Why in the world do Russian tanks keep doing this?!
Since the start of the war in Ukraine the west has discovered a critical vulnerability
in Russian tanks, but the reason why Russia's tanks keep blowing their tops comes down to
two reasons- and they're both pretty dumb.
The mighty T-72 and T-80 were developed to take on western tanks in a nuclear battlefield
on a NATO vs Warsaw Pact grudge match to the death.
The winner would inherit an irradiated world, and the future of the global wasteland could
only be one of two things: capitalist utopia with a McDonalds in every Super Mutant camp,
or communist worker's paradise, where you and all your Ghoul friends would own the means
of production In the inevitable struggle for the fate of
all humanity, both sides knew that it would come down to a slugfest between their mightiest
tanks.
The west took one approach to tank design, the Soviet Union took a different, far dumber
approach.
For the west it was all about technology.
With eastern Europe giving every citizen the option of either queueing up for the most
basic necessities or serving in the army, the Soviet bloc fielded a terrifyingly massive
army that the west simply couldn't match.
To neutralize the Soviet numbers, the west decided that it would double down on technology,
and pack its tanks with as many fancy sensors, the most sophisticated armor, ultrasmart firing
computers, and tea kettles- looking at you, Britain.
This resulted in some of the most legendary tanks ever built, names you recognize today
like the M1 Abrams, the British Challenger, and the German Leopard.
The Soviets looked at western tanks and said, “Nyet.
manpower is cheap.
Quantity is better than quality anyway!” and decided to take an altogether different
approach.
Rather than field technologically comparable tanks, the Soviets would instead focus on
making many tanks.
Thousands upon thousands of tanks, because to the Soviet Union there wasn't a problem
in the world that couldn't be solved with the application of judicious levels of tanks
and armored personnel carriers.
Especially pesky things like revolutions by citizens yearning to be free of the Soviet
yoke.
To be fair, the Soviets were sort of forced to make many cheap tanks, as they were typically
several steps behind the west in the development of different key technologies.
Thus the Stalin adage of “quantity is a quality all its own” was adopted, and when
asked how many tanks he wanted, each Soviet premier simply kept answering, “yes.”.
But what's this got to do with Russian tanks taking gold at the turret tossing Olympics
today?
In the west, crew survivability was given a premium, however Soviet forces were almost
expendable by design.
Russia's notoriously poor logistics aren't just a modern accident, it's basically baked-in
to the post Russian military.
The Soviet military also suffered from bad logistics- to this day Russian forces still
haven't palletized their supplies, meaning instead of using forklifts to move large amounts
of conveniently packaged supplies around, they do it pretty much by hand in boxes.
In the Soviet playbook, they figured they were going to take massive losses anyways
so why bother keeping units resupplied.
Private conscriptavich and his mates would fight until they were either dead, out of
ammo, or both, and if they managed to limp back to friendly lines then great- they could
do it all again tomorrow.
Thus, when some Soviet engineer pointed out a critical design flaw in Soviet tanks that
would end with the crew dead or exploded into orbit, he was promptly ignored.
In order to protect the crew, western tanks included blowout panels for the tank's onboard
store ammo.
That way in case of a direct hit to the vulnerable ammo storage, the resulting explosion would
be funneled via the blowout panel harmlessly out of the tank.
Designers were happy.
Crews were happy.
Nobody got turned into an involuntary astronaut.
The Soviets saw the design of blowout panels and said, “hold my potato vodka.”
Not only did they decided not to include blowout panels, they then basically did everything
they could to turn every single Soviet tank crew into volunteer cosmonauts.
The west has also made some confounding moves themselves- like the Germans deciding that
the best place for their ammo storage was in the left, front of the tank.
Now, on the one hand this kind of makes sense.
The front of the tank is the most heavily armored, and thus the most likely to survive
a direct hit.
On the other hand, tanks are meant to drive head on to enemy fire so, we think you see
the problem here.
The Leopard's armor is rated to survive at least one, possibly two hits in near vicinity
to same spot from anything Russia can throw at it, but at the same time, any penetration
to the front left of the tank is going to result in the driver probably getting turned
into overcooked bratwurst.
However, the Soviets took the cake in terrible design decisions.
If the West could endanger one of their tank crew’s members, well then by Stalin's whiskers
the Soviets could do better and just straight up murder their entire crew.
Thus the Soviets decided to put their ammunition basically ringing the turret floor, in effect
seating most of the tank's crew directly over the highly explosive ammunition.
