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.
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.
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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?
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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
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.
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!
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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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
But keep believing tanks are relevant. It’ll be awhile before they get phased out regardless, same as a bunch of other kit.
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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2020/12/21/us-army-drone-tank...