Are all the modern western tanks pretty similar in performance ?

[Hannibal]

As an american I would assume that the M1A1 is the best tank in the World,but since it apears that the west has shared alotof tech. I would assume that all the western tanks are pretty similar when it come to firepower and protection .

[JasonC]

Merkava is arguably better, in pure gun and armor terms (especially the latter, crew survival etc). Leopard II is at least as good (2A6 model and onward has a superior L55 gun, vs. the L44 on the Abrams). Challenger 2 marginally worse, but only marginally (basically as good as an M1A1, not quite the electronics of an M1A2 SEP).

Russian T-90, comparable if the electronics suite is up to best Russian standards, otherwise a modest edge to the M-1 in vision and sensor gear and somewhat better ballistic computer. The ERA is at least as good as M-1 protection, for the first hit on a given plate at least.

M-1 was arguably best in the world when it first appeared, but it is by now quite an old tank. The upgrades since inception have been to firepower (120mm smoothbore, German, taken from the early model Leopard IIs) and to sensors and fire control (SEP package especially).

Since then, the Germans have been improving the guns, the Israelis tank layout for protection, and the Russians explosive reactive armors. The US has concentrated on sensor tech and on board computers.

[Hannibal]

How do the Leclere and Ariete compair ?

[C'Rogers]

JasonC or anyone else on the matter.

But would you say they are all, relatively, similar? Compared to say the tank difference in WWII

[M1A1TC]

M1 Abrams is the best! (I am a little biased)

[Martyr]

Originally posted by C'Rogers:
JasonC or anyone else on the matter.

But would you say they are all, relatively, similar? Compared to say the tank difference in WWII From what I know, the field of comparison is much tighter now than it was in WW2. WW2 saw a bewildering variety of armored vehicles, and different nations' main AFVs reflected very different design philosophies. Nowadays, it's kind of like every country has fielded their own best, most faithful copy of a Pershing II.

[civdiv]

A bit off topic but I read somewhere that some country (Iran?) has a Merkava (probably an older model) on display that they claimed to have captured. You can't get anywhere near the tank as supposedly it is made out of plywood.

[Wicky]

Looks fake as you say

Inside the Hizballah Museum (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1653282,00.html?xid=feed-cnn-topics)

Originally posted by civdiv:
A bit off topic but I read somewhere that some country (Iran?) has a Merkava (probably an older model) on display that they claimed to have captured. You can't get anywhere near the tank as supposedly it is made out of plywood.

[gibsonm]

Yes, from a very quick glance at the magazine photo, the barrel is only about half length for starters.

[FAI]

Why the Abrams don't sport ERA?

[M1A1TC]

Abrams armor is good enough - it doesnt need ERA smile.gif

[FAI]

Originally posted by M1A1TankCommander:
Abrams armor is good enough - it doesnt need ERA smile.gif What about tandem HEAT warhead?

I know it's probably armor overkill, at least I'm guessing it would be easier to replace ERA tiles than to repair damaged armor.

[Secondbrooks]

Abrams is heavy enough already, i don't know can it take much more weight? Heavy ERA-blocks aren't fairies.

No HEAT should get thru M1A2's (as well as any modern tank's) frontal armor of turret. There might be few warheads which can do this, but you gotta save weight. Even Russians aren't stuffing heavy ERA everywhere, just to most critical parts. aprox 60% in frontal sector.

[Barleyman]

One thing that blows my mind about Abrams is that they never put in a darn periscope. Until the high-tech-doo-dad from A2.

I guess kraut invention just can't make sense? Or there's always more boys from reserves to put their head out of the hatch..

[Jon Hagstad]

Wow, the Merkava looks very impressive, maybe the US should purchase? smile.gif

[oren_m]

Originally posted by gibsonm:
Yes, from a very quick glance at the magazine photo, the barrel is only about half length for starters. The whole tank is half the size compared to the real one, and the front hull sloping armor is ridiculous.

I dont know about the M1A2, but the Merkava Mk4. has an internal company comm system which works somewhat like the internet and let's the comapny share it's targets and sightings with each other.

oren_m

[Piecekeeper]

I saw a program on Discovery where they thought the swedish version of the Leopard 2 was the best tank in the world. MIA2 is a great tank but i think its gasturbine engine is there weakest point.

