Does the Tank Have a Future?
economist.com
economist.com
While it is possible that drones and modern ATGM teams could effectively counter traditional combined arms operations, the evidence from the war in Ukraine is largely inconclusive at this time. If Russia were to correct their manpower issues, or at least be able to conduct traditional combined arms offensives in certain areas, then we'd have more solid evidence. Notably Ukraine still sees value in the tank, since they've been repeatedly requesting tanks (along with a variety of equipment) from the West.
Personally, I think we'll see an adjustment to the balance of military forces, but the tank will continue to play a pivotal role. Active protection systems will continue to improve, we'll see the expansion of short range air defenses and doctrine to counter drones (and even longer-ranged ATGMs), increased teaming of drones alongside infantry and armor (in doctrine acting as a sort of middle ground between artillery and air power), and the usage of novel indirect fires for tanks like the KSTAM.
I suspect like all the other armchair experts this is actually a massive russian doctrine failure, but if I was being charitable I'd say we're not seeing the FEBA in play, this is post-fight or side-fight mop-up stuff.
And, they've been let down by spares, failure to do tire rotations in the last 5 to 10 years, fake parts, fuel quality, you-name-it. A lot of the materiel we see in the videos could be the class of stuff you would also have seen post D-Day: Dang: the duce is bust: ok, drive it off the road for later and move to another truck...
1. When enemy has tons of artillery, and any light armour is doomed in open field
2. The only military unit capable of offensive operation during nuclear warfare
For as long as nuclear weapons are there, there will be a need for an all-terrain nuclear bunker with gun.
They still have to refuel the tank and find food.
4x4 Toyota Hilux trucks with some sort of heavy gun + a fireteam of infantry kitted out with 1x drone, 1x manpad, 1x atgm.
Far cheaper than a modern tank and far more mobile.
The situation is a bit different in forested areas. Maybe modern aircraft have thermal imaging good enough to detect heat signatures from out of MANPAD range, dunno.
TLDW: Tank has a task on a battlefield and fact that you can easily kill it won't take that task away. Same goes for infantry and they are not going away either. On the other hand we don't see battleships anymore, because big guns were replaced by precise missiles with much more range.
I'll make my comment more assertive: I think "we" (for almost any value of "we") prepared for this. Some assumptions were proven wrong, like it often happens with war. But a lot of it is playing out like many assumed it would, or at least, it's playing out so that some factions can observe what modern war fought with modern weapons looks like.
There's a reason Russia feels good blustering about attacking Finland.
When did that happen?
https://nypost.com/2022/05/14/russia-threatens-nukes-for-us-...
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-threatens-finland-sweden-nat...
This was major news and carried by almost every outlet. It is almost certainly just bluster, but escalatory bluster for sure.
Obviously what Russia has done is reprehensible, but if Ukraine saw war as incoming I don't see why they took these aggravating steps.
I did want to say your observation is astute.
Even Russians themselves reflected on this, noting that most volunteer forces they have faced so far come not from the Western (majority-Ukrainian-speaking) regions of Ukraine, but rather from Kharkiv, Dnipro etc. Their explanation is that all those people are "brainwashed by Ukrainian Nazis".
There is some real contention with the status of Russian as 1) the official government language, and 2) the official education language in schools. But I don't think it's fair to phrase that as "banning Russian".
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-langua...
"The new legislation requires TV and film distribution firms to ensure 90 percent of their content is in Ukrainian and for the proportion of Ukrainian-language printed media and books to be at least 50 percent."
It also says civil servants must speak Ukrainian. It does not say they can't also speak Russian.
In any case, that's not a ban.
Turkey has done the same thing to Kurdish speakers and most of the West has rightfully condemned their attempts to crack down on the language.
On the whole, I'd say that Ukrainian language policies are more akin to Quebec. OTOH Turkey has been packing its prisons with Kurds until recently for crimes such as "insulting Turkishness", so no, it's not really a valid comparison. I don't like the laws on this subject in either Ukraine or in Quebec (or really any place that tries to force cultural cohesion), but specifics do matter.
Previously, Russian was allowed to be taught in schools in Ukraine. It was then banned from being taught in schools even in regions where the majority of people speak Russian.
Furthermore, it is illegal in Ukraine to have a Russian language radio station.
I encourage you to read up on the actual policy differences.
"Yes it is" "No it isn't" is a really uninteresting conversation. Somebody supply some evidence, not just claims.
For schools, businesses and public services: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210401-new-law-stoke...
There's an education law that says that starting in 2023, all state schools must be taught primarily in Ukranian at and above the fifth grade. While imperfect, it does allow teaching in several minority languages, especially in primary school. Russian is not allowed at state schools above primary school as a teaching language for other subjects, but it can be taught as an elective subject and other organizations are free to teach it. The ECHR implications of this are mentioned specifically by the Venice Commission.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-language/criticis...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190516190140/https://www.presi...
https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?p...
From section 5 of the Venice document.:
"69. Thus, it appears that members of the Bulgarian, Greek, German, Polish, Romanian and Hungarian minorities, in addition to being able to study their language as a subject, may also study one or more other subjects through the medium of their language at the secondary education level. However, members of national minorities who do not speak an official EU language — Byelorussians, Gagauzes, Jews, and, significantly, Russians — will only be able to study at the secondary school level their language as a subject. Thus, a hierarchy is created at the secondary school level, with indigenous peoples potentially treated more favourably than national minorities which speak an official language of the EU, and national minorities which speak an official language of the EU treated more favourably than other national minorities."
There is a high quota for state-language content on radio but other languages are allowed a percentage. From section 7 of the Venice document.:
"95. With regard to the use of languages in broadcasting, Article 24 refers to the Law on Television and Radio Broadcasting. At the same time, a transitional provision of the Law (Section IX, point 7.24) amends Article 10 of the latter Law, tightening the language quota requirements, by increasing the proportion of the Ukrainian language content for national and regional broadcasters from 75 to 90 per cent and, for the local broadcasters, from 60 to 80 per cent. This amendment will come into force five years after the Law’s entry into force (i.e. on 16 July 2024)."
So is the situation perfect for everyone? No. Is the EU (and Hungary and some others) pushing Ukraine to compromise? Yes. Have they promised to work on compromises? Also yes.
There's no need to go beyond the actual, documented issues and spread falsehoods and propaganda.
TL;DR: I invite you to read up on the issue.
Doesn't seem all that minimal to me.
That's like forcing all Canadians to be only taught in French and subsequently losing Vancouver to the US.
So you have just confirmed everything that propaganda was talking about and were quite efficient at that.
Nobody has ever banned a language by allowing printing in it, allowing grades up to 4 to be taught in it, allowing secondary schools to teach it as a subject, and allowing private groups to continue teaching it as a primary language.
But more correct case in point is Belgium. If Belgium tried to force education to be in Dutch exclusively, there would very soon be no Belgium.
> allowing grades up to 4 to be taught in it,
"Banning grades after 4 from being taught in Russian" - I did it for you
All 30 years of Ukraine's independence they were seeing new limitations to the use of Russian, every year. Some of these are listed in comments.
I never did - please don't accuse me of doing so.
1. On the school claim, it is now illegal to have exclusively Russian preschool or elementary school. Your own point concedes that it is illegal to teach other subjects in Russia - students will only be able to study their language as a "subject." That is not a "Russian-language school."
It is also illegal for private schools to teach in only Russian.
2. On Radio: As I said, it is now illegal to have an exclusively Russian language radio and for news subject, it is illegal for the radio to be even Russian majority.
This lines up with both of my claims.
Show me that law.
> [not] banning Russian language
Russian isn't banned in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians use Russian in their day to day life just fine. You can hear Russian spoken by Ukrainians on the battlefield.
> not shelling cities
Check photos from Donetsk in e.g. 2020, city ~10 kilometers from the frontline. Does it look destroyed? No, it looks like any peacetime city.
There were artillery exchanges between both sides targeting military fortifications. Civilian casualties in the last few years have been minimal.
But this doesn't really matter either way. Putin doesn't care about civilian casualties, otherwise why would he start this war?
It is illegal to have Russian language radio stations, Russian language schools, and for government to communicate officially in Russian (in addition to Ukrainian & English). Of course people still speak Russian in Ukraine.
> There were artillery exchanges between both sides targeting military fortifications. Civilian casualties in the last few years have been minimal.
Yes from both sides. 3.4k civilian casualties prior to the actual war.
Then it's not banned as you claimed.
> Yes from both sides. 3.4k civilian casualties prior to the actual war.
With 3000 out of that in 2014 and 2015. In 2021 - 18 civilian deaths, half of that caused by unexploded shells/mines - https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/Conflict-...
War in Donbas was actually dying out in the past few years, until Putin decided to escalate it and cause deaths of 10 000s.
This is an understandably myopic view. Especially now, as the whole charade of justification and "objectives" of russia's invasion in Ukraine is in full swing.
Perhaps, remembering that in putin's view, Ukraine is not an independent state, its existence is a mistake, the land is a sphere of russia's influence... well, the madman outright wants it "back" into the "empire".
Thus it has long been clear that no amount of pacifying or "non-irritating" is to alter such policy. Language, aspirations and affinities are simply pre-texts for the forceful grab.
Fundamentally, we're dealing with a clash of mentalities. One adopting to modern day and the one still stuck in the "age of empires".
To putin's russians, tank is a symbol of forceful conquest. So it's not going away. Perhaps, more images of the charred russian army tanks could break this perception... temporarily.
This represents the total failure of diplomacy present in today's discourse.
We no longer think diplomacy affects the outcome and we think that any compromises from our side is just "free stuff" for the other one.
What happens if Putin is not insane? What happens if there were better diplomatic outcome to this situation that the war? The ones that were missed by the lack of effort?
There're no more what ifs. The madman was amassing the troops on the border for months, dismissing any possibilities of preparing an invasion. Then invaded, and openly blackmailed the rest of the world with a nuclear strike, all spreaded by his chief "diplomat".
Present day russia as state proved to be pathologically incapable of maintaining signed treaties.