This has termed the fatal design flaw the “jack in the box” flaw, because the moment
that ammo cooks off, the tank commander and one other crew member are going to enjoy a
brief but very intense career in the Soviet Air Force.
But the design does make some amount of sense.
Placing the ammunition low and centrally to the tank means that it's best protected from
penetration at any angle.
Ammo stored in the turret itself is vulnerable to rear or flank shots, while the position
of ammunition low in the tank and center to the body itself means it's much less likely
to take a direct hit.
However, the widespread use of two different weapons has turned this carousel system into
a hilarious spring-loaded death trap for modern Russian crews.
The first is the use of anti-tank guided missiles.
In the old days, anti-tank missiles would try to bore straight through tank armor itself
to kill the crew inside.
Today though, ATGMs instead are usually fired in high trajectories that see them come down
on the tank from above, forming an explosively shaped penetrator milliseconds before impact
that disables a tank.
Surprisingly, while the tank commander is usually toast, the rest of the crew has a
chance of surviving, as the explosively formed penetrator- or EPF- is not explosive itself.
It's meant to simply tear into the tank and disable the turret as well as destroy mechanical
and electronic components in the way.
Because tanks can't be well armored from everywhere or they'd be so heavy they can barely move,
tank designers have been historically forced to sacrifice armor plating on the top of the
tank, which is statistically the least likely part of a tank to get hit.
However, having a superheated slug of explosively shaped metal tearing into your tank from above
directly over the turret has obvious implications for any tank where the ammunition is stored
directly under the turret.
The second weapon being used in Ukraine are large anti-tank mines, which are designed
to detect the vibration of tank treads and after a short delay, fire an explosive blast
upwards.
Once more, the underside of the tank is not very well armored, because if other tanks
are firing at the bottom of your tank, you've done something terribly, terribly wrong.
But tanks are designed to literally drive over minefields, so they do have some protection
from mines- which is why anti-tank mines are between five to ten times the size of an anti-personnel
mine.
Here we can see the problem with Russian tanks again, because in essence you're having an
explosion go off directly under your ammo storage.
While the crew is very likely to survive rolling over an anti-tank mine even if their tank
is probably going to be disabled, there's little hope for survival when your tush is
just inches away from dozens of pounds of explosive primer.
Russia is aggressively winning the turret tossing Olympics in Ukraine, with some turrets
calculated to have been blown as high as 250 feet in the air.
Turrets have even been found lodged in the upper floors of Ukrainian apartment buildings.
But it's not just bad design, it's the Russians being bad at war in general.
Tanks are pretty terrifying things- if you've never been around one, having 70 plus ton
armored behemoths thundering past you is pretty terrifying, even if they're on your side.
Their meant to take the worst punishment the enemy can dish out by break the teeth of enemy
defenses while shoving themselves down the enemy's throat.
But in modern war, tanks have a pretty bad allergy to anti-tank guided missiles, and
the primary destroyer of Russian tanks in Ukraine has been man portable ATGMs.
This isn't a threat unique to Russia.
During both invasions of Iraq, US and coalition tanks faced the threat of ATGMs, and yet for
some reason western tank crew didn’t become voluntary astronauts during the conflict.
That is because of infantry, as the best way to protect tanks from enemy infantry with
anti-tank missiles isn't more tanks- seriously Russia, get with the program and yes we're
talking about you, Terminator.
In the west, armored assaults are backed up with infantry, who's job is to neutralize
enemy anti-tank teams.
Yet despite learning absolutely nothing from having their tanks and BMPs absolutely wrecked
by Chechnya in the first Chechen war, Russia continues to fail to use infantry and armor
side-by-side.
Actually, we take that back- Russia did learn something from losing hundreds of tanks and
armored vehicles to a rebel force with none of their own, and it was to build even more
tanks to protect their tanks.
Once more, here's looking at you, Terminator.
Without infantry support, Russian tanks have been getting mauled by western ATGMs, and
the only reason that Russia's attempts to break turret tossing world records have slowed
down in recent months is not because they've learned their lessons, but because reports
from the Ukrainian front lines state that the Russians are having to consolidate their
remaining tanks and only use them sparingly.
In the US Marines there's a saying- every Marine, despite their job, is a rifleman.
In Russia, thanks to bad design, every tanker is also briefly an airman.
Ready for more luls?
Check out An Honest Look At The Russian Military, or click this other link instead.
The Emperor protects!