[SLIM]

Does anyone have any info about how effective the Arena active and ****ora-1 passive protection systems are, like on the T-90?
I have info on how it works from the FAS website, but it has no information about how effective something like that would be in the field.
EDIT: Link http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/row/t-90.htm

[SgtMuhammed]

oren,

That is what the digitization systems do for the M1.

The arguments about what can kill what or which tank is better are pretty pointless. Lab results rarely translate into real results. The most important factor is the training of the crew as long as there isn't a gross inequality in equipment.

[Peter Cairns]

I think it doesn't really matter as over the next few years the next generation of small armed UAV's will be with us.

For 10% of the value of an MBT, armed with two to four Javelin type rounds and the ability to target for long range terminally guided MRL's, tanks will just be battlefield junk.

Peter.

[oren_m]

Not true Peter, every time a new technology is introuduced to the battlefield someone jumps and say that tanks are history.
Maybe the look of the tank will be different in the future, but the concept of a vehicle that would be able to provide heavy fire power will last for several good decades.

You still cant occupy an area without troops and tanks, wars, in general, cannot be won only with air power, look at the 2'nd Lebanon war in 2006.

Oren_m

[Peter Cairns]

Oren,

Infantry hold ground tanks don't. What you need to be able to do is bring firepower to bare accurately on the enemy. In the past artillery couldn't do that without excessive volumes of fire, now it can.

A networked UAV can bring to bare more firepower than a company of tank and it's better protected that a metre of armour because the best protection is not being able to be hit.

At 2,000m it can pick off tanks all day at not one in the world can touch it. It can stay airborne for close to 48 hrs bringing in MRL rounds that can hit a moving target from 60 miles away.

As in the Balkans you can hide tanks, but then they just become pillboxes waiting to be destroyed. What 2006 shows is that you can't win a war with air superiority alone, but without it you can't win at all.

Although you do have my sympathy.....

Aafter nearly five decades of trying to develop the worlds best tank Israel has produced it, in time for it becoming obsolete.

Peter.

[luderbamsen]

Originally posted by oren_m:
Not true Peter, every time a new technology is introuduced to the battlefield someone jumps and say that tanks are history.
Maybe the look of the tank will be different in the future, but the concept of a vehicle that would be able to provide heavy fire power will last for several good decades.

You still cant occupy an area without troops and tanks, wars, in general, cannot be won only with air power, look at the 2'nd Lebanon war in 2006.

Oren_m Agreed. Personally, I kinda like the idea of an air portable mech force (i.e. Future Combat Systems), with UAV's and beyond line-of-sight weaponry as a substitute for heavy armour and big guns.

But the trend seem to be back towards heavy vehicles. Apparently, the US Army Stryker/USMC LAV are being overhauled, bringing their weight well beyond the limits of a C-130. And the Abrams/Bradley HBCT are recieving "spiral" spinoff technology from FCS (rather than all budget focus being on the FCS vehicles).

A true air mobile/air portable force (as originally envisaged with FCS) will fore the foreseeable future likely be a specialised rapid reaction force, like the 82nd and 101st divisions with extra (light) armoured vehicles, based on existing designs. Or so my crystal ball tells me...

Peter Cairns,

You're saying that UAV's and precision munitions make the MBT obsolete the way the aircraft carrier made the battleship obsolete in WW2? A valid point, but I just don't think we're at that point. Yet.

[ January 28, 2008, 08:08 AM: Message edited by: luderbamsen ]

[YankeeDog]

Meh. I suspect tanks, in one form or another, are going to be an important part of first-world militaries' OOB and doctrine for the rest of my lifetime at least. Unmanned combat vehicles are clearly an ascendant techology, and will certainly take over more and more of the roles that manned vehicles (and even footsoldiers) currently cover, but I don't think they will completely replace manned vehicles (ground or aircraft) anytime soon.

There is still value to having human decision-making ability at the point of contact. And as long as this is the case, there's going to be an incentive to give that human decision-maker at the point of contact protection, firepower and mobility. Which, of course, is exactly what a tank does. Now, the nature of the firepower and protection will probably change. For example, I think it's likely that active defense will eventually replace thick, heavy passive defense armor. Next generation is likely to be a more lightly armored vehicle that relies on an advanced, active defense suite to eliminate heavier incoming rounds. But that's still basically a tank to me.