If anything, the diplomacy needed to rely on the effective sanctions. However, that's were the failure was. Since the 2014 the sanction pressure proved to be insignificant to alter russia's course. Did we get a second chance at it now?
Why do you need troops if you're not going to amass those? Still does not mean that diplomacy can't be useful.
The mental health argument is weird. Was Bush a madman when he invaded Iraq?
The point of sanctions isn't deterrence. It's to weaken the Russian economy and slow down the rate at which they can manufacture more weapons.
With such strength of diplomacy, no wonder it didn't work.
And yeah, you should've got by now that the position of your neihbours is the most important factor in the policy of most, if not all, countries.
A state is always going to need a military to defend its stability and continuity from existential threats. Despite what the internet would have you believe, the world is a massive place with a vast diaspora of peoples with tons of different contradictory policy preferences. I don’t think we could give up preparing for the next fight if we wanted to.
The other poster raises a valid point that war, as it is typically been envisioned, might be far less prominent than people realize. The argument is that the tank has a task on the battlefield, but we should ask ourselves how much that battlefield matters in this day and age.
Deport the unfavorable people to Siberia. Then import the willing population into Ukraine.
Given the Russian "tactics" and "strategy" for its war in Ukraine, it is clearly a threat of cultural genocide. Russia aims to destroy the Ukrainian people and their history, and disperse them into Siberia where they won't be able to become a threat.
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USA tries to "win hearts and minds" because we've convinced ourselves that we're the "good guys", and want to win under certain conditions. Without hearts and minds, we lose and we're willing to accept that.
When Russia fights, they're not aiming for that at all. Its just destruction. Even against "brother Slavs", its better for Ukraine to be destroyed than for it to play nice with NATO (or so they want to believe).
Under these circumstances, the only solution is to arm the Ukrainians and give them a fighting chance. Otherwise, the Ukrainians will be completely, and utterly, annihilated as a people.
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Russia has the will and the right strategy here in broad strokes.
They fortunately, don't seem to have the right tactics or approach. So it looks like the Russians will fail. But even as they fail, they will cause hundreds-of-billions, maybe trillions of dollars worth of damages, and likely cause the largest famine event the world has ever seen.
Better weapons and a better defense could have prevented the Ukrainians from losing their coastland. Better weapons could have allowed Ukraine to continue their grain exports. Better weapons and defenses could have protected Ukrainian's grain silos, which are being blown up and pillaged.
The West will HAPPILY fund the Ukrainians to proxy destroy the Russian military, and proxy bankrupt them.
We'll see how long Putin lives with cancer. The speed of deployment and assumed schedule for victory would point to very fast cancer.
Not many Ohlone on hacker news.
The US tried exterminating the Taliban, but failed.
What is that based on? What good outcomes has Russia had from a war, in centuries?
But the world has changed faster. All use of military now is misuse and futile.
We don't look at veterans now and say wow what heroes. We just thank them for their service. We don't celebrate them for "Mission Accomplished". Thanking is like a participation trophy.
So trying another region's way of war would be an improvement, then?
The fact that the world is as peaceful as it is now is remarkable. It's because of MAD and the high cost of war.
What we revolt at is the industrial scale of modern war. But war has been with us since prehistory. Our ancestors killed, raped, and pillaged. Far enough back in time, and they even ate one another.
Look to nature. It evolved thousands of types of killing machines to harness the energy of other creatures. Lions eat wild prey alive. Hornets lay their larva inside live hosts so that they can feed. Orcas play with their food for sport.
Just imagine what happens when we get AGI or BCI.
It's easy to be pacifist and condemn war. And we should hope for that. But we also have to protect our sovereignty and safety, and that means maintaining an adequate defense with weapons, food, energy, and supply chain.
Our comfort comes at great cost.
Russian empire needs to be dismantled. But unlikely UKR waging war on russia will do it.
I think most people will agree with you that war is bad. But if you get attacked, then all you can do is either give up or defend yourself.
Afghanistan chose to give up to the Taliban, and now their rights are being taken away.
Ukraine chose to defend themselves, and the jury is still out on whether they’ll be successful and what the cost will be.
But there is no third option where you simply will war out of existence.
Diplomacy works with certain enemies, and that will hopefully be the outcome in Ukraine too, but that too will come with a heavy price, such as giving up major amounts of territory.
The natural corollary of someone attacking you is not to get into an arms race.
Afghanistan didn't choose Taliban. Pakistan and Saudi chose Taliban and armed them enough to take over. War obviously works.
What's going to happen in UKR is that the warlike will win and then naturally turn their guns towards the locals. Exactly like in Afghanistan. You can arm them as much as you like, but they will not turn into gandhis with an excess of guns.
My point is not that war doesn't work. My point is that we should all be fighting against war.
By what, asking nicely?
The way is for the antiwar people to be more successful than warriors and turn war into the losers' choice.
I refuse to arm myself, refuse to serve in militaries and refuse to support war as much as i am able. If antiwar people are successful, war will evolve out.
That’s always the unfortunate downside of relying on only persuasion. Some people will just take what they want if you don’t force them to stop.
Just read about how well persuasion (aka “appeasement”) worked in the buildup to WW2. Spoiler: it didn’t.
Whether they do that as a democratic government, a dictatorship, a paragovernamental entity, or a set of mobs makes all the difference in the world.
I don't trust people with guns. They are the same because they all choose violence to get their way.
"Democratic" gun holders point more guns at me today than mobs.
Words and persuasion are all very good, until you meet people who simply don't care.
You can have more than one, but it's a huge life vs. death issue. You can't have zero.
Ideally the Zelensky regime should have gotten the message and should have left for the West as soon as the Russian paratroopers landed at Gostomel. The Czechoslovaks in '68 and the Hungarians in '56 had done exactly that. Yes, that would have probably meant a couple of decades of a Russian-backed puppet regime in Kyiv but the future would have been open for anything. As things stand right now Ukraine has almost no access to the Black Sea anymore, about 7 million people have left their homes, not to mention the tens of thousands of civilians dead in this war.
As long as there are conflicting desires, there will be conflict, and it can break out into war.
However, it's possible that war can be reduced, but it may require things we're not quite ready for, such as the end of Westphalian states.
TEDxAmsterdam: Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjAsM1vAhW0
Link to TED profile: https://www.ted.com/speakers/peter_van_uhm
"Peter van Uhm [was from 17 April 2008 until 28 June 2012] the Netherlands' chief of defense" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_van_Uhm
To eliminate war the motives for war created by governments need to be addressed. There is only one logical outcome, once you decide you don't want war.
I'd go further and say that unless you achieve the perception of global equality in all things it is futile.
The grass is always perceived as greener, even when it actually isn't.
Armed conflict is driven by foreign policy which itself is, ultimately, politics.
(Unless it’s a crusade.)
I'd love to update or correct my understanding of tanks, artillery, HIMARS, aircraft carriers, cruisers, littoral combat, submarine classes, F-22, F-35, AWACS, etc.
For armor, Chieftain is probably as good as it gets in English when it comes to universality (he's both a historian and an active service Lt.Col. in the US NG).
For further armor sources, I'd highly recommend the YT channel of Tank Museum Bovington: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTankMuseum
The chap whose video Chieftain replies to ("Perun") is worth following in his own right for the modern take on Russian / Ukraine war. He's more of an economist / logistician, but well worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
From Perun You'll often hear the name "Michael Kofman". He doesn't get one single place where you could find all of his stuff, but google him and go through the articles / videos he is in. He's often used as a source for quite a lot of commentary about Russian Army in the past 20 years or so. https://russianmilitaryanalysis.wordpress.com/
When it comes to general doctrine, it's sometimes useful to know the compositions of forces. This is a good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleOrder
When it comes to modern navy, Jive Turkey (now called "SubBrief") is probably a cool starting point. Mainly submarines (he's an ex US Navy 688 sonar operator), but : https://www.youtube.com/c/SubBrief
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKewF8_SiIs
The short, short, short version is that the Russian BTGs (battalion tactical groups) and undermanned in general, and the conscripts are supposed to be filling most of the infantry slots. Theoretically, because this isn't a declared war, the conscripts aren't supposed to be fighting, and weren't sent to the "special military operation".
I enjoyed watching all the Ukraine war videos on that channel.
If You like Perun and want to dig a bit deeper, try checking out Kofman's articles / videos. He's used quite often as a source (and with quite some reverence) by Perun and others.
Here's one from 2019 where he basically says what everyone figured out in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UktY0XePs0
Beware, it's not the best presentation, but his public speaking skills have seriously improved since ;-)
Here's a panel he did with West Point right at the beginning of the invasion, if You'd like to check how his stuff holds up (Col. L. Collins is a good one on his own as well). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXEvbVoDiU0&t=2378s&ab_chann...
https://www.matrixgames.com/game/armored-brigade
Armored Brigade is probably a good start. 4 minutes for artillery to aim, 1 to 2 minutes for shells to actually arrive, 10 minutes for air-support to fly in.
1 to 2 minutes to deliver commands to any particular squad (depending on how good their radio contact is).
Roughly realistic levels of arms, armor and penetration. Angle of shots and type of weapon (kinetic energy, such as APFSDS, or Chemical energy, such as M47 Dragon or HEAT rounds) are factored in.
Guided missiles, top-down missiles, fire-and-forget missiles. Etc. etc. Its not every weapon, but its a solid set of important weapons that probably cover a wide variety of possible combat situations.
Line-of-sight is simulated on an incredible degree: height maps matter, but so do trees (partially obscured), houses, and smoke grenades even. Line of sight is best at 12noon. Line of sight is worst at night, unless your squads are equipped with thermal vision. Weather (foggy conditions especially) can change things dramatically.
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The simulated soldiers/tanks aren't the best, but they're smart enough to run away during artillery barrages and hunker down. They'll seek cover on their own (and if you tell them a direction to defend against, they'll look for cover on their own too against that direction). Tank commanders "button up" during enemy fire (reducing their vision but likely saving the commander's life). Covering fire is therefore effective.
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The AI is okay. The AI runs into traps and ambushes, and never really figures them out. Still, good enough to get you the basics of strategy of each of these weapons.
