Russia's failed push into northern Ukraine in March of
2022 was vividly illustrated by video after
video of top of the line tanks being pulverized by
anti-tank weapons.
Although attack helicopters and aircraft once thought of
as the tanks, true foe seemed to be limited in this
new war by a sky made more dangerous by surface to air
missiles. The use of atgms or anti-tank guided missiles
and precision artillery appeared to have made the
tank obsolete in real time.
But the technology used incorrectly can sometimes
seem faulty or useless.
If you look at what the Ukrainians are doing,
they're desperately trying to get hold of our Abrams
tanks and German leopard tanks and some of the better
quality. Pretty obvious from that that the tank is
still an important part of the battlefield.
In the case of the Russian tank drive towards Kyiv.
Poor tactics, preparation and a mobile and motivated
defense hampered the road bound columns of T-72 t-80
and t-90 tanks.
Tanks have been very important to being able to
gain and take territory because you need something
that's going to have some protection behind it that's
going to allow infantry to be able to either use it for
cover or use it for indirect fires.
And as the war dragged on, tanks on both sides became a
key cog of offensive and defensive operations.
The US military's investing in a new light tank platform
and the constantly upgraded Abrams continues to be the
mainstay of the US Army Armor Corps, but is a next
generation tank around the corner, and can it survive
on the battlefields of the future?
Tanks were first used in World War One.
The ability to have firepower and protection
rolled into one vehicle that could traverse rough
terrain, change warfare.
Although the debate about what constitutes a tank
continually raged. Generally speaking, a tank
is a tracked vehicle with armor and a main gun.
A main battle tank is a tank designed to be able to
do it all. To be the tip of the spear during offensive
operations capable of anchoring defensive lines
and also capable of destroying other tanks.
The primary tank.
The US Army fields is the M1 Abrams.
That's been around since the late 80 seconds.
It has been renovated and upgraded over time, but it's
still a relatively old technology that's been
repackaged in new ways.
It has a 1300 horsepower engine that can be powered
by jet fuel and a 120mm main gun designed to take on
the top of the line enemy tanks.
Abrams crews set the Abrams tank apart from anything,
the crew training makes it the most lethal, most
deadly, most dangerous thing on today's
battlefield, especially going to large scale combat
operations.
There are numerous versions of the Abrams.
The most advanced is the Abrams M1a2 System
Enhancement Program version three or V three.
The M1a2 Sep V3 cost around $11 million with upgrades
and sustainment. Nearly 10,000 Abrams tanks have
been produced since its inception, and thousands of
Abrams tanks of various modifications are currently
in the US Army's inventory in the Sep v four is in
development and could be operational by 2025.
So tanks are really important to gain and take
territory against an entrenched adversary mobile
protected firepower, infantry fighting vehicles,
robotic combat vehicles.
They can all be really beneficial if you're going
up against an adversary who's maybe more dispersed,
not quite as entrenched.
But the Army is also adding a light tank to its
inventory that at 38 tons, weighs less than half as
much as a single Abrams tank.
The Mobile Protected Firepower Vehicle, or MPF,
features a large cannon and lighter weight than a main
battle tank. The Army has set aside $1.14 billion to
start procuring the new armored vehicle.
And according to the fiscal year 2023 president's
budget, the cost will be around $12.8 million per
vehicle initially. But that cost could come down if the
number purchased rises.
The future of the tank could also look like the hi
tech concept, the Abrams X.
So the US, even though it has probably the most
advanced technology in the world, is not really taking
advantage of the full range of new materials, science
and new weapons technology that's out there.
I think the.
Abrams X is vulnerable to the same kind of problems we
saw with things like the F 35 and the Littoral Combat
Ship, where they were using complex software, newly
developed systems, and they ended up not being able to
carry out their missions in some respects and also were
very hard to maintain.
Tank Losses on both sides of the conflict have been huge.
Around half of Russia's modern tanks have been lost
in the war, according to a report by the International
Institute for Strategic Studies.
Ukraine's military may have lost hundreds of its tanks,
the same report found, which is one reason Kiev has
pushed for more tanks from Western backers.
And the US, the UK and Germany are finally
preparing to hand over main battle tanks.
It's considered a major step by Ukraine's military
backers, one that could lead to more deliveries from
other countries in their effort to aid Ukraine.
The US has pledged to send 31 Abrams.