As a paralell, I think it's instructive to look at the history of the rifleman, and his place in military doctrine. In modern military history, the rifleman probably reached his apogee in the mid-19th century; in wars like the Amercian Civil war, the foot soldier with his personal firearm was overwhelmingly the dominant weapon on the field. Increases in firearms' rate of fire, range and accuracy had largely relegated cavalry to a supporting role by this time, and artillery was still relatively short-ranged, and reliant on direct observation; while important, it had not yet become the massive killer that it would be by the First World War.

Since that time, new technologies and doctrines, such as the machine gun, indirect fire artillery, the tank and the aircraft, have gradually eroded the rifleman's dominance on the battlefield. But he certainly hasn't gone away; as Peter notes, he's still critical to holding ground. He may not be the dominant unit he was in 1860, but he still has important place in the doctrine that is modern combined arms.

Similarly, I believe that tanks were at their most dominant as a military system from roughly 1940 through maybe 1960 or so, and that their place on the modern battlefield has since been gradually waning. But they're certainly not yet irrelevant, and I don't think they're going become irrelevant anytime soon. Newer tanks will probably break current paradigms, and look to new techologies, like active defense, for protection and firepower. They may also become less numerous in military inventories. But I think most first world militaries will still carry heavy armor on their OOB, and that said heavy armor will have a place in doctrine, for the foreseeable future. Large heavy armor vs. heavy armor engagements like Kursk, Fulda Gap, or The Battle of 73 Easting may become incrasingly unlikely in the future, but I'm pretty sure heavy armor will be in the mix somewhere. . .

Cheers,

YD

[RSColonel_131st]

Peter, your UAV can be shot down, blinded, jammed...tons of methods to deal with them. It just hasn't happened yet since the current wars see little organized Anti-Air Defense on the enemy side, and the threat of armed UAVs is very young.

The Airplane didn't make tanks obsolte, why should UAVs do so?

[Wiggum]

Is something possible today when you have good equipment against modern (west) tanks ?
http://panzer-archiv.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=136604&highlight=sherman&sid=4035e77c3580c2dafa6324ac49bc3f52#136604

Its all in German and i cant translate it all...
But the text is about a German Soldier who destroyed 7 US-Tanks (Sherman) within 24h in the same battle with panzerfaust and mines.

[ January 28, 2008, 08:59 AM: Message edited by: Wiggum ]

[Sivodsi]

Tanks won't be obsolete due to the UAV threat for a while yet simply because not enough countries have ones that are capable of knocking out tanks. Until AT-UAVs become so cheap and widespread that they can be had easily on the arms market, tanks will remain a part of a dominating occupying or invading force.

And if two powers that have them do come blows the obsolescence of tanks or otherwise will be the least of anybody's concerns.

[Bigduke6]

Well, cavalry hung around for about a century after becoming obviously obsolescent. It is a coincidence that the armor arm in most armies considers itself a direct descendant of the horse cavalry?

From a purely technical point of view, I think tanks are already obsolete, i.e., if your army has the money and tech to field tanks, already your army with the ability to choose without prejudice can get far more firepower for resources invested than a 50-70 ton hunk of steel that is increasingly impossible to hide.

The logic is obvious. Guided missiles and munitions are no longer only available to the 1st World or even the 2nd: India makes them, so does Iran, etc. The electronics that makes those weapons go are getting cheaper and more available over time, and if the Americans can field a top-attack infantry missile then it's only a matter of time before the Russians do the same, and the Chinese and the rest won't be far behind.

A tank by definition depends on its thick armor for survival, at least, tank tactics have always been built on the idea that at least some part of the tank was relatively invulnerable to at least some of the basic weapons that could get thrown at it.

With the advent of top-attack (or side attack, or bottom-attack, or hyper-targeted, or hyper-velocity, or whatever else missiles in the hands of the infantry, it seems to me the infantry or whatever else throwing missiles will gain a decisive advantage. The infantry can hide better than the tank, and the infantry can hurt the tank from any aspect, at whatever range the tank is likely to find the infantry.

UAVes are a permutation of the same thing - a way of seeing the tank so as to whack it with a missile. As are helicopter-mounted missiles, as are vehicle-mounted missiles, as are laser-riding artillery shells, and so on. All are ways of seeing something on the battlefield and smacking it precisely, with a weapon specifically designed to destroy that particular target. And of course as time has gone on, the "signature" of the missile has tended to become smaller, while tanks if anything are growing easier to spot.