Seeing the 3000m range of a tank vs the 150m range of a M72 LAW really demonstrates the bravery that those unguided anti-tank bazooka squads have.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1502380/Combat_Mission_Bl...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9egpHJiRis89uHkeyJiEug/vid...
I think the closest to what you're looking for is FM 3-96 the Brigade Combat Team (https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31505-FM_3-9...). The is the smallest unit that includes effectively everything the Army can bring to bear, including infantry, armor, artillery, and rotary aviation. There might still be some fairly specialized intelligence, surveillance, and recon assets only available to divisions, but most of what the Army can deploy for fighting purposes exists in the BCTs at this point. I imagine other branches of service have their equivalents in terms of doctrine on how to employ submarines and fighter jets, but I only ever served in the Army and am most familiar with their tactics and doctrine.
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not...
Maybe you're willing to climb into a tank after what we've seen in Ukraine recently, but that's all you, pal.
Not everybody likes wars of attrition. Russia is an outlier in that regard. Copying their doctrine and tactics is a bad idea, as is citing them as a successful example of how to accomplish anything. They are great at beating up on unarmed civilians, but against a modern armed force they wouldn't stand a chance... and no amount of tanks and soldiers will change that.
...modern armed force and which is willing and allowed to fight. It's an increasingly important factor of modern day engagements.
Let's not forget the political aspects of the battlefield, as we are continuing to witness.
They seem to be doing quite well against the modern army of Ukraine, NATO-trained for 7-8 years now.
Where do people get the impression that Russian army is strong and capable is beyond me, they just throw people into the meat grinder and sit on top of the infinite Soviet arsenal of old equipment.
"Quantity has a quality all its own". They aren't considered "strong" because individual Russian battalions are expert warfighters per se. They're considered "strong" because the Russian military-industrial complex in its totality is not something that can be idly ignored by anyone except maybe the US or China.
Basically Russia scores high on 3 particular Principles of War: Mass, Offensive, and Simplicity. Not so well on the other 6 though.
https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/B2B2269...
Frustrating to watch.
There are also larger issues to consider beyond just "we want the help the Ukrainians". The best stuff we can send has a bunch of sensitive NATO/US technical information (radio comms, etc.). Do we want to risk that gear falling into Russian hands (and by extension probably getting shared with China)? If the answer is "no", we either have to send alternatives or send the equipment to depot maintenance areas to have the sensitive tech removed. That takes time.
Do we want to risk escalating the war outside of Ukraine, if the Russians respond kinetically to armaments shipments? The answer is again an emphatic "no" from almost every nation except maybe Poland.
Hence the popular snarky refrain: "NATO will fight Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood". Western governments and people will "stand with Ukraine" as long as it doesn't involve them really risking anything (such as themselves being on the receiving end of Russian missiles or artillery).
More concerning (imo) is gear, particularly man portable anti-air weapons, sold to terrorist groups either via corruption in the Ukrainian forces, or a Russian op to supply NATO arms to such groups.
Makes sense - if all combatants in the Russian army are dead, there’s no further need to defend territory for Ukraine. A boom with a border guard stamping passports would suffice.
Thus the priority from the very beginning was to disrupt the supply lines and ability to generate resources, meanwhile securing own supply and resources.
Ukraine needs more supply of long range artillery and lot more ammo for it ... yesterday and right now!
Political goals are always the first priority. Fighting may be exciting, but it may also be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Defeating the enemy is neither necessary nor sufficient for winning the war.
Infantry and AFVs that support them will never go away. They may change but war isn't just about destruction.
There are some experiments using turret style drones to maintain like DMZs. They still need a human operator. That is a case where you are mostly just waiting though.
Seizing a town means dealing with a ton of civilians - negotiating, handling mixed reports, etc. Drones may become part of that but cameras are imperfect and you will need people unless Drone tech has a giant leap in human interfacing.
How would you occupy a city with only drones? What would it look like? Would they issue orders to civilians to stay in their homes? What sort of objectives that humans do now in war [0] do you think drones can fully replace?
[0] establishing forward bases for further logistical support, "securing" areas, including searching through rubble for humans and making sure they're not a threat, etc. I've never been in the military so I don't know from experience but I'm pretty sure there's tons of other examples here.
Half-life 2 confirmed.
Also, the degree to which the world economies are now interconnected make it next to impossible to believe that a major war in Europe would not impact other parts of the world, which is super naive. Time will tell but I fear that we're in for a very rough ride if this current war doesn't get stopped in its tracks before it can engulf more territories, which ultimately will happen.
The only good thing is that now that the Russians have shown their true goals that the bulk of the 'NATA did this' or 'The Ukrainians only have themselves to blame' people have something to chew on.
This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.
>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.
I'm not sure what purpose you think this sentence serves. If your argument is, again, the United States is the Global Imperial Power and, because I post on HN, I am balking in my responsibility to sufficiently support this Empire, then got it. I'll make sure to "do better".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
> there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument
Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?
There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. Changing the government, plenty of times, but not erasing borders with the cultural genocide and some forced children "relocation" on top of that.
I didn't say anything about the US as a global empire or whatever, it's the collective World's responsibility to maintain peace and it's failing. But I say that there are clear "good guys" and "bad guys" here, regardless of the history of the US.
From your link:
>>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement.
>Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?
There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map.
>There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2.
This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.
It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania
>It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania
This is what I do not understand, the "safer" part. How exactly is it "safer" to intentionally antagonize the old Cold War adversary over a country that even President Obama admitted is not a strategic interest to the United States? To attempt to steelman this, we should support/arm/fund the Ukrainians as a means to degrade and destroy (by proxy) Russian combat power just in case they invade Lithuania next - or maybe to try and prevent them from being of use to the Chinese in a new Pacific War - knowing full well that they know invading a NATO country means WWIII in Europe (and probably the Pacific, who knows). This sounds awfully similar to the "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" refrain that I heard all the time in the lead up to GWII and thereafter as we extended our stays in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's the most compelling argument in favor of support I can come up with. I still think it's wrong, though.
Practically how does NATO actually liberate them. Does it have the stomach for the full scale high intensity war as we see in now in the East Ukraine? Not just Putin, I am also not sure of that. Who is going to lead the American armoured division drive to capture Kaliningrad..
Yes detoothing Russia in Ukraine is MUCH safer.
I don’t know that I’m as confident as you are in the Russian VDV’s ability to competently conduct an airborne invasion given their, shall we say, clumsy implementation of combined arms war in Ukraine thus war. I’d also love to see a citation that 20% (really?) of the population in the Baltics wouldn’t freakout and instead either actively support or be indifferent to a Russian invasion.
I was incorrect about the 5th column number. Lithuania is actually the best in this category with very few non-citizens. Seems like many left and some naturalized, current total is more like 8% not 33% like it was in the 90s. Latvia has the most but it is still much less than 20%.
And yet we've been arming the Saudis while they starve and bomb the Yemenis into oblivion for the past 10 years.
>>>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Wars-are-only-evil-when-West...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civili...
I find the degree to which HN has taken umbrage with this particular war.....unsurprising, yet extremely telling.
So yes, even if you do give up on Ukraine, it won't stop there. In that, again, this is very much like 1938.
BTW, I should probably add at this point that I'm ethnically Russian as well as Russian citizen, although I've been living mostly out of the country for the past decade. But I still remember very well what our nationalists are, I'm familiar with the kind of political musings Putin gets his inspiration from, and my firm belief is that this is going to be a much bigger war than most everybody in the West currently anticipates.
>In that, again, this is very much like 1938.
I'm looking for some actual evidence that the global geopolitical situation is comparable to 1938. Merely pointing out that a country in Europe has been invaded is not sufficient.
At this point, I think I should probably note that I consider Putin's invasion of Ukraine to be an enormous blunder. The humanitarian cost is already well documented, but from a strategic perspective, which is the theme of this thread, he's going to deplete his forces to such a degree that any follow-on invasion of other countries is going to be even more of a disaster. I don't know why or how he was convinced this was a good idea. He was always going to pay a significant cost, even if he, eventually, gets a land bridge to Crimea.
Comparison to Germany in 1930s is fairly straightforward. Both Germany and Russia believed that they have suffered considerable humiliation in the last major conflict (cold war for Russia), lost "their" lands in the process, and were plunged into an economic black hole. In both, this triggered an embrace of irredentism and the overall ideology that can be summed up as "we'll be back, and then you'll be sorry". Both produced increasingly authoritarian regimes that, as they solidified their rule, started to look more and more at "their" lands among their neighbors. Both accused one of their neighbors of persecution of "their" ethnic minority, and justified the invasion and occupation of said neighbor on those grounds.
As for WW3 - no, I don't think it'll start over Kazakhstan. But if you wait long enough, it might start over, say, Latvia. The problem is that, with every country that the collective West allows Russia to overrun, NATO Article 5 is perceived as less of a real deal and more of a bluff. Basically, if US is unwilling to fight for Ukraine for the fear of escalating into nuclear, why would it fight for e.g. Latvia when the likelihood of that escalation would be even higher? Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine. So if you "draw the red line" there, you might find that line rather faded by the time Russia comes close to crossing it. They might cross it simply because they don't believe you have the guts to do anything about it by then.
Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far. Don't get me wrong - they are doing very well, exceeding all expectations by a large margin, and have plenty to show for it. But, at the end of the day, this is still a country of 50 million people with a $6 billion defense budget (2021) fighting against a country of 150 million with a $66 billion defense budget. Ukraine has had several mobilization waves since the beginning of the war, while Russia is still relying mostly on contractors and PMC. Ukrainian industry - which is largely in the east - is already devastated, while Russian manufacturing capacity is still fully intact, limited only by sanctions. If Russia were to truly switch to war footing to the same degree that Ukraine already did, Ukrainians won't be able to hold the line - not because they're bad at it, but because Russia can afford to overwhelm them with bodies and munitions. So you can't just assume that if we sit and wait long enough, the Russian advance will stall indefinitely, and that'll solve the problem long-term because all forces will remain tied in Ukraine.
>Putin did not expect it to be a fight at all.
