Posted on 01/04/2024 7:23:22 PM PST by FarCenter
NATO has a huge problem that will take decades to overcome. Put most simply, the armor vehicles NATO has won’t survive in a firefight with the Russians, notwithstanding the fact that Russian armor is far from the best.
Russia has demonstrated in Ukraine that in conventional warfare it can knock out some of NATOs best tanks and decimate Western armored fighting vehicles like the US Bradley and the German Marder.
NATO does not have enough tanks, does not have sound logistics to support them, and faces significant problems coming up against modern Russian ground forces.
The Leopard tank has performed poorly, despite Ukrainian efforts to try and fix some of its many problems.
Even when it comes to the American M-1 Abrams tanks, Forbes reports the Ukrainians have not put it on the battlefield – probably because US advisors have told them it wouldn’t survive and the destruction of the Abrams would give the US a black eye.
So, instead, the Ukrainians have been urgently trying to “upgrade” the Abrams by gluing on Russian reactive armor and building cages on top of the tanks’ turrets to ward off Russian Lancet unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Germans, meanwhile, say that Ukraine no longer has any operational Leopard series 2 tanks; those that were broken down or salvaged from the battlefield have been sent off to Estonia for repairs.But Estonia does not have spare parts to fix them, so they are rusting in marshalling yards.
Modern tanks, like modern aircraft carriers, face serious challenges to survive in hostile environments.
(Excerpt) Read more at asiatimes.com ...
Are tanks and armored vehicles the equivalent of battleships in WWII (aircraft carriers obsoleted them)?
Just a question, I don’t know the answer.
Talking tank on tank is akin to battleship on battleship during WWII. The trend with drones on the battlefield is to take tanks out before they ever see each other.
I think tanks can be made more robust by eliminating the crew and crew space. That would reduce the volume that needs to be protected by armor, and the weight savings can be used for missile countermeasures.
Keep AC carriers out of this.
NATO: No Ammo To Operate.
It’s not necessarily weak armor, it’s just that arms took the usual jump ahead of armor in the classic leapfrog game that happens.
Both Israel and Russia (the former directly, the latter indirectly through both Chechen Wars and other fights) have been telling the West and NATO that we’re back to the state of affairs in the 1950s, where modern ATGMs will go through anybody’s armor. The advent of the modern heavy ATGM with tandem or even the proposed triplex warheads made sure of that, though NATO kept denying it. Both Russia and Israel were pointing out that tanks and armored vehicles need an Active Protection System to stand a chance of surviving on a modern battlefield against peer or near peer weapons.
NATO didn’t want to hear it, the US didn’t want to hear it and both went about things thinking their armor was going to be sufficient. They believed that all the problems the Israeli and Russian armor was having was due to “wog quality armor” as the Brits would put it. At best, both the US and NATO believed that getting APS mounted to vehicles was a relatively low priority and it could wait either for later in general or in the US’ case, until Raytheon could develop the all-singing, all-dancing yet still vaporware QuicKill system that the Army wanted to the exclusions of all others. It was only when Turkey invaded Syria with front line NATO standard ex-Bundeswehr Leopard 2A4s and 2A5s with the “full up” composite armor that that complacency started faltering. The Leopards went in and got absolutely shredded by tandem warhead heavy ATGMs.
This event lead the US Army to finally drop waiting for the Raytheon QK system for the Abrams to the exclusion of all else and start hastily bolting export versions of the Israeli Trophy APS on instead - but only for a select subset; they balked at doing the entire fleet. The rest of NATO basically did the same thing.
Then came Ukraine. NATO is shipping over front-line(though admittedly on the older side) tanks like it’s going out of style and they’re getting absolutely shredded by tandem warhead missiles because none of them have APS systems. Nobody can claim their APS-less tanks will survive when nobody else’s will now as they’ve all taken casualties. (Though the Abrams has had no hull losses in Ukraine, there have been Abrams losses - WITH the depleted uranium armor package - in Afghanistan and Iraq plus export models have been lost in Yemen and elsewhere. Usually to heavy ATGM with tandem warheads, though there are now RPGs with tandem warheads.)
Now NATO and the US are panicking because they sat on their arses for too long and ignored decades of warnings. At this point, we’re back to “If you don’t have APS on your tank, no practical amount of armor is going to keep warheads out of your hull - and they will get through.”
The first thing that would happen to an automated tank is that it would either get hacked or it would go haywire. Remember the Sargent York SPAAG disaster? It was highly automated... and the first thing it did when being demoed for bigwigs was to turn its guns onto the reviewing stand. It also decided that an officer’s latrine was a valid target.
The analogy I use is horse calvary, especially since it was generally replaced with armor about a century ago. Now armor is obsolete because basically it can't protect itself from all the ways we invented to kill it.
The future of kinetic war is swarms of drones and swarms of lethal and expendable wheeled and tracked unmanned platforms (some might call them robots).
So if “Russian armor is far from the best” but its knocking out NATO tanks - then who has the best tanks?
China?
You saw in Ukraine. You can’t move your army anymore if you’re fighting against a near peer.
It isn't the armor. It is the armored vehicle concept.
Disagree with that. Armor is evolving - western armor is behind because we ignored APS for too long. Watch some of the footage coming out of Gaza, where armor is at its most disadvantaged - Israeli armor is surviving due to their fitment with Trophy APS, which does a rather good job of keeping unwanted warheads out of their hulls. They are mounting the formerly derided ‘cope cages’ as it’s clear that until a better truly vertical interception system can be developed you need to have something overhead to keep unwanted grenades or drones from dropping into your hatch. But even at high angles, the Trophy APS is keeping stuff out of the hull.
The Israelis and Russians (and the Indians and the Chinese) have disproved that, actually. You *can* still relocate, it’s just a lot harder.
I don’t think the concept is going away, but the details or the execution will. I think the armored vehicle of the future is going to look a lot more like a Leopard 1 - relatively light armor to keep mobility high (just enough to keep people with small arms from bothering the crew), low emissions systems to keep visual/radio/thermal signature low... and an awful lot of APS cells to knock down incoming.
The problem with point defense for armor is their limited magazines. The adversary only has to learn to direct a fire hose stream of cheap projectiles until the armor point-defense magazines are exhausted.
When we have a compact DEW solution for armor point-defense, armor will make more sense on the modern battlefield. But for now a tank on the battlefield is likely to become an expensive coffin. Or crematory.
The best counter to an armored vehicle is no longer and armored vehicle.
The objection to *that* concept is that if the enemy under attack is not alone, his friends can ‘counterbattery’ and destroy either the launch point or the control links before it gets to that point.
Further, non-chemical laser, maser and jammer point defense doesn’t run out of ammo, in the case of drones.
Another thing to keep in mind that an armor formation with current leading edge APS active can actually keep even artillery rounds and drones dropping in from above out of their buddies’ hulls if set up properly in a ‘scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ arrangement.
The absolute best counter to an armored vehicle hasn’t been another armored vehicle since before WW2. Artillery accounted for more tank kills in WW2 than literally any other weapon system.
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