There are reports from the Yom Kippur war, denied by the Israelis, that not only did the Egyptian Sagger belt stop Israeli armor in its tracks, but that a substantial portion of the Israeli counterattack in the Sinai depended on US TOWs to write down the Egyptian armor. There is also the French experience in Chad, where as I understand it Milan on Toyota trucks (WFT isn't a weapon like that in CMSF, BTW?) cut a conventional Libyan armor force to bits.

But aside from that questionable example, never has the theory that a force armed primarily with missles could fight it out with primarily a tank force.

Could an army willing to think creatively do without its tank park entirely? I wonder. Maybe it might well be possible to simply field high missile densities, the infantry capable of handling it, and back up that up with artillery and UAVes capable of riding the same kind kind of guidance beams, and then issue scads of SAM to keep away the airforce operated by conventional opponents. Provided you could keep the infantry and the missiles coming in quantity, it would seem to me a force like that would have all sorts of advantages in any kind of attrition. Their killing power is cheap, flexible, and replacable, the opponents' killing power by comparison is more expensive, harder to maintain, and more difficult to replace.

Sure you do without the "shock" the armor guys keep saying is their secret weapon, but from where I sit, armor shock only works if the tanks can get to a point where they are invulnerable to the infantry opposing them. Theoretically, from a cost POV, already it is possible for almost any nation with a reasonable industrial base to field infantry invulnerable to tanks, for alot less cost than the tanks.

The point of course is that all that is theoretical. Without wars and usually heavy defeats to force the pace, military innovation is typically slow, incremental, and biased towards making what we already have a little bit better. For a nation to buy into a full-missile-force, it would have to jettison its armor branch and any pretensions to an armor force - an almost impossible proposition in any country with a professional military.

An absence of tank envy is even more improbable in a place without armor, but with resources and the ability to decide whether they want tanks or not. A despot newly in control of some African or Asian military wants tanks first and foremost, because even if the 1st World can cut tanks to pieces his domestic opponents cannot, and that's where he sees the first threat to his power.

It's kind of like aircraft carriers. There's alot of evidence out there that a weapon like that, in this day and age, is simply too big and impossible to hide in an all out war. There would be too many guided munitions aimed at it, from things the aircraft carrier would have too much trouble finding, the logic goes.

But as long as there are no all out wars, then it is very convenient to have something big and powerful and capable of delivering a whole bunch of force against opponents incapable of striking back. That's a pretty good description of a tank I think.

[M1A1TC]

What about active defence systems? When mounted on a vehicle, it can defeat an RPG or a missile coming at it.
Some good info here

http://www.imi-israel.com/Business/ProductsFamily/Product.aspx?FolderID=41

http://btvt.narod.ru/2/2.html

http://www.btvt.narod.ru/spec/antitank.html

[ January 28, 2008, 10:28 AM: Message edited by: M1A1TankCommander ]

[cool breeze]

And air bursting heavy HE taking out infantry an uavs?

[gibsonm]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:
It is a coincidence that the armor arm in most armies considers itself a direct descendant of the horse cavalry?No because in almost every army the Cavalry units swapped their horses for armour and currently conduct similar roles to their mounted forebears but in vehicles instead.

British Light Cavalry became Armoured Reconnaissance Regiments, Heavy Cavalry became Tank or Armoured Regiments, etc.

Similar conversions occurred throughout the Commonwealth.

The French followed a similar process as did the Americans too.

[MikeyD]

Funny how nobody mentions Canada. Leopard 2 A6M with long-barrelled 120mm and Slat armor cage.

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e171/mduplessis/Leopard_2A6M_CAN_Canadian_Army_K-1.jpg

[gibsonm]

What do you mean?

I said “Commonwealth” above (that includes Canada) and also I thought the thread was vehicle based so when Leopard 2A6 was mentioned in the second post I took that to include all user countries (again includes Canada).

Also be aware that Canada doesn’t own their 2A6’s they are leased. Interesting to see how they return them all in working order when at least one has been destroyed overseas.

[Stuart Galbraith]

I think for urban operations, the Challenger2 is pretty well setup. With the new toe armour package thats just been developed and the new machine gun the loader can operate under armour, I think that it has the Abrams beat. Post Tusk and I think the only significant advantage the Abrams has is the ammunition, and Challenger2 is getting the smoothbore sometime in the next 10 years. Leopard looks great with Slat armour, by the Challys had that for the past 4 years. smile.gif


Understand Im not razzing anyone elses armour here. ive just looked at the Challenger2 dorchester level 2 F armour package, and I think people greatly underestimate how thick the side armour is.