I genuinely don't get this, though I agree with you. Still, how could Putin possibly expect Ukraine to roll over after the Maidan Revolution, which had clear and obvious western support? Perhaps he was nervous and figured that event was an actual threat to him? Especially given the United States', shall we say, cavalier attitude in selling arms abroad it seems really really obvious that Ukraine would of course happen to find themselves in possession of the latest in battlefield tech. Surely a lesson has been learned here, especially given that Russia's most advanced combat power has been significantly depleted in this endeavor - and without those modern weapons NATO can mop the floor with them using F-18s built in the 1990s. Same with tanks, not to mention drones.
Third,
>Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine.
Agree. I said this in another comment but I think it's pretty obvious that, 30+ years after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union ceased to exist it's probably a good idea to assume there is some kind of priority list within the NATO members for who actually matters. I would venture to guess that certain former-Soviet countries that were added after the fall of Soviet Union are at the bottom.
Finally,
>Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far.
Also agree. When I discuss this with my too-well educated and too-well traveled friends, they sound like they've spent too much time on reddit. If you actually pay attention the war has somewhat stalemated, with slight favor to Russia at this point as they repair and rearm for what I assume will be a push to the western edge of the Donbas. Despite all this, these friends still believe in these now debunked myths (the Ghost of Kiev for one).
All of this just makes me want us to try to figure out a diplomatic solution. I don't know that Putin or Zalenskyy are in a position, politically, to seek one, so you may end up being correct that a compromise in one conflict leads, for Putin, to the initiation of another. I hope you're wrong.
We mustn't forget Vizzini's Aphorism: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
The problem is that once shots are fired, things can escalate very quickly, and decision-making is often not rational.
The US no longer has a draft law because the US determined that the draft was bad both from a military manpower perspective and from a domestic politics perspective as to maintaining national will to continue a conflict.
The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war while the US remains a major power. If the US collapses from major power status and the entire political and military calculus is scrambled, it might.
Nixon got rid of the draft for reasons that had to do with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and his presidential election. The argument was that the AVF wouldn't negatively impact force readiness, not that the draft was "bad" from a military manpower perspective (I'm not sure what that means). There's some other reasons peppered in correspondence from that time, but I'm super skeptical of this argument for enough reasons to finish a PhD thesis. It's been a long time coming, but the conversation needs to be had about how even if the United States needed to institute a draft we may not actually be able to do so anymore because of the general decline in health and fitness of men in this country. More over, there are civ-mil relations considerations that aren't properly accounted for when you claim the AVF is superior - we have essentially a warrior caste now, that's in many ways sectioned off from the reset of the civilian population. Good? Bad? Exercise for the reader but you can probably guess my stance.
>The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war while the US remains a major power.
I don't see how these are related. Plenty of non "major" powers have conscription (in some form or another), as do plenty of "major" powers. The US wasn't a "major" power before WWI, though it was certainly "a power", and yet my great grandfather was drafted. Maybe you mean the US won't get into an unwinnable and unpopular ground war in South East Asia and then re-institute the draft, but you may be underestimating the depth of ineptitude of the people who've been running the show the last 30ish years. Everyone I served with was a volunteer, obviously, but war necessitates a lot of things that people would otherwise consider impossible right up until they happen.
The argument for the AVF has evolved over time; the issue wasn't once and done, and the importance of longer service terms in a wide range of specialties has been increasingly cited in arguments for maintaining the AVF. But even in the original Gates Commission report, the AVF was not, contrary to your description, painted as merely non-harmful, but as a more efficient means of meeting military requirements, with extensive supporting analysis.
The Commission's charter wasn't "figure out how to never do a draft again". It was "figure out how to turn this draft that everyone hates off".
edit: bad grammar
No, it's just accurate to what's in the report.
> The entire premise of the AVF at the time was that it would work fine, if you could still do a draft if you needed to.
No, it wasn't. While the standby draft was in the report as a safeguard to slightly reduce the the from-0 spinup time of a draft, the argument presented is not “an AVF is non-harmful as long as backstopped by a standby draft”, but “the AVF is superior on both practical economic efficiency grounds and ethical respect for personal liberty grounds in essentially every conceivable situation (with extensive analysis of the former and philosophical argument for the latter), and, just in case, we can also set up a standby draft system so things aren't quite needing to be built from scratch if Congress and the President ever decide a draft is needed for some reason again.”
In fact, the section of the Gates Commission report on the Standby Draft makes, obliquely, very good argument against the standby draft ever being the right choice, pointing out that it cannot immediately produce forces in an emergency because of time to train and organize, so it is only useful for gradual expansion, but then arguing for voluntary recruitment measures like compensation boosts for gradual expansion to be used in preference to activating the standby draft.
The military doesn't even want conscripts anymore. They have discipline problems, take too long to train, and don't stay long enough. Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.
I am not, necessarily, concerned about questions of if the military wants conscripts. I'm concerned about the ability of the nation-state to properly respond to a crisis that precipitates major war. If you just consider the military's wants in a static context and extrapolate forward, just giving them what they want, the entire procurement roadmap for the next 10 years would probably still look like IED defeat devices and other garbage "future" tech that didn't and doesn't work, with the actually useful stuff arriving in 2040. We've thankfully had, on rare occasions, some smart civilians and DoD contrarians who have edged things in a different direction in some cases.
>Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.
Hard, hard disagree. It is not at all decided that technology is more important than "numbers" (I'm assuming you are referring to raw numbers of troops in a particular combat zone). "Technology" has a lead time, and while humans have an approximate lead time of ~18 years, whatever technology that would beat them on the battlefield isn't stockpiled like humans are.
I'm not too sure it would be motivating to people either. Usually what motivates people is the fear of being overrun by some other group but with immigration the way it is that's happening anyway.
Is a remote-controlled dune buggy with a low-recoil rifle a tank?
- you can airlift 25 2-ton dune-buggies instead of 1 50-ton tank
- you can buy 25 $2 million dune-buggies for the cost of 2 $25 million tanks
- if you sent 2 tanks, losing one is half of your force projection. If you sent 25 dune-buggies, losing one is 4% of your force.
- maintenance on an unmanned 2-ton dune-buggy has to be easier, faster and cheaper than maintenance on a tank. Tanks need dedicated recovery vehicles (or Ukrainian tractors) that cost nearly as much as another tank. Maintenance is going to be much, much easier without armor and the concomitant suspension for the armor getting in the way.
A hybrid powerplant is probably best -- a diesel motor-generator to charge batteries and run for distance, with an electric motor system and nice quiet relatively cool batteries for an hour or two of sneaking around at a time. Tanks don't sneak up on you, but a hybrid dune-buggy in battery mode can.
This also has knock-on effects for the civilian economy, because if the cool support weapon for the infantry is a quiet hybrid dune-buggy, the same thing with a crew cabin instead of a gun and ammo will be a smash hit.
Also, lol at "Ukrainian tractors". Their biggest (only?) tractor plant was destroyed in Kharkiv. Most of their tractors are... John Deere. Probably why they got so good at modifying them that Americans are buying their software :D
But it will be vulnerable to smaller weapons on smaller cheaper vehicles.
Also consider that tanks are dispatched in small groups; they need to be able to defend themselves. But a swarm of buggies could have weapons optimized to defend each other -- a shotgun is pretty effective against small suicide drones, and nothing defends against a laser-guided bomb anyway.
Which is the reason why great-powers don't go to war with each other these days. Forget nukes, the first thing that will be destroyed is each other's satellite communication systems. That alone would devastate the world's economy.
Anti-satellite warfare is a huge reason why the Space Force (stupid name) came into existence.
No idea how far between concept and reality that is and obviously this is a whole different class of vehicle than a tank.
"Since 2011, the system has achieved 100% success in all low and high-intensity combat events, in diversified terrain (urban, open and foliage). The system has intercepted a variety of threats, including the 9M133 Kornet ATGM, RPG-29, etc. the U.S Army has reported similar success in tests. “I tried to kill the Abrams tank with ATGM 48 times and failed, despite the fact that some of them were supersonic,” said US Army Col. Glenn Dean."
I'll add a complimentary link for others' benefit from Military History Visualized: "Tanks are obsolete, apparently since 1919" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY
In short, people forget about Combined Arms warfare. One cannot look at the tank, or other arms of a military without understanding how it supports and is supported by the others. When that is overlooked, misunderstandings and exaggerated conclusions are the result.
The modern Combined Arms Warfare is so similar to the medieval "Infantry, Archers, and Cavalry". Infantry is still infantry. Archers are now air support. Cavalry is armour.
History doesn't repeat but it rhymes. Tanks won't be obsoleted by anything currently deployed, but if you manage to squeeze an a antitank munition (like some sort of armour piercing super-RPG) into a weapon an infantryman (every infantryman) carries, that might do it.
Modern militaries are rapidly transforming into what was science fiction, say, 50 years ago: almost exclusively remote-controlled robots and primarily (or even exclusively) autonomous robots.
If you call small, unmanned, armored vehicles "tanks" you are misleading people.
In modern militaries, whether it be surface ships, submarines, airplanes, tanks, etc.... within another few decades, people almost certainly won't be inside of them. People will control them remotely and/or algorithms/artificial intelligence will control them.
What we are seeing in Ukraine is Russia and NATO disposing obsolete military weapons in a disgusting farce of a war. Washington and Moscow should have divided up Ukraine like they did much of Europe in the waning days of World War II.
There was no need for a single bullet to be fired, let alone mortars and missiles. Washington antagonized Moscow ceaselessly. Eventually, Moscow took the bait. It's tragedy that could have, and should have been avoided.
Nonetheless, just because these days you see men in tanks fighting in Ukraine on your phone or laptop, don't think that "Tanks are still relevant in modern warfare!" They aren't. Tanks, by which I mean large vehicles with people inside of them, are obsolete in modern warfare.
People who claim tanks are still viable in modern warfare are either fools, liars, or manipulative purveyors of falsehoods who enjoy twisting words by referring to small, unmanned robots as "tanks."
