Its cannon can fire laser-guided anti-tank missiles. Its armor is impenetrable to anything
but nuclear weapons. It can kill ten American M1 Abrams standing front-to-back in a row with
just one shot- if the Russian Ministry of Defense and Russian military bloggers are to be believed,
the T-14 is the deadliest tank ever created past, present, and future.
But if it's so good, why isn't it in Ukraine where it's needed the most?
The T-14 really is quite impressive, at least on paper. Then again up until eight months ago
the Russian military was also quite impressive on paper. If the T-14 was a paper tiger though,
it was one with some serious capital investment. We know after eight months
of war that the Russian government never lies, but we do know that the T-14 Armata has
been announced in full production at least half a dozen times in the last ten years.
Originally the Russian military was supposed to acquire 2300 of these monsters between 2015 and
2020, making western analysts absolutely brown their pants at the time- back when
the west actually believed a single word coming out of the Kremlin. However when
2015 rolled around not a single T-14 had been delivered and the tank was still in prototype
testing. In 2016 some western news outlets reported that the T-14 was in fact on its way
to crush democracy- The National Interest ran a story on March 13th, 2016 saying “Surprise:
Russia's Lethal T-14 Armata Tank is in Production”. The source for the article
was a quote from a top Russian defense industry executive- or basically “trust me,
bro”. Yet 2016 came and passed without a single T-14 in active service, and by July 20th 2018
Russia made an announcement that in effect indefinitely postponed any deliveries of T-14s,
similar to an announcement made on the SU-57 Felon around the same time period.
In 2021 Russian state-owned TASS media outlet reported that the tank would finally begin
serial production in 2022, with serial production starting in December of 2021.
Mysteriously not a single T-14 has been verified to be in active military service,
though TASS did announce that the tank had been sent to Syria for testing in “battlefield
conditions”. No other media in the world could verify this, and rumors circulating online that
one T-14 was destroyed by Syrian rebels using an American TOW missile are also unverified.
But let's wind the clock back and look at the background of the T-14,
its alleged capabilities, and why Russia seems to be incapable of
bringing these capabilities to a battlefield near you anytime soon.
The T-14 was a seismic shift in Russian tank design. Back in 2010 Russia was developing the
T-95, an upgrade over traditional Soviet-style tank designs. However, it was concluded that
what Russia needed to be a relevant tank force in future conflicts was not an upgrade,
but a complete evolutionary leap forward ditching old Soviet tank design behind.
The United States faced a similar problem back in the 1980s when it introduced the
M1 Abrams. Originally the US was simply going to continue evolving its M60 main battle tank,
but the threat of overwhelming numbers of armored forces in eastern europe meant that it was time
to throw the entire design out and work on something brand new. Like the M1 Abrams was
built to face a specific threat- a defensive land battle against overwhelming numbers- the
T-14 was born from discarded Soviet upgrades with the goal of building the tank around brand
new technologies. It would be Russia's boldest leap forward in tank design for generations.
While today it's easy to consider the Russian military laughable,
the truth is that Soviet designers knew what they were doing in making tanks. The Soviet
Union fielded some truly fearsome tanks, many times superior to their western counterparts.
While the west held the advantage in the air and at sea, the Soviet Union was decisively
the superior land power- perhaps not in doctrine, but certainly in its armored
forces. This expertise has continued to be handed down to the modern Russia,
and if at least half of its capabilities were real and not propaganda, it was a weapon to be feared.
The T-14 would ditch traditional Soviet style hulls to feature a more western-style
boxy turret and low profile body. This makes the T-14 a smaller target on the battlefield and can
seriously improve crew safety by keeping them out of the line of fire. However,
this redesign of Soviet designs fixes one major flaw in nearly all tanks Russia has
in service today- a flaw seen in full effect in Ukraine that has spawned an endless host of memes
(https://preview.redd.it/d83esnrt9zc91.jpg?auto=webp&s=860d5509a129c6d8dcbab44517a303bff50ab2d4).
Russian tanks store ammunition in the armored turret, which makes it easier for the autoloader
to do its job. However, this also leaves the tank extremely vulnerable to top-attack munitions,
as any hit on the turret is guaranteed to light off this ammunition. In effect,
Russian tanks have a tendency to blow their tops sky-high and send the vaporized ashes
of their crews into the stratosphere. Western designers meanwhile decided that their tanks
should be tanks and not rockets, and put the ammunition in specially designed storage spaces
with blowout panels. The T-14 takes a cue from the west in this regard,
much to the relief of Russian tankers with no hopes of becoming astronauts one day.
But the T-14 introduces a brand new feature that even the United States has
yet to adopt. The turret can typically be a serious liability for the crew,
as for it to do its job it can't be as well armored as the rest of the body. That's bad
news for the tank commander who's seat is typically in the turret. However,
the T-14 features an unmanned turret which allows the crew to remote control it from the safety of
their seats inside the body of the tank. In fact the entire crew compartment is a densely
protected armored capsule that the crew sits in, affording greatly increased survivability.