[JasonC]

BigDuke6 - I'm not buying it. Only the dead have seen the end of tanks (lol).

You state that the point of tanks and tank tactics has always been to be invulnerable to enemy AT weapons. But this is simply not the case. On the contrary, periods in which the heaviest tanks have been invulnerable, even just through the front aspect, to the most powerful AT weapons of their enemy, are outlier exceptions in the history of tank warfare.

The point of armor is to neutralize some enemy weapon systems. This reduces the effective enemy force, and sets up a concentration game as to where the remaining highly effective AT weapons will be sited. Armor then exploits its superior mobility and an offensive posture to mass elsewhere. Meanwhile, combined arms coordination is employed to reduce the effectiveness of the AT weapons that remain in the tank heavy sectors, or to neutralize the dense ones even when they are avoided.

That recipe has worked from WW I to now.

When lazy overconfident tankers depart from it, sure they can be stopped. Being stopped one place, at one time, has never been the issue, since it can always happen and frequently does. Breakthroughs only need a couple, the defense needs to hold everywhere.

In practice, armor used correctly has only been countered by counter-massed armor )attritional brawling between reserves, like on like), or in very recent times (post smart weapons) by complete air supremacy. Occasionally in earlier eras it was stopped by massed HE storms, depriving attacking armor of combined arms - but even then the bulk of the actual kills and the overall stop still depended on defending armor.

As for Saggers in 1973, it is directly on point. As soon as the Israelis dropped their 1967-learned arrogance and went back to using combined arms, they were readily mastered. That meant coordinating air and artillery with tank movements, and it meant punching through the line at chosen points only, instead of trying to steamroll it everywhere.

Modern infantry AT has proven itself able to cause occasionally losses and thus puncture any mythical invulnerability of tanks. But tanks have never needed any such invulnerability to be effective. Israel lost 400 tanks in 1973, but it had 1500, and won. In fights since, no one has come close to inflicting losses on that scale against modern western armor, with full air supremacy and combined arms.

The Russians lost something like 150 tanks in Afghanistan in 10 years, and more like 50 in the Chechen war. Losses on such a tiny scale simply do not have military significance. Not fun for the few in them who would rather be invulnerable, no doubt. But tanks continue the mission and clobber whatever is in front of them, and if that is all these lose to infantry AT, it does not remotely stop them.

Chad vs. Libya is another case directly on point. Chad was only able to do as well as it did because the Libyans lacked combined arms sophistication. They were militarily incompetent, that is all. Iraq vs. Iran there was plenty of that to go around, but tanks were quite effective. Same in the Bosnia war.

There are tens of thousands of legacy major weapon systems fielded by regional and first world powers, that can't seriously hurt a modern main battle tank, but can readily stop anything less. There are scads of artillery systems and even more of light arms throughout the world, that are completely ineffective against them, but perfectly effective against dismounted infantry touting expensive missiles.

Just as the invention of a PAK 40 hardly made a T-34 obsolete, the invention of good ATGMs does not make modern MBTs obsolete. It just makes them major weapon systems in a combined arms toolbox, just like Panzer IIIs or T-34s or Shermans were, in their heyday.

[John Kettler]

M1A1TankCommander,

Please Google Valeriy Fofanov. He's a contributor to CMSF, and his site has some marvelous material on the issues you raised. Please also see the pertinent parts of www.warfare.ru (http://www.warfare.ru) Apologies for those intrusive ads, which weren't there the last time I visited the site!

Regards,

John Kettler

[ January 29, 2008, 09:47 PM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[Lethaface]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:
Well, cavalry hung around for about a century after becoming obviously obsolescent.I think you might be roughly 4 millennia wrong there :D

[SgtMuhammed]

I hope they plan on removing those signs. Then again they are Canadian.

[M1A1TC]

Thank you Mr Kettler
I think the new active defence weapons might make AT missiles obsolete (until something else come up)
Now we have lazers that shoot incoming missiles, mortar and RPG rounds. When they are portable enough to be placed on each tank, they will be pretty much invulnurable to AT infantry weapons.
How about this jammer:

The TShU-1-7 optronic jammer ensures effective protection of armoured vehicles against anti-tank guided missiles such as TOW, HOT, MILAN, DRAGON, COBRA, АТ-3, HN-5 etc. The modulated IR flux formed by the TShU-1-7 makes up the jamming noise inside the missile's "track loop" and exploits its guidance system. The hit probability is decreased practically up to zero.