The Economist.com is yet another legacy media property that regularly engages in obvious yellow journalism in a doomed struggle to remain profitable. Articles with headlines like, "Does the Tank Have a Future?" are clickbait.
I didn't take the bait; I didn't read the article. Why should I have? A better article would have been, "Does Economist.com Have a Future?"
They are absolutely not disposing of obsolete weapons -- and the West has no desire to "carve up Ukraine". How did Washington antagonize Moscow? NATO is a voluntary defensive pact. The Eastern European countries, who all have a long history of being oppressed and occupied by Russian (and Soviet) governments, asked to join NATO. What good would it do for the West to start a war? What is there to gain from brinksmanship when the stakes are a strategic nuclear exchange?
The idea that this war is at all something provoked by the West, or in any way defensive on Russia's part, is pure Russian propaganda. The Putin regime fears the democratization of its neighbors resulting in its own people losing confidence in its ability to lead the country. This phase of the war is merely an extension of Russia's desire to quash any semblance of Ukrainian agency -- this war started in 2014, after the last vestige of Russia's control over Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, fled the country.
Finally, your view actively denies the Ukrainian people their agency. If they did not find this war worthwhile, if they did not think Ukraine as an idea was worth defending, why are they dying in their tens of thousands to defend it?
Several of these countries were created by the actions of Russian government.
That narrative will really have to go in favor of much more granular approach to post-WW2 history.
Which ones?
Are you sure you can tell propaganda from history?
"Russia caused the pogroms" (sic) is another gem of same quality.
I wonder if you could point to a country which does not have "sordid history". But if you ever want to have a dialogue with Russian as opposed to war, you can start by not pretending that you don't have your own "sordid history" and is allowed to judge others.
Indeed. And the problem is nationalism. Every country has had a shameful past. But Putin, that fascist and crackpot, who Russians largely admire, is in denial about that.
As opposed to the war ...indeed.
Here it goes again, everyone still needs to learn how to treat russians.
Well, finally, the world has figured it out and summarized it succintly in the manner russia treats the rest of the world:
"Russian ship go f...!"
Even Fukuyama has now retracted his paradigm that the history is over.
Prepare for a lot of war, hope you enjoy it. And not even with Russia.
> "Russian ship go f...!"
I think that phrase is a fake. However, these guys were captured, then declared dead, then surrendered and kept in captivity for some time. To put that in perspective. And that is real.
You know how everything in our lives is slowly becoming smart? This goes for all the weapons too.
Sure. And carriers can simply launch their reusable hypersonic smart drone swarm shields and submerge underwater.
It's hard to hide a strike group. Even civilians are tracking them these days with commercial sattelites:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/05/07/the-realiti...
US itself talks about sending out hundreds of cheapish drones in a swarm (5 km spacing) to seek out all naval assets over an area.
It would make sense for equal economies fighting.
Not sure if you were serious or not, but:
A couple years back the Navy asked congress for funding to demonstrate taking down an inbound saturation attack of 500+ missiles, probably as a deterrent to China. Congress declined.
When people say "hypersonic missiles" they mean missiles with a hypersonic glide phase, which have non-ballistic flight paths and can't generally be intercepted by anti-ballistic-missile countermeasures.
As of right now, nothing does a ground offensive like a few dozen tanks advancing at top speed with appropriate support. They'll blast anything in their path and charge right through all but the toughest and most concentrated defenses. As long as you can see those really concentrated defenses in advance and go around, they're pretty tough to stop.
What does a vulnerable tank do that self-propelled artillery doesn't do better? Not being vulnerable to small arms is one of the key value propositions of the tank, in a modern anti-tank heavy environment* tanks are just expensive slow moving trucks w/ a big gun.
*as we are seeing in Ukraine.
Being able to directly support infantry and their IFV/APC on the frontline?
I wonder if the new "tank" will be a wheeled SPG that can fire hull down and has an APS system. Or it could be something like BTR 4 with its auto cannon, being able to carry some infantry, add APS to that and you have a lethal combo.
There is also a lot of overselling of infantry support. Stugna or Javelin can kill T80 from 4km away, what use is dismounted infantryman there?
Well they can carry their own Stugna or Javelin. Isn't that an argument for more dismounted infantry, not less?
Warning: combat footage, people die...
A T-72 is both easy to detect and easy to kill for someone with a Javelin, while the Javelin-man is hard to detect and non-trival to kill (at range) with the T-72.
The arms race between protective equiment (armor, shields, etc) and anti-armor weapons has been going on for over a thousand years, arguably longer (like when Roman pila would get stuck in enemy sheilds, making the shields useless, even if the pilum didn't kill the enemy soldier).
In our current age, the previous generation of tanks has been made obsolete by ATGM, just like Cuirassiers were obsolete at the outbreak of WW1 and WW1 tanks were obsolete at the outbreak of WW2.
Modern tanks with state-of-the art sensors and APS are much better protected against ATGM's. While still not the ideal platform for use against anti-tank weapons, at least they don't get slaughtered on first contact. If the enemy has a high concentration of ATGM armed infantry in an area, it's probably better to take them out with infantry, artillery and/or aircraft. Given the cost of ATGM's, this is cost-efficient. And if the ATGM's are spread out, a tank formation with good protection systems can affort to smash through, even if it comes at the cost of a few casualties, to maintain momentum.
As an example, is there a point where hypersonic weapons become so effective that aircraft carriers are [temporarily?] retired? Surely the cost (time, money, human lives) that goes into the weapon system is part of the equation.
In fact, it looks like the US has 11 active aircraft carriers [1]. It seems that they are all near port right now [2], this might be the reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_t... [2] https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-George-H.W.-...
Simple: carriers are for power projection against weaker enemies with low tech militaries. Thus their vulnerability against high tech miliraries is a moot point since wars between high tech powers == World war == unlikely (hopefully).
So what does Russia have? Currently, all they have fielded is the Kinzhal missile. But is it neither a hypersonic glide body nor a hypersonic cruise missile. It is simply an air-launched ballistic missile. It would not be suitable for an anti-ship mission, unless striking a ship docked in port. The impressive and novel thing about it is that they managed to get a ballistic missile to be launched from an aircraft, which is rather tricky to do from an engineering standpoint, and IIRC is the first ALBM to actually be deployed. They also have Avangard in development, which is a hypersonic glide body deployed from ICBMs for the nuclear strike mission. Finally, they have the Zircon missile in development, which is a hypersonic cruise missile meant for the anti-ship mission. Russia claims to have completed testing of the missile, but it doesn't appear to have been deployed yet. It's unclear how effective it would be against a carrier strike group, with air defenses, electronic countermeasures and decoys. Notably, it cruises at a high altitude, unlike most anti-ship missiles which try to skim the surface to make it harder to detect and track on radar.
Ultimately, I don't think that hypersonic weapons fundamentally change the security of the carrier. It may necessitate the development of some anti-missile missiles better tuned for the counter-hypersonic mission. It may necessitate altering doctrine towards the anti-ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) mission to complicate targeting such missiles. I could be wrong of course!
Humans are about the most vulnerable thing out there. Yet nobody suggests that we should get rid of the infantry because they're too vulnerable. Instead, we give them camouflage gear, some armor, train them to stay behind cover and move carefully, and work on better medical care if they get hit.
FWIW, hypersonic weapons are likely overrated. The hard part has always been finding an active deployed carrier and tracking it well enough to guide a weapon into it. If you can do that, there's no shortage of weapons that can sink it. The carrier's tactics are to use its air wing to stay outside of radar range from any targets while still being able to strike, and using airborne radar as needed to monitor the area without revealing the precise position of the actual carrier.
Foreign militaries are just as prone to exaggerations about how effective their weapons are as American military contractors. Results of well-run tank divisions against anti-tank teams, some of which are documented in the GP's video, show that the kill rates against tanks are often underwhelming even in situations where the tanks are at a disadvantage.
"Principle: armor in strength produces decisive shock effect
The psychological shock effect that comes to troops on the receiving end of a massed armored assault is terrific. This effect radiates from the point of attack in concentric semi-circles, as do the waves from a stone dropped in the water near the edge of a millpond. If the attack is in strength, these shockwaves reach to the enemy division, corps and army headquarters. Shock effect gives armor part of its protection and hastens the disintegration of the enemy force attacked. The shock effect of the mass employment of armor varies as the square or cube of the number of tanks used. Attacking with armored strength too small to produce decisive shock effect often results in great losses and inconclusive results."
https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/Historical...
Simply put, they are pants-soiling terrifying spectacles of death and they prove overwhelming. Once significant momentum of a well-executed armored attack has been gained, they are difficult to slow or stop. Drone swarms may make this tactic obsolete, but we're not there yet.
While I am all for seeing the rise of Bolo's, and I love shock effect as much as the next enthusiast, the ability of a $500 drone with the equivalent of a RKG-3 grenade to take one out is really the only relevant part of the question. Tanks are dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RKG-3_anti-tank_grenade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_universe
Edit to add; "expensive to operate" was a bit of an understatement, the logistical support required for a tank company is tremendous, totally preposperous; 1000s of gallons of fuel a day, 3 types of ammo, support equipment and personnel.
ATGMs, RPGs, guided mortar rounds and switchblade drones are not offensive weapons that can take and hold ground. But infantry, supported by a tank which they can knock on the hatch of and tell to obliterate the machine gun nest pinning them down with instant 120mm fire, can.
When armies find something that can replace the mobile, protected, and relatively instant firepower a tank can provide to the infantry, the tank will be dead. But nothing yet has quite come along to combine those things, and so regardless of the tank's vulnerabilities, it will remain.
Past a certain size a drone can fly high enough and far enough that it fills the combat role of an aircraft, but as far as man-portable systems go, well-resourced militaries demonstrate consistent preference for single-use guided explosives like the Javelin or Switchblade to maximize range and payload size and minimize time to impact.
A large-caliber, direct-fire gun provides long range, precise, and instant effects. As The Chieftan explains: https://youtu.be/lI7T650RTT8?t=934 (timecode link provided.)
In contrast, a drone flies at 25 to 50 meters-per-second.
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To put it in concrete terms, a tank 3000 meters away will hit its target in 2 seconds. A drone 3000 meters away will take 1.5 minutes.