The UK is sending 14 challenger twos.
And Germany has pledged 14 Leopard two A6 tanks.
The Defense Department announced that M1a1s would
be sent to Ukraine, which would speed up delivery to
fall of this year.
Critics of the Abrams transfer have noted that it
is high maintenance doesn't run on diesel like the tanks
used by the Ukrainian military and takes ample
crew training to fully take advantage of its high tech
design. Germany produces the leopard series of tanks
which do run on diesel and are considered easier to
maintain than the Abrams.
The German made leopard tank was one of the platforms
that the United States was pushing for over the Abrams
because it's a tank that's widely used in Europe.
Since the US announced it is giving tanks to Ukraine,
Germany has followed suit, opening the doors for
transfer approvals for nations operating the German
made leopard tank.
The Abrams tank is also a popular export.
Various versions are operated by Taiwan, Egypt,
Iraq, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco and
soon Poland.
Tanks tend to have more armor on the front and turn
and less on the sides and rear of the tank.
This creates vulnerabilities, but picking
and choosing where to put armor is a trade off to keep
the tank from being too heavy for most roads and
bridges. One way that tanks are moving into the future
is with defenses that are more than just adding heaps
of heavy armor.
The war in Ukraine has shown hard proof that modern
anti-tank weapons can be brutally effective.
The Russian tanks didn't fare well.
They were taken out pretty quickly by modern anti-tank
systems, and I think that would be a problem also for
U.S. Tanks in a future conflict.
Reactive armor is designed to react to projectiles as
they hit the tank and reduce the potential of
armor piercing weapons, breaching the hull through
advanced materials designed to absorb, redirect and
degrade the attack.
Explosive reactive armor uses an explosive sandwich
between metal plates.
When an incoming projectile hits the explosive, it
detonates and redirects the energy of the impact.
These concepts have been around for decades, and
Abrams tanks have the Abrams reactive armor tiles
made by Ensign-bickford Aerospace and Defense
Company that can be added to the hull to help provide
more protection. A more advanced method is using
active protection systems.
These intercept incoming anti-tank weapons prior to
impact with the tank itself. Rafael Advanced
Defense Systems and Leonardo have teamed up to
equip US Army Abrams with the trophy APS system.
Some of these anti-tank systems actually use an
outgoing round, so it's either some kind of gun type
of round or an explosive to basically defeat the
incoming explosive of the anti-tank round.
So some of them are very sophisticated and these
systems have been around for about a decade and the
US has just now begun to put those on the ABRAMS.
So I think one really big lesson out of Ukraine is the
importance of these active protective systems.
Unmanned and optionally manned ground vehicles,
including tanks, could be the next huge innovation in
land warfare.
You're seeing a lot of the energy and innovation going
into things like robotic robotic combat vehicles,
which the US Army has been investing in.
And there's many companies overseas like Rheinmetall
that have been building a variety of semi-autonomous
or autonomous armored vehicles that are
weaponized, that can be controlled remotely by a
person or have a person in them potentially sometime.
But getting this new technology to work will take
big investments in automation, AI and indirect
control systems.
We battle every war is unique and I
Think we've got to be careful about how we
interpret what's going on in Ukraine right now.
But at the same time, I think it is time that we
turn. We realize that a lot of the conclusions we made
after Desert Storm and from the early days in Iraq and
Afghanistan were just wrong that that warfare between
peers and near peers is a lot more violent.
And it's got a lot more technologically oriented
than the early campaigns were in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
As the war in Ukraine rages, Pentagon planners are
focusing more on what a war in the Indo-Pacific, an
arena filled with island chains and remote logistics
would look like.
If you look at the Indo-Pacific context, it's
probably not going to be, you know, land wars where
the US and Chinese are fighting.
In the Philippines, for example, it's much more
likely that the US is going to be trying to protect that
base from some kind of small scale attack.
You know, the Chinese might mount in the Philippines or
in the Japanese island chain where a smaller tank
or a smaller set of armored vehicles with guns is going
to be more beneficial than a large tank that maybe
can't use all the road networks that maybe takes a
lot of gas and is more difficult to sustain.
There's still a question of how useful tanks will be in
future conflicts.
And of course, we want to head off some of those
conflicts through diplomacy and skilled political
developments as opposed to just preparing for war, some
of which may never come to be.