Posted on 10/09/2020 1:18:02 PM PDT by RomanSoldier19
Unmanned combat air vehicles have notched up kills against armored fighting vehicles all over the world. Does it mean the end of the tank
In the first days of the new war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Azeri military claimed a number of destroyed tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. Those strikes seem to have been made — and filmed — by a Turkish-designed armed drone, the Bayraktar TB2. With armed drones bearing anti-tank ordnance increasingly cheap, accessible and capable, does it spell the end of the tank’s century of battlefield dominance?
Two decades ago, the U.S. rushed the first armed drones into service for its post-9/11 campaigns. They carried no more than two Hellfire missiles and were propelled by an engine producing less power than a contemporary Toyota Camry. But what they had was endurance: a drone could circle its target for hours on end before striking, whereas a high-performance jet or attack helicopter would have to return to base for fuel and crew rest in a fraction of that period. This was a crucial factor in the irregular campaigns the U.S. employed them in, where the targets had little or no anti-aircraft capability. Most strategists, however, assumed that in a high-end war, drones flying lower and slower than a Second World War fighter plane would be shredded by an adversary with integrated air defenses.
(Excerpt) Read more at thediplomat.com ...
The tank will become an armored, mobile power generator with rail guns, beam weapons and missiles.
It will have tremendous computing and sensing systems.
They’ve been saying this since at least the first major use of the ATGM in the Yom Kippur War. It’s been nearly 50 years since then, and tanks are still around.
However, tanks are expensive to build, maintain, and operate, so as we see more inexpensive weapons that can kill them, we’re going to see less incentive to build or buy them.
What it actually means is that a cheap method for killing drones isn’t far away. Including immediate real time counterbattery fire against the launchpoint.
It would be tough do develop a MANPADS that can reach the ~25,000 foot altitude of modern armed drones. But there are plenty of old vehicle-mounted Soviet systems that can. I think Armenia shot one down with an old SA-8 earlier this year.
Of course, I don’t know much about the going price of Soviet surplus SAMs these days, nor do I know much about how detectable these drones are on radar.
Not a manpad. An armored AAA system that operates in general support of tanks. But in any case, we won’t ever be operating tanks anywhere we do not have air supremacy. A drone chugging along at FL25 at 130kts will be/is helpless.
Radar aimed chain gun?
You’d need a pretty big gun to reach that high. Something like a ZSU or Vulcan wouldn’t do. A 76mm gun might do it, but I don’t think there are any modern SPAAGs with guns that big out there. The Italians had one called OTO, but I don’t think they ever produced it.
But when we’re talking about developing a new, armored self-propelled AA gun that can engage high-altitude targets with low radar and IR signatures, I don’t think we’re talking about “cheap” anymore.
It’d probably be cheaper to arm your own drones with Stingers and have them run combat air patrol.
Nothing like that is going to engage a target flying at 25,000 feet.
Perhaps the best way to engage a small, cheap drone very high and slow is with your own small and cheap drone right up there in the neighborhood?
Marines just got rid of all their tanks.
It carries 9M38M1 missiles that have a ceiling of 46,000 feet.
There's also the 2k22 Tunguskas, which currently can fire its missiles and hit up to 20,000 and the current upgrade under development will hit to 25k or 30k.
The Marines got rid of their tanks because they are refocusing on actual amphibious warfare, say Pacific island landings against China, and the current M1 is so heavy that a giant LCAC can deliver only *one* of them to shore at a time. One.
The Marines are likely to be able to borrow tanks (and crews) from the Army if they need them for an operation, and they are also likely to buy some of the new light tanks the Army is looking at getting now that the Abrams isn’t tactically airmobile any more.
Counterbattery against launch site only works if the drone’s controller is actually at the launch site - larger US drones are controlled by satellite uplink to a remote facility so blowing up the launch site may not do much of anything.
Also, modern drones have limited self-directed capability in case their uplinks fail. You can already, today, buy a commercial drone that knows how to orbit an object by itself, lock its camera onto the target, do things that could be converted into missile launch events, and then fly home.
Yup. Trucks with Abrams going out of 29 palms up to barstow and trucks coming in with ACVs.
Except what happened is Active Protection Systems, which are currently tipping the balance back towards the tank. NATO ignored APS for years, but recent events in Syria have NATO scrambling to bolt APS onto our tanks while Russia and Israel laugh and say “I told you so.”
It isn’t necessary to use a large missile-carrying drones that fly high over target for long periods. Really tiny drones can fly low, wait on the ground and inject poison gas at tank air intakes or enter through the cannon muzzle and explode the shell in the breech.
“There’s also the 2k22 Tunguskas, which currently can fire its missiles and hit up to 20,000 and the current upgrade under development will hit to 25k or 30k.”
Do you have a source? Documentation I see shows 3.5 km (11,482 ft).
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