In contrast, the Javelin you launch will take 12 seconds before it hits the tank at that range. That's more than enough time for the tank commander to see the Javelin and return fire, killing you before the Javelin even strikes the tank. (This is why "fire and forget" is so important on a missile like the Javelin). So we can see that even a missile like a Javelin has a significant speed disadvantage on these long-range plains that exist on the Donbas region. Its a different fight than the typical heavy-urban environment that Ukraine was doing well in a few months ago.
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Its one thing to fight a tank in urban combat, where they can only see 200 meters out (too many buildings blocking your vision and the tank's vision).
Its a totally different thing to fight a tank on open plains, where 3000m worth of vision is common.
> In contrast, the Javelin you launch will take 12 seconds before it hits the tank at that range.
What's the latency for the turret to pivot to the target angle? I suppose it's pretty fast but let's say in worst case 180deg? How long does that take? 1s? 10s?
I can only guess at how long the full return fire process takes, but you only need to be pointing a javelin AT at the tank, it will do the rest. You can be sprinting away pretty much as you launch and get 50 meters away. Safe? Hell no, but it's not as bad as the "2 seconds" comment makes it out to be.
NLAW has 1000m range. AT4 and Panzerfaust3 has 300m range.
If you are using an NLAW and the enemy tank has line of sight 3000 meters away, you are outgunned, outranged, and outmaneuvered and almost certainly will lose.
The tank has 40+ shots with a firing rate every 4 seconds. Javelin is a 50LB weapon that is single shot, so a miss (due to thermal smoke grenades / flares) is a critical mistake that will kill you.
Running away at 3km/hr only delays the inevitable, as the tank travels 50km/hr to close the distance with you... And had far more shots to invoke suppressing fire to scare you from running away effectively.
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The advanced weapons help, but a tank is a tank. It's faster than you, has more range than any weapon you can carry, is almost always decked out with the best night vision optics, has more bullets, bigger bullets, and armor to negate most of your weapons.
At best the advanced missiles even the odds. I'm not sure if I'd call it an advantage though, because of the single shot nature / long reload times of missiles / recoilless rifles, especially compared to tank guns.
Assume the turret is 90 degrees off target and it will take 2 seconds just to swing the turret around. Assuming it takes 2 seconds to notice the AT round fired, 2 seconds to target lock, that's still 8 seconds total for the tank shell to hit.
That's not great for the AT team, but it is a survivable amount of time for shoot-and-scoot tactics, enough that it's going to be a hellish war of attrition between armor & AT teams, not a completely one-sided battle. Which seems to be roughly what we're seeing in eastern Ukraine, unfortunately. A truly shitty and hellish situation all around.
That's a lot of "assumptions" that still leads to a virtual tie situation: both parties kill each other.
There's also the situation where the tank commander emerges out of hide-position, fires a shell, and kills the enemy infantry before they even know where the tank is, and the tank then retreats back into hide-position before any enemy even knows that a tank is there.
A tank in turret-down position is still exceptionally difficult to spot. And that tank commander looking out, waiting for the ideal time to ambush with his main tank gun, will have night-vision, thermal vision, and loads of other equipment.
See this screenshot of the Chieftan's discussion: https://imgur.com/tk10YHN.jpg
In "turret down" position, pretty much only the tank commander is visible. They can spot you 3000m away in this kind of position thanks to modern binoculars.
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Given that the tank moves at 50km/hr, and has more expensive equipment (thermal vision / etc. etc.), the tank honestly has the advantage in most of these fights.
Infantry might (?) have the advantage of surprise and hiding. But tanks also might have that advantage. There's no guarantee that the infantry always ambush the tanks. Especially when you consider how much faster a tank travels, and the shear size / distance that these weapons cover (a tank can choose any point with 3000m line-of-sight to attack the enemy infantry, knowing that the infantry is too slow to keep up with the tank's movement).
Don't get me wrong, it's not ideal and the fighting is more about attrition than superior tactics. I agree completely that an open field is just about the worst place to deploy the AT system.Tanks may have to travel through open areas but they do so to get to & from locations of more strategic interest, and it's best to hit them in those places, or if enroute then at a location where there's a least more natural cover. And I don't think the tank is at all obsolete quite yet.
To defeat capable EW, you'd need self-directed swarms of drones, and we don't have those yet (especially not at Best Buy). I agree that remotely-piloted commodity drones would likely make a terrible mess of something like an African army with T-55s and not much else, and of course today's Russia (I never thought I'd write that sentence).
I concur on the cost of armor, but it comes with significant benefits, hence the investment we've made in logistics to support them. It's only preposterous when the situation makes it so, like a highly mobile island hopping campaign. They worked pretty well in Iraq. Twice.
If you made a misstake in the first scenario, there is no second try. But if you have a second drone, there is.
(ukraine has more men than drones, though)
Yes, technically some of those tanks are ‘modern’, but many of them appear to have fake reactive armor, are poorly built, and they are being deployed without infantry, air, or logistical support. It’s the perfect recipe to lose all of your tanks.
It is very hard for tanks to be effective in the age of cheap UAVs.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/09/30/...
This whole argument is stupid and predicated on a vast misunderstanding of how combined arms operations work. Systems are not discard because they're vulnerable, if they can be employed in a way that min/maxes their impact vs vulnerability.
There is nothing new about this conflict as far as tanks and ATGMs. Everything happening here happened in the Yom Kippor war, in Grozny, in Syria, and in Yemen.
You just have a bunch of lazy bloggers and journalists making a sensationalized claim to sound like something exciting and dramatic is happening, at the cost of grossly distorting the actual reality.
What will change is future tanks will likely prioritize active protection systems and sensors over bulk armor. But the basic concept of combing firepower, mobility, and protection is not going away any time soon.
Example, Rheinmetall just announced their new tank prototype this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTBA5tQsDbE
A couple key features:
* an active protection system specifically for top attack munitions like Javelin
* a remote weapons station with a machine gun specifically for engaging small low altitude drones like quad copters
* flexible manning, including looking at autonomy and remote control
* ability to host drones for its own situational awareness
* a loitering munition that's being co-designed, launched by the big gun
Maybe the era of the T-72 is over. But the people confidently predicting the era of tanks and armored fighting vehicles in general are over, cuz missiles, cuz drones, frankly, have no clue what they're talking about.
and missed the moral of the story...
> This whole argument is stupid and predicated on a vast misunderstanding of how combined arms operations work. Systems are not discard because they're vulnerable, if they can be employed in a way that min/maxes their impact vs vulnerability.
The mythology of the board game Go is that it was invented by a Chinese general in an attempt to teach his son strategy and tactics. In that domain there is a concept called Aji, in which you should not write off pieces on the board that are doomed. The fact that they are still on the board makes them useful, even if they can't possibly be saved, saved only by gross error by the opponent, or saving them is possible but devastating to your overall prospects.
Then you mean the infantry screen the enemy infantry from the tanks. You screen the threat, not what you're protecting.
But in any case, it seems you just want to double down on that fine hnews tradition of utterly valueless semantic quibbling, which I will not participate in further.
They're technical terms - entirely different tactical actions. You're confusing a screen with a guard or covering force.
If you asked someone to screen and really you mean cover or guard, you've fucked up.
Right here! This is so close to what I was talking about. You might refer to the specific field the are technical terms in.
> You're confusing a screen with a guard or covering force.
Nah, likely a non-professional.
It isn’t! I’m a professional in this field.
You're confusing a screen with a guard or cover force. Different tactical actions.
It is to the average person!
> I’m a professional in this field.
Good for you! Most of us are not professionals in this field and are using average people language. Adjusting to your audience is a thing. If it is wrong in professional speak, just realize you are not likely talking to other professionals and mention that something has a specific meaning in your field. People will just take that tidbit of information.
Do you think you would be able to see this tank if it were 3000 meters away?
Because the tank commander, with his set of night vision / thermal vision binoculars sees you.
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If that tank commander closes the hatch and ducks down, you wont see him at all. In full hide position, the tank commander will only reveal himself and his tank when a nearby infantry asks for support.
Of course, tank commanders want to see the battlefield for themselves and will stick their heads out like that unless they think there is an eminent danger.
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At 3000 meters, you can't hear the tanks, and you can't see them in hide position either. They move around the battlefield at 50km/hr all terrain, so they don't follow roads or well trodden paths either.
And the tank is absolutely lethal at this range in a way that no other weapon is comparable to. Even sniper bullets and rockets are far far slower than tank shells.
When you're on the attack, you often don't have time to dig in and instead have to make due with the natural terrain. Tanks will reach those natural slopes and enter hide position faster than infantry.
Worth noting: The western-made MANPADs are designed to exploit a serious design flaw in Soviet-era tanks. The ammunition is stored in the turret where it is easy to ignite externally. That's why we have so much youtube of Russian tanks blowing their turret sky-high.
Long story short, design failure can't be remedied by anything they can put on the top of the tank unless it's another tank.
The specific issue the other comment is referring to is unique to Soviet designed tanks that combined an autoloader with an ammo rack carrousel that's below the crew in the turret. This proved to be a big design flaw, but is not one universal across non Soviet tanks.
They're for shooting down aircraft. The Javelin and NLAW are not examples of MANPADS.
Practical APS is going to require a full sphere LPI radar of some sort. Given you already have to build that, it's logical to leverage it as a sensor for sensor fusion in general. Same goes with IR, both distributed aperture systems and telescope/periscope. EW equipment is going to require antenna apertures that can cover DC to 6ghz. If you gotta build those might as well aggregate all the needs into a common set of apertures.
The logic here is straightforward, and it does directly lead to thinking of future MBTs as like the mini land version of multi role naval frigates, imo.
This reads like the gist of it. I imagine them getting lighter, heavier, more sophisticated/expensive, cheaper, slower or faster. But the basic archetype seems to be almost timeless as long as there is some utility for armor, mobility and projectile weapons.
An armored truck may have equivalent ability to defend itself using active systems with much greater mobility and firepower than a tank. A converted autonomous econovan might be even more effective, bypassing the need for defense entirely.