The TShU system consists of two emitters, two power supply and control units, a control panel. It is mounted on tanks like Т-72, Т-80, Т-90 (as a part of the protection unit "ShTORA-1"), as well on other military and civil objects.

[Bigduke6]

JasonC,

Well, what you say is of course the standard professional armor officer line. smile.gif

You may be right of course, but I think the trends are against the tank. All that metal is getting harder and harder to hide, and easier and easier to hit with something cheap, that can kill the tank.

I think the Sinai '73 is illustrative of an initial step in that trend. The balloon went up, and Israeli tank platoons and companies attempted to overrun Egyptian infantry sitting in holes in the sand on the east side of the Suez canal. The Egyptians had a primitive ATGM - Sagger - which they fired in salvoes at individual tanks. The result was Israeli tank platoons and companies cut to bits.

The Israelis to their credit altered their tactics. They began employing combined arms against missiles, mostly meaning APCs and every one else that could see it hosed wherever the launch exhaust came from, the moment there was a launch.

Sagger is a first generation missile, you fly the thing into the target like a model airplane, there is no sighting. So the operator needs his head stuck way up, as he needs to see the missile and the tank he is trying to hit. Which added up to vulnerability to supression.

This combined with increased density of tanks - eventually standard Israeli attack was by combined arms battalion - and APCs changed the balance. Where once it was tanks outnumbered by missile launchers, now there were enough MGs to supress a missile operator firing a missile with a 20 second flight time out to a maximum range of 3000 meters or so. Result: Sagger threat supressed, the tank is not obsolete after all.

But these days, missiles are alot better, and alot more common. They reach out farther than tanks, the best of them are smart enough to zero in on the thin top of the tank, the low end international sighting standard is the gunner keeps a red dot in his sight on the tank, and the top end standard is fire-and-forget. The big launch cloud is already old hat, the better systems don't make much of a cloud at all, can be fired from buildings, take 8-10 not 20 seconds to reach 3000 meters, etc. All of which predicates against supressing the gunner.

More ominously for the tank, no longer is missile technology monopolized by a couple of superpowers. Iran makes 'em, India makes 'em, China makes 'em, Brazil makes 'em. So you get reduced price for missiles and more effort to figure out a workable system, as quite simply there are more companies out there trying to sell missiles.

It is easy enough to blame the Libyan defeat against the Chadians and their Toyotas on Libyan incompetence. But I think it is worth remembering, the Chadian tribesmen have never been models of Prussian military efficiency, or advanced technological skill. Yet somehow, the French managed to hand out enough missiles and basic training to cut a tank-heavy combined arms force to pieces, using technicals operated by substantially illiterate crews. This I think is evidence the missile is alot more accessible, and therefore distributable, than ever before.

The tank, in my view, appears to be improving its defenses at a much slower rate. Reactive armor returned to the tank immunity from most missiles, for less than a decade. If electronic warfare in the naval arena is any guideline, technologies the tank might use to interrupt missile sighting would, logically, become targeted themselves. A laser beam interrupter emits, that emission can and if there is a will, will be targeted.

The day where the smart AT munition was a high speed/low drag weapon operated only by highly-trained dedicated specialists, with access to big nation inventories, is already passing. Infantry squads have them, FOs have them, UAVs have them, light vehicles have them; heck, if you believe the trade literature even engineering obstacles have them these days. Even tanks have them, come to think of it.

I think this is a potentially, a significant change in the weapons balance on the battlfield. Where once the threat to a tank was a direct LOS weapon fired by only a few participants of the battlefield, at least theoretically, almost
anything on the battlefield can be armed with a cost-effective weapon, in sufficient numbers, capable of destroying a tank, at ranges at least as long as the tank is capable of firing back.

The essence of my thinking is not that the missile suddenly has become superior to the tank in all aspects and battles, but rather, a smart missile is becoming cheap enough that it can be fielded in quantity, and theoretically battlefield-dominating-numbers, if the cost of fielding tanks is done away with.

In other words, today for the first time, true missile quantity is possible.

