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Comment by prometheus76 | Hacker News Reader

Judging by the current situation, it seems that there are more resources for building tanks than there are for building anti-tank weapons. Once the anti-tank weapon stocks have been depleted, tanks still play a devastating role in warfare.

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...

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A tank is 15-75 tons of armor, engine, chassis and gun. It costs millions of dollars per tank.

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.

I'm not speaking about cost. I'm talking about the scarcity of the parts and the manufacturing capability required to make anti-tank weapons.

https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/04/26/managing-the-dod-s...

A soldier is tens of thousands of dollars of training and gear. A bullet costs pennies. Thus soldiers have no place on the battlefield?

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.

Personally - I agree. I don't yet think we're at the point where tanks are 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.

Indeed, if you value a soldier's life the same as a human's life, you really don't want them on the battlefield any more than absolutely necessary to defend against the invaders.

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.

And yet, using artillery to wipe towns and cities from the map is a no no.

There is a balance here. Sometimes you have to risk the human.

I don't understand this comment.

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.

It's the scarcity of the parts, not the overall cost. Javelins require rare-earth minerals (which largely come from Russia) and rare silicon chips that are in short supply worldwide. I edited my original post to include a link to an article about the difficulties in replacing the diminishing stock of anti-tank weapons.

Modern tanks also use minerals and chips, they're basically armoured computers. They also, obviously, take a huge amount of resources to produce, transport and train to use.

That's the expensive drones. But there are plenty of kills attributed to octocopters dropping modified anti-tank grenades.

Tanks can also destroy more stuff than they cost.

You could say it the other way around - once the tank stocks are depleted, anti-tank weapons can still play a devastating role (against other armored or unarmored vehicles).

You could say it the other way around, but the complexity of the electronics in the anti-tank weapons have proven to be difficult to produce in large quantities because of the chip shortage, but also because of the high level of experience and knowledge required to continue to make them. Tanks are much less reliant on complex electronics and manufacturing capability in order to be effective on the battlefield.

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.

> Tanks are much less reliant on complex electronics and manufacturing capability in order to be effective on the battlefield.

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.

Have you watched any of the Ukraine footage? Tanks are being blown up from bombs dropped from COTS drones. Longer range semi-autonomous drones seem to be the future.

I agree tanks seem to be very vulnerable in the current Ukraine war.

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.

Not every weapon system has a direct and obvious replacement when it becomes obsolete - the nature of the combat itself changes around what's viable given the tech.

Agreed. I meant the role of tanks cannot be fulfilled by drones, and therefore they cannot be a replacement. The tech is irrelevant, the role is relevant.

Even an evolution of the tank's role, because all roles change, will not be fulfilled by drones.

Much of this has to do with Russian tank doctrine and the lack of sufficient infantry to provide mutual support to armor.

How well do long range drones work if the other side puts up a serious blockages of radio waves and decides that "no you dont get satellites anymore"?

I think the shortage is mostly due to a lack of a desire to make big changes to resolve the issue.

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.

We have no idea what a major economy like the current US would look like if it went on a real war footing. According to this [34] we spent 40% of GDP on WWII (equivalent of $5 trillion today) - that would be almost $10 trillion a year now if we did the equivalent. That's absolutely insane numbers, and many, many things would change, and quite quickly.

[34] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/february/war-...

When was the last time the US even produced a new tank hull? Pretty sure they haven't produced a new Abrams hull since the 80s (yes, they've been rebuilt and upgraded a few times, but no new hulls to my knowledge). I'm not even talking about a new design, I'm talking about production of an existing design.

That’s probably because anti-tank weapons aren’t all that important for the US military. The US military has guided missiles from planes and ships that serve this role much more effectively.

If we actually needed infantry anti-tank weapons, I don’t think we have any problem building them in huge quantities.

How many years will it take to replace the 700 or so tanks lost in Ukraine? Russia is estimated to have 3,000 or so tanks currently operating, they are closing in on losing 1/4th their number. It’s unclear how many of their roughly 10k in storage are still working and whether making new tanks or repairing those will have the same chip shortage problems.

The ones in storage are like t-62s so no chips required =)

There is absolutely no chance Russia lost 700 tanks. Ukrainian sources are pure garbage.

Ukrainian sources put the number lost at nearly double that last time I checked. I am using a number from oryx, who claims to have counted tanks out of commission or being towed from photographs taken in front lines or publicly released arial photography and de-duping them, as they have done for other conflicts like the war in Afghanistan. They actually have the count now at Tanks 774 (of which destroyed: 438, damaged: 21, abandoned: 53, captured: 262), and host all the images used to make their count. I’m sure there are problems with this approach but it seems like the closest thing to an unbiased estimate available to the public right now.

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...

Yeah, no. This defies credulity. Tanks are complex systems too, with very high cost and long lead times. Javelin production is currently 2,100 per year and ramping up. I don’t know what NLAW production is, but some 24,000 have supposedly been produced in the lifetime of the weapon. Russia started the war with about 3,000 tanks.

> 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.

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.

Tanks also rely on silicon chips. Many more than in an anti-tank weapon.

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