They’re cheap. One of the reasons the Russians use so much conventional artillery is that it’s cheaper than missiles or air strikes.
Being armoured is the tank's core value proposition in a way that it isn't for those other examples. The thing that a tank can do that a self-propelled gun can't is survive on a battlefield where small arms fire is overwhelmingly common and armour-penetrating munitions aren't. If we get to a point where that situation is no longer relevant, the tank's reason to exist disappears.
The bigger threat is dual charged ammunition like the javelins
Ukraine are pleading for, and using, mostly anti tank missiles to destroy Russia's tanks, aren't they? Why if swarms of expendable drones are better and cheaper?
Zzz.
But keep in mind what this all is made for: Destroying and killing. We are talking about war machinery, and technical discussions about those tend to romanticize all that technology much too often.
If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place.
There would be less toys to play with and less "fascinating" discussions about tanks and guided missiles and strategy and artillery and infantry and fighter planes, which may sadden the technically inclined, but in the end these are not toys. These are devices to destroy and kill, and designing, building and maintaining them has enormous costs even in peacetime.
If you get everyone to decide this, yes.
But if you do this and your aggressive neighbor doesn't, your decision to forgo military spending can make the world less safe. Some parts of Europe are remembering this now.
The "we" in your original statement is doing a lot of work.
What would this even mean?
You can see what the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs spends their budget on here: https://dppa.un.org/en/funding-documents
Just like post-mortems in other areas. A plane crashed? Investigators go find out why, amend protocols and technical safeguards so that root cause won't bring down another plane in the future. Too many bad side effects of some drug? Investigation into why and adjustment of recommendations to doctors. You had a prod network meltdown? The responsible team does an ideally blame-free investigation to find the root cause and re-structures their setup to prevent it next time. Fight with your wife? Find out what caused it and then improve communication or expectations or whatever contributed to it. A war broke out? THOSE GUYS ARE EVIL AND WE NEED MORE SPENDING ON WEAPONS!!!1
Since WW2, all those former world-power countries in western Europe have lived in peace with one another, not because they built weapons for mutually assured destruction, but because they built economic interdependence and mutual understanding. That's a start and proper research into this could take things much further.
Yes, and people thought this would work with Russia too, hence Nordstream and other trade.
Turns out, only more military power would've stopped Putin from invading. Economic interdependence can certainly be a good thing, but it's not all-powerful. Sometimes the answer really is having enough military power to deter your enemies. Democracies generally don't invade other democracies, but not every place is a democracy.
There's no diplomacy hack that would've stopped Russia from invading Ukraine, and major projects that people thought would've stopped them -- including major trade infrastructure like Nordstream (2) -- were ineffective.
On the other hand, if Ukraine had been part of NATO, there was no chance Russia would've invaded. Almost like having more military power on their side would be the correct answer.
I didn't say anything about stopping the Ukraine War, so I'm not sure how that relates.
The "United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs" [prevention] had an income of $81m in 2020 whereas the "United Nations Department of Peace Operations" [mitigation] has a budget of $6.5b. And the UN has a budget of $3t!
To over-simplify a bit:
Cost(prevention) ~ 1% * cost(mitigation)
Cost(prevention) ~ 0.0003% * UN Budget
So essentially the global institution tasked with preventing conflict spends a rounding error of its budget doing so.
The "best thing against bad guy with a gun is good guy with a gun" mentality runs deep.
An example counterpoint is the Iraq war "Thunder Runs." Of course the US had air superiority, etc, etc. However, sometimes the resistance level cannot be known in ways other than getting out there and seeing if your unit draws fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(2003)#Thund...
Thunder runs were limited incursions designed to test Iraqi defenses. Beyond air superiority, which is huge, the American tanks also had active defenses and well-trained crew.
But you aware, that there are currently many infantrymen digging and defending trenches in the ukraine? (partly allmost equipped like in WW2)
What little russia has of precisiom ammunition is reserved for more valuable targets, than infantry. They just get shelled by dumb artillery. Lots of it.
In a world where there is a Stugna-P "behind every blade of grass" tanks become a liability. I think they'll be scaled back to niches; there will probably always be a need for a big chunk of metal to push through and blow holes in things. Going forward though, the German Blitzkrieg model or Russia's Horde Of Armor doctrine is dead when the combatants are not greatly asymmetric.
But it never was meant to operate on it's own. And when it did, it was either lost in large numbers (Russian tank charges in WWII) or was in all actuality a fluke (Your Blitzkrieg example. See The Chieftan's video on the Battle of France in WWII on why this was such a reckless thing to do, followed by reading on the Battle of The Bulge on why it didn't work a second time.)
Tanks unsupported by infantry are a liability. However, infantry, unsupported by tanks, can be a liability as well when attacking an opponent who's well fortified and/or has heavy weapons. When tanks, infantry, and artillery work together (combined arms theory), then the danger posed by ATGMs and the like is greatly reduced. Armies have been reminded of this numerous times last century, and each time a renewed emphasis on combined arms fixes the balance.
Lastly, and I feel this point is missing in a lot of arguments: ATGMs like Javelin, mines, guided mortars, etc and all but the heaviest drones are defensive and supporting weapons. For ATGMs and RPGs, these weapons exist to prevent infantry from being overrun. (And as the Russians are being reminded, they can be quite good at this.) They are not offensive weapons. That is the reason the tank remains. It's offensive.
Naturally they're defensive. Tanks are offensive weapons; breakthrough armor, conceived to break WW1 lines. So weapons to defend against tanks have proliferated.
The question is has this proliferation made them obsolete? Can you still effect breakthroughs when a guy with a tube can kill armor from 5+ km away? And if his man portable tank killer can't do the job he can text a missile from 50+ km with a anti-tank precision warhead so big there is no mobile armor system known to man that can withstand it. You can't have a Battle of Kursk when one M270 could theoretically kill a dozen tanks every five to ten minutes.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a40277518/...
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/06/rheinmetall-unveils-new-...
If we cared about the weak, we would ensure they aren't harmed. The world isn't interested in that. For profit weapons systems aren't interested in the weak, they are interested in the well funded.
How much conflict has the low cost AK47 (7$ on the world market) enabled?
It worked around Kyiv because it's forested and hilly, it works in cities with large soviet apartment blocks, but isn't working well at all in flat Donbas farmland.
It's also a 100% defensive strategy. Unsupported infantry have almost no ability to retake dug-in positions.
The Ukraine / Russian conflict has degenerated into trench warfare with thousands of 155mm / 152mm artillery being shot into each other's positions per day.
These are the kinds of conditions where tanks excel. Humans who try to walk at 3km/hr get blown up by shrapnel, even 100m away is "close enough" to cause a significant injury and take a human out of a fight.
Tanks? They pretty much ignore everything except a direct hit (within 2m) of the target. All that shrapnel just bounces off the tank. We've gone full circle back to WW1 trench/artillery warfare, where tanks were invented to break through the stalemate.
Other vehicles (even armored cars) don't have thick enough armor to survive the shrapnel reliably. APCs, IFVs, Humvees still get shredded by artillery and air-burst munitions.
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How do you beat artillery? You travel at 50km/hr, so you're hard to aim (a 20km shot takes 1.5 minutes to land. Easy to kill a human who can only travel a hundred meters in that timeframe, especially since its +/- 100m target size since the shrapnel blast is so huge).
Tanks / vehicles on the other hand, move too fast to be targeted by dumb artillery. Smart artillery still kills you, but its relatively rare on the battlefield (due to the high costs of computer parts needed to make a smart shell). The vast majority of these holes are dumb artillery.
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https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/...
This isn't the landscape of "drone warfare". This is WW1 style dumb-artillery wars.
I guess, if it works...
And dumb is cheap. Cheap can be king, especially if you can keep making them. The US had the same thing in WWII, the Panzer tanks were better than the Shermans in nearly every way - except cost and repairability.
1. You're selling them.
2. You have absolute complete superiority and are trying to minimize your casualties
There's a country that fits those parameters very well.
A surprising number of conflicts: WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, degenerated into artillery slugfests. You can't get much cheaper, faster, or more effective than guns shooting dumb explosives 20km away.
Only when the opponents were stupidly overmatched by US Air Superiority (Afghanistan / Iraq) did things change. But even with Air Superiority over say, Vietnam, USA still degenerated into an artillery slugfest.
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Its hard to beat 100lb shrapnel bombs delivered 20km away. Logistics wise, trucks carrying shells is just far cheaper than any other delivery mechanism. This fact has been true since WW1, and no technology has ever really changed the calculus. (Adding li-ion batteries, cameras, remote-control and other features so that you can turn the delivery mechanism into a drone is just unnecessary chips in most cases)
I just finished James Holland's Normandy '44 and I'd say, according to his book, that sentence pretty accurately describes pretty much all of the WW2 Normandy campaign as well.
(For the curious, here's a blog post from the Donbas separatist side that talks about drones and their combat use and maintenance, among other things: https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2140772.html)
However, Ukrainians have learned to embrace the drones in 2014-15 already, and have had a lot more experience with them since. Russia is still learning that lesson in the field.
https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2148946.html
(I would generally recommend this entire blog for those curious about the tactics and the logistics of the conflict, because it's one of those rare cases when a guy who is directly involved in the war, and has a long-standing reputation as one of the prominent hawks, is consistently writing posts that are critical of his own side - which criticism is far more likely to be accurate than propaganda from the other side.)
Artillery is far more lethal in 2022 than it was in 1945 because you can spot and kill individual infantry units from ten miles away.
The underlying tactic of someone, or something, out in the field, issuing radio messages back to home-base to coordinate artillery has been around since WW2, maybe earlier. Drones represent an evolution to the forward-observer paradigm, not a revolution.
In WW2, those were paratroopers, commandos, or other scouts who were performing those forward-observer duties while hiding inside of a treeline.