The tank also features an upgraded barrel with increased range and lethality,
as well as a host of modern upgrades including GPS, satellite communications, and even a
meteorological mast to feed environmental data to the fire control computer to greatly increase
accuracy. So if the T-14 is so competent, why in the world isn't in full production
and storming the front in Ukraine today? Russia's attitude towards the T-14 appears
to be a conundrum. The nation has gone to great lengths to tout its lethality and capabilities
over even the most advanced western designs, and is putting great effort into pressuring nations
like India to buy it. Yet the Russian government seems completely uninterested in actually
buying the tank itself. At the ARMY 2022 expo, Rosoboronexport, the state-owned arms company
that manufactures the Armata line of combat vehicles, was seen trying to garner international
interest for the T-14 while a TASS news article continued to speak out about its capabilities.
Yet instead of buying this revolutionary tank itself,
Russia was trying to pawn it off on foreign buyers,
a move that no doubt raised serious eyebrows from anyone considering buying the tank.
The T-14 may arouse comparison to the Su-57, widely considered to be a dud and the worst of
all 5th generation fighter designs. The Su-57 was claimed to be superior to even US F-22s,
the stealthiest 5th gen fighter in the world, but this was demonstrably a lie. India, which
was initially a partner in developing the Su-57 eventually pulled its funding from the program,
citing serious questions about its effectiveness, stealth characteristics, and ability to survive
against other 5th generation aircraft such as American F-22s and F-35s and Chinese J-20s.
The pullout of Indian funding effectively killed Russia's ability to manufacture the
Su-57 and to this day only a little over a dozen of the aircraft are operational.
However, while the Su-57 is on simple observation inferior in design to its counterparts, the T-14
appears to be the real deal and is backed by generations of Russian tank design know-how.
The real reason why the Russian military may be passing on the tank is unlikely to be that
it's a dud, but rather because Russia is facing the same problem the US was in the mid 2000s.
With the turn of the millenium came a slew of revolutionary new military technologies and some
serious spending around the world on developing and integrating them into active fighting forces.
Nobody spent more than the US, which famously put nearly 20 billion dollars into its Future
Combat Systems Program. However, all this tech came at serious cost to develop and purchase,
and in the end America's spending frenzy resulted in exactly zero active-service
weapon platforms. Instead, the US scaled back its ambitions and started spending
on slow, incremental, and proven upgrades rather than moonshots.
Russia seems to be facing the same issue, only on a budget a fraction the size of America's.
This means that Russia's dreams of a horde of 2300 of this cutting-edge tank are simply
financially impossible. Identifying these budgetary shortfalls as far back as 2016,
Russia instead has been funneling money to modern upgrades for its existing tank fleet
rather than new acquisitions, and this left the T-14 without domestic support.
With a price tag of nearly $4 million each, the T-14 is a significant investment for any country,
though it's still significantly behind America's Abrams which comes in at nearly $10 million in its
most modern variant. With a much smaller budget than the US, any hopes of acquiring the T-14 in
large numbers were extremely unlikely in the past- today it's simply impossible. Sanctions
against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are having a significant economic impact,
which has to date been delayed due to a massive war chest of over $300 billion that Putin had
been holding in reserve for exactly this scenario. That money- originally as much as $700 billion,
most of which was frozen in western banks- is going to be running out soon though,
and that's when Putin will be unable to offset the damage of the sanctions. In other words,
there's some very lean times ahead for Russia's military budget,
specially as millions of professionals have left the country, further eroding its economy.
The biggest death knell for Russia's acquisition of the T-14 however, and perhaps its ability to
even manufacture it for foreign buyers should it find any, are sanctions targeting the nation's
technology sector. The west and its partners around the world have in effect cut Russia off
from the global technology market, making access to advanced electronic components
the T-14 and other modern weapons need, much more difficult and expensive. Russia is quite
adept at sanction-busting, but it's going to be impossible for the nation to illicitly
get its hands on enough materials to build and maintain a fleet of over 2,000 high-tech tanks.
Yet we know Russia does have a small number of T-14s that it's been using
for testing and prototyping- so why isn't it sending these
to the front? The answer comes down to one simple comparison.
A T-14 Armata tanks costs approximately $4 million. A US Javelin anti-tank missile
costs around $250,000. The US has supplied Ukraine with hundreds of this weapon system,
and losing a single T-14 to a Javelin or British NLAW is in effect, an economic
disaster in the making. Then there is the huge loss in international prestige should
Russia lose its most modern tank to a military that's supposed to be vastly
inferior to itself- the same reason we've yet to see the Su-57 in combat over Ukraine.
It's not known how many T-14s Russia has actually built, but the number is believed to be less than
a hundred. Even if Russia wanted to send them to the front lines, there's simply not enough of
them to form operational units out of. Instead, these ultramodern T-14s would find themselves
fighting alongside much more dated models, making them vulnerable on the battlefield.
With too few T-14s to be used effectively, Russia is best served by by using it’s old
tank stockpiles rather than sending their new tanks to their certain destruction or simply
abandonment in Ukraine. After all, the shame of having a Ukrainian farmer tow away Russia's
most advanced tank with a tractor might be what finally does the Russian military in.
Now go check out Why Putin Is Scared To Deploy The Su-57 In Ukraine,
or click this other video instead. Waffles are better than pancakes.