military parades.

Anti-tank weaponry is sophisticated enough to blast open the greatest of tanks like a hot knife through butter. The warfare equation is changing where an expensive tank and it expensive trained crew can be annihilated at a minute fraction of the cost of building the tank and training its crew.

Citation: several hundred videos of tanks being blown to pieces by lone rangers in the Syria and Ukrainian wars using anti-tank weapons. In some videos a single guy destroys multiple moving tanks within a few minutes!

Today when a tank is seen on a road, the opposition smiles and is happy. They are going to have a blast and provide a viral youtube video. (which gets taken down but not before it spreads)

Unless there is a revolution in armour tech and some sci/fi shielding technology, the Modern Main Battle Tank (MBT) is a Dead Dodo.

The gamer's language for these things actually seems to be pretty relevant. A tank needs to be able to move forward into the thick of the battle, and be able to give and receive a dishing.

A WoW warrior class is a tank. It can give and receive a dishing. A DnD rogue class is not a tank. It would not move forward into battle in a frontal assault, with the intent of pushing a breakthrough.

That gamer terminology is a pet peeve of mine. A gamer's tank fills the real-world infantry role. It can hold territory and take a lot of punishment, but it doesn't do much damage to the enemy. The D&D melee rogue, on the other hand, is much like a real-world tank. The rogue moves fast and hits hard but is vulnerable without infantry support.

Is a drone aircraft a tank? It moves fast and hits hard.

Nah, drone is a mage's summon.

Eh, MMO lingo presumes that a "tank" class is supposed to take damage. Any tank crew that plans to rely on its armor to survive hits isn't going to live very long.

For what it's worth, I'd give an M1 better odds of surviving hits than a B2.

Being able to take unreal amounts of damage is sort of general to video games, and not specific to tank character classes. The medic in TF2 can survive more direct hits from a rocket-propelled grenade than a real-world battlefield medic, too.

That’s a bit selective. I would say that a tanks main duty is to draw aggro from main damage dealers and support and act as a damage sponge.

But historically, not every tank was a breakthrough tank. Some tanks were not sufficiently armored for a direct frontal assault, and were made for flanking or reinforcement against specific targets. Some tanks are purely defensive, like the S-tank.

though most video game tanks don't need to dish much damage, instead the damage is done by the dedicated DPSs

Why do enemies attack tanks, if tanks don't dish damage? ("Tanks are used in games because game AI is dumb" is not a very good answer for extrapolation and metaphor.) How is a tank not a shield?

Video-game "Tanks" often have a degree of controlling the enemy movement. Slowing enemies down, binding them, preventing movement.

So the point of a "tank" is to run in front of the party. If the enemy tries to run around the tank, they get "CC'd" (crowd-controlled" and are then unable to move. The DPS-job is then to run in, kill them while they're under the control of the tank (aka: while the enemy can't move), and that's that.

So trying to kill the enemy DPS often just gets your own party out-of-position. As such, you're often forced to kill the enemy tank first.

-------

Needless to say, these fantasy fights / video-game fights don't exist in the real world. These roles were setup by video games, probably World of Warcraft and Diablo II before LoL and DotA. (Maybe an earlier game than that?)

But when video gamers hear the word "tank", they expect real-world tanks to act... well... like a video-game tank, and not like a real-world tank.

This is an okay definition but it spreads the definition a little thin as you're conflating Player vs Player (PVP) and Player vs Monster (PVM) tanks.

With PVM, there is no focus from the monsters directly, they have aggression algorithms, and tanks typically have a way of directly manipulating this (draw aggro). They have skills that improve statistics usually defensive, and sometimes can outright prevent damage with well timed skills. They're "Tanks" because they absorb/prevent damage while keeping attention on themselves.

In PVP, Tanks are typically fight starters or stoppers, that is, they come with a skillset that is designed to manipulate the position and movement of other players (often the enemy, sometimes their own), and even sometimes outright incapacitating other players. They are tanks because they have low or 0 damage stun moves, displacement moves (i.e., players are forcibly moved against their will to an disadvantageous position), terrain creation/removal moves (blocks player movement), and typically high health and defensive stats.

Tanks in both cases can start fights because they have to pretty much. Their value is not in the damage, but in their ability to set up fights or to absorb damage/attention. For PVP in particular, tanks tend to have very heavy crowd control so you must be careful about if they decide to engage. The .5-2 seconds that is common for crowd control often is "just enough" to remove your main damage dealers from the fight (temporarily or permanently) and then you're at a disadvantage because the team numbers are against you.

For PVM, the tank wants to start its skill rotation so it can get specific buffs going and active.

ARPGs really don't have tanks btw (mostly RE:Diablo 2). You can certainly build them, but modern diablo forces all players to be damage dealing tanks. Diablo 3 tried to change this a little, but it still just ended up being an "Every stat is perfect" sort of game, and probably with more glass cannon builds.

>Why do enemies attack tanks, if tanks don't dish damage?

The target of the enemies, and their tendency to attack, is usually modeled with "aggro". Damage increases aggro, but aggro can also be manipulated. Tanks usually have ways to increase their aggro, unproportionally to their damage, and DPSes sometimes have ways to lessen their aggro. Actually the tank's task is to take damage and manage aggro so that the enemy doesn't kill the DPS-es or the healers.

In pvp or tabletop games, tanks often come with some penalty to the opponents to motivate them to engage the tank sooner. e.g. damage over time that can be interrupted or mobility restrictions the tank can place down

There's something about tanks that makes them a priority. Games are set up so the tank can absorb damage done to others, or heal, stuff like that.

Because the roles of each fighter are baked into eg League of Legends, there are reasons tanks play the role of a tank. And yeah, opponents try to kill the other roles first, but the the job of a tank is to make that hard.

Those are artillery.

"tank" seems like a very headline (and tweet) friendly word.

http://www.isabelperez.com/module4_tesis/headlines.htm

I can imagine similar nerd discussions for some of those.

(Interesting to note the only one that seems longer than the usual term is replacing 'strike').

The S-Tank is my favorite tank. Although turretless, its hydropneumanic suspension allowed it to aim its gun up and down in a remarkable way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RVbqyz2lk4

From my utterly uninformed position, the Bradley looks like the future to me.

Why? Because look at that dumb little gun on the thing. Nobody shows up to War with a dumb little gun like that, unless they've got some really freaky tricks hidden up their sleeve. If somebody shows up in a tank, you know their plan -- they are going to use their giant gun to shoot at things. Probably other tanks. But the Bradley? Not a tank, no tank gun, so who knows what it is going to do?

The smart bet on the future of military hardware (or most anything, really) is never that it's just one thing. Not just one plane, not just one gun, not even just one small-arms caliber...

I didn’t realize until Ukraine 2022 that true tanks are infantry weapons. They are low profile (same height as a soldier) and there to deliver artillery style impact but at point blank range, side by side with riflemen.

Why do tanks need infantry? You can immobilise a tank with a petrol bomb. Something with the firepower of a tank also needs FIBUA close quarter combat to defend it. It is a bizarre quandary.

On a side note, the story behind the etymology of “tank” is a funny read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank#Etymology

Here's my favorite vehicle from the Jacques Littlefield tank collection. A Russian P-40 radar.