Sure, they were Morse code messages over a radio powered by a 20lb lead-acid battery pack with terrible encryption, but the fundamental tactic hasn't changed (especially because said forward-observer team would rarely be spotted... since they aren't firing their guns they're really hard to find)
An infantry squad dug into foxholes in some forest in WWII was really quite safe against artillery. A forward observer can maybe spot a tank or artillery battery (sometimes). A drone can scan an entire battlefield and identify infantry 10 miles behind a line of trenches, and coordinated artillery strikes can wipe them out.
That's hugely difference! It vastly changes the lethality per unit of artillery, and the relative risk for infantry units who aren't in obviously-fortified positions.
If memory serves me correctly, my brother said the cannon he captained was capable of incredible accuracy at 30 miles.
EDIT: I'm just relaying what I read in several articles about the difficulties in making anti-tank weapons because they rely on rare-earth minerals and because they rely on silicon chips, which are in short supply worldwide. Here's one of the articles I read: https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/04/26/managing-the-dod-s...
The US Defense Dept. has said it will take at least ten years to rebuild the stock of anti-tank weapons that have been used in Ukraine in the last five months.
I don't disagree with your overall comment, but note the modern main battle tank is a really complex beast, both in sensors, gun control, and also defensive systems. Even Russian tanks are very complex (their current high losses notwithstanding), but Western tanks are incredibly complex. They are not meant to sustain heavy losses, they are designed to survive.
If modern weapons strongly reduce the survivability of tanks, at least the future of Western tanks may be in question.
That said, drones cannot replace tanks. Maybe something else will, but drones cannot make breakthrough advances, nor accompany and shield advancing infantry. Drones may be cheap tank killers, but I don't think they can replace tanks.
Even an evolution of the tank's role, because all roles change, will not be fulfilled by drones.
If a meeting was called of 10 big tech/manufacturing companies and they were each told they'd be hansomely rewarded if they managed to make large volumes of a missile design, and that all IP/Patent laws would be suspended for the purpose, I guarantee you that there would be massive stockpiles within the month.
[34] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/february/war-...
If we actually needed infantry anti-tank weapons, I don’t think we have any problem building them in huge quantities.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...
Reponding to this and some of your other comments elsewhere... These anti-tank weapons may be the best anti-tank weapons, but they're not the only ones. If all of these are used, there are plenty of other ways to destroy tanks, so it's important, but not required to have a large stock of them.
You could probably increase the rate of manufacture of these, but there's also value in having ten continuous years of manufacturing instead of long time periods between batches.
I may be overly cynical, but in some ways, this war seems like a warehouse clearance event. It seems like everyone is finding their old stockpiles of Soviet era equipment and sending it to Ukraine to be used and/or destroyed. And presumably afterwards, it'll be time for the military industrial complexes to turn back on and build new stockpiles. Add in a few field demos of new equipment too.
An antitank weapon is 6-120 lbs of propulsion, controller and warhead. It costs between a thousand and tens of thousands of dollars per weapon.
Economics refutes you.
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/04/26/managing-the-dod-s...
I think you should watch Chieftains video and read some military theory. Simply being vulnerable to less expensive weapon systems does not make a unit/vehicle/soldier useless or obsolete.
That said... I think the niche the tank occupies right now is getting a LOT smaller.
Infantry screening is no longer enough. It's not just manpads and other anti-tank weaponry coming in from close quarters... it's gps guided missiles dropping on the tank from drones miles above.
We're definitely still going to see ground vehicles play an important part in combat, but I strongly suspect it's going to move back towards favoring nimble vehicles with specific utility. Not the current style of armored tanks.
Spears and catapults and bows make your soldiers effective dozens of yards away from the enemy.
Rifles get your soldiers to a hundred, sometimes two hundred yards away.
Artillery and drones make your soldiers effective up to a few miles away.
The further away you can keep your soldiers while accomplishing your goals, the better.
There is a balance here. Sometimes you have to risk the human.
The anti-tank weaponry is an order of magnitude less expensive than the tank (some is several orders).
The M1A2 Abrams has a unit cost of around 10 million USD (numbers from 2016, so likely higher now).
The drones currently destroying tanks in Ukraine (Bayraktar TB2) had a unit price of around 5 million, although some estimates are as low as 1-2 million per unit delivered to Ukraine at this point (production has ramped up).
notably - the whole drone isn't consumed when a tank is destroyed, so I really suspect we're going to see a drastic ramp up in drone warfare.
A tank isn't hyper mobile, isn't hyper accurate and isn't hyper long range. I don't get it's role — especially when it costs tens of millions and can be destroyed with either a $5k anti-armor launcher or from a missile fired across the horizon.
I think long range artillery (> 50kms) is the solution.
Tanks are great at assaulting enemy hard points, taking fire away from supporting infantry who can move in and cleanup the position after the tank has suppressed it or broken it open. It’s a heavy weapon of mobility and manoeuvre on the field.
A tank’s role is that of heavy cavalry, designed to intimidate and break defensive lines in a charge across contested territory and to provide immediate direct fire on a target in support of advancing infantry. As the modern rifleman company is the descendant of line infantry of old, the tank is the descendant of the Cuirassier.
Also Russian tanks are on the light side as they can't manage a powerful enough engine required, ie gas turbine of 1500hp+. The best they have so far managed is 1000hp diesel on may be 200 tanks by now, the rest is old one 800hp. Thus their tanks have armor lighter and of older type than say Abrams.
And there is huge area of discussion about integration of all weapons on the battlefield - without such integration any weapon loses its efficiency tremendously - and Russian military is very bad at integration, and tanks in isolation are much weaker target as opponent much easily finds the window opportunity.
How is that so hard to understand?
the future of warfare , according to most of the RAND papers i've read, is in cheap/commodity available 'nodes' , part of a 'system of systems' that can all interconnect cheaply and provide good data without being valuable assets themselves.
in a future where any group can destroy any one thing quickly and without hopes of defense (hypersonic missiles, for example) it becomes increasingly more risky and less valuable to shove a lot of effort and value into a single strong piece of equipment -- 'distributed warfare' is going to become increasingly common, and it's one of the few strategies that remains viable in a future without sufficient anti-air defenses.
I don't have a compendium of every game ever but they usually throw some OP weapon in. Doesn't invalidate the tanks. There is not in the game or real life an infinite supply of the god rod. On a side note I'm surprised there is no weapon called the god rod yet.
Heavy armor will always have a place in battle. What happens when someone makes a slightly better armored swarm and you have to make a more armored swarm to take out their more armored swarm? Yep, escalation leads to escalation and eventually you end up with a......tank. Then you use the god rod to take out the tank and start over again. Battle is not a fixed state.
The more interesting question is if having the US as a credible security partner has a future.
It's...I don't know what to call it except intriguing, the way you flip from a picture of the US as a totalitarian monolith with tentacles controlling everything, to the US as an utterly impotent former empire in shambles, unable to even be a "partner", within two sentences.
It's kind of an echo of the way Russia has been portrayed in the last few years.
If you didn't mean it that way, ok, but I think it's a common view and common to express it like this.
If the media is an arm of the establishment, the rulers of the country, with a singular purpose of supporting it regardless of policy changes, that is what I'd call a totalitarian monolith.
Now if you don't view things that way, fine, but it seems like maybe half of the politically aware US public is more or less on board with that worldview, except that they identify the "monolith" with the left.
Literally every day recently, I hear, on the radio that is always playing in a convenience store I go to, an ad for a famous person's new show on Newsmax, that is somehow rebelling against (I forget the exact phrase) major media outlets. I guess the phrase "mainstream media" is tired, but the concept seems to remain.
The baseline here is the assumption that there is no free press, that there is no diversity of opinion, and I see that sort of claim made everywhere, every day. By, you know, the brave dissenters.
I wonder if it's so ubiquitous that you have stopped seeing it as a background?
Their objective was to overthrow Ukrainian goverment and take half a country. So no, their objectives definietly will not be met.
Isn't that true?
The only obvious thing accomplished lately is all the death and destruction. It can't have been planned this way.
They look easy to immobilize.
But you still ultimately want to take out the tank (and crew, and munitions) itself. And that requires defeating the armour.
Javelin missiles are just one thing, but cheap drones with simple rockets on them should be able to take out a moving force of numerous tanks.
Imagine having an arsenal of 20 tanks storming your city.
Now imagine having about 100 drones ordered from Amazon, outfitted with RKG-3 anti-tank grenades. One each. You can fly low, you can fly through the woods, and you can fly each individually operated drone right up to the top part of a tank, and boom.
No clever software automation. Just a drone that can lift something like 1 kg worth of anti-tank grenade.
You have 20 drone operators. You'll have 5 drones per tank. One after the other. Skip the already defeated tanks. Attack the tanks that will create a barrier when destroyed first, take natural barriers into account.
Your tanks can have all the power and shock and awe you might think they have, but any 12-year old will be able to take you out as if they were playing a video game.
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not...
edit: for example, I would not want to be a drone operator controlling a drone in real time anywhere near a modern army. RF direction finders are a thing.
A decade from now what's happening in Ukraine won't work against most major military powers. The drones we're seeing are very slow and very low but modern anti-aircraft systems aren't optimised to detect things this small and low so are getting away mostly untouched, but there's no significant technological hurdle against modifying existing systems or developing new ones that work against this type of threat.
This has been a fact of warfare for almost a century. in fact it was so easy the US Government published a warfighter training video on how to do it, and it didnt even fill 15 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHFUKKKmJM
Tanks had shock and awe value in nineteen sixteen. for the first time on the battlefields you had an imposing, lumbering, seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of forged iron that if left to its means, could obliterate hard targets like buildings and bunkers without much effort and keep advancing seemingly endlessly. if you could reason to stop them, the thought was perished by the overwhelming terror alone they imposed.
by WWII most antitank technology had reached horrors unimaginable; being a tanker was objectively near suicide. the swedish bofors sabot rounds could not only pierce most german armor, but cook the occupants alive with a shower of boiling steel before they invariably detonated the ordinance on board. even smaller mines like the TM41 were enough to blow the road wheels through the driver and out the hatch. And if all that proves too technical, the Japanese tactic in WW2 was to simply hose tanks in petrol and light them ablaze.
the only shock and awe of a 21st century tank is watching your tax dollars propel something with 0.6mpg