What if a modern force were to forgo tanks and their cannon completely, arm itself to the teeth with missiles and all the ways missiles can be carried these days, and then find itself in the field against a force using tanks as its primary arm of decision? Could a force like that get a high enough density of missiles to make it invulnerable to a conventional tank-heavy force in most combat situations? Could an "early Sinai" situation be systematically replicated, on most modern battlefields?

Like I said in the previous post, I wonder. I am not arguing the tank is dead, for if nothing else bureaucratic inertia will keep tanks around for quite a while.

But just maybe, the situation today is kind of like post-WWI. For about two decades most militaries considered infantry in trenches backed by MGs and artillery as the prime tactic, to which all other tactics and weapons mixes had to yield. The people arguing the tank could break that mold were generally considered nuts and freaks, and unable to learn the lessons from previous wars.

Perhaps now, a basic lesson from previous wars - the tank and a properly-constituted combined arms team is unlikely to face missiles of sufficient lethality and density to make the tank useless - no longer applies.

Originally posted by JasonC:
BigDuke6 - I'm not buying it. Only the dead have seen the end of tanks (lol).

You state that the point of tanks and tank tactics has always been to be invulnerable to enemy AT weapons. But this is simply not the case. On the contrary, periods in which the heaviest tanks have been invulnerable, even just through the front aspect, to the most powerful AT weapons of their enemy, are outlier exceptions in the history of tank warfare.

The point of armor is to neutralize some enemy weapon systems. This reduces the effective enemy force, and sets up a concentration game as to where the remaining highly effective AT weapons will be sited. Armor then exploits its superior mobility and an offensive posture to mass elsewhere. Meanwhile, combined arms coordination is employed to reduce the effectiveness of the AT weapons that remain in the tank heavy sectors, or to neutralize the dense ones even when they are avoided.

That recipe has worked from WW I to now.

When lazy overconfident tankers depart from it, sure they can be stopped. Being stopped one place, at one time, has never been the issue, since it can always happen and frequently does. Breakthroughs only need a couple, the defense needs to hold everywhere.

In practice, armor used correctly has only been countered by counter-massed armor )attritional brawling between reserves, like on like), or in very recent times (post smart weapons) by complete air supremacy. Occasionally in earlier eras it was stopped by massed HE storms, depriving attacking armor of combined arms - but even then the bulk of the actual kills and the overall stop still depended on defending armor.

As for Saggers in 1973, it is directly on point. As soon as the Israelis dropped their 1967-learned arrogance and went back to using combined arms, they were readily mastered. That meant coordinating air and artillery with tank movements, and it meant punching through the line at chosen points only, instead of trying to steamroll it everywhere.

Modern infantry AT has proven itself able to cause occasionally losses and thus puncture any mythical invulnerability of tanks. But tanks have never needed any such invulnerability to be effective. Israel lost 400 tanks in 1973, but it had 1500, and won. In fights since, no one has come close to inflicting losses on that scale against modern western armor, with full air supremacy and combined arms.

The Russians lost something like 150 tanks in Afghanistan in 10 years, and more like 50 in the Chechen war. Losses on such a tiny scale simply do not have military significance. Not fun for the few in them who would rather be invulnerable, no doubt. But tanks continue the mission and clobber whatever is in front of them, and if that is all these lose to infantry AT, it does not remotely stop them.

Chad vs. Libya is another case directly on point. Chad was only able to do as well as it did because the Libyans lacked combined arms sophistication. They were militarily incompetent, that is all. Iraq vs. Iran there was plenty of that to go around, but tanks were quite effective. Same in the Bosnia war.

There are tens of thousands of legacy major weapon systems fielded by regional and first world powers, that can't seriously hurt a modern main battle tank, but can readily stop anything less. There are scads of artillery systems and even more of light arms throughout the world, that are completely ineffective against them, but perfectly effective against dismounted infantry touting expensive missiles.

Just as the invention of a PAK 40 hardly made a T-34 obsolete, the invention of good ATGMs does not make modern MBTs obsolete. It just makes them major weapon systems in a combined arms toolbox, just like Panzer IIIs or T-34s or Shermans were, in their heyday.

[Peter Cairns]

It's all very well to talk about fitting anti ATGM defences on tanks but why bother.

What tanks have is Mobility Protection and Firepower. But if you look at MPF the modern UAV beats it hands down.

A UAV has far greater mobility, it can fly four or five times as fast as the best tank, it isn't constrained by terrain, hills, rivers, woods, towns.

It has far longer range and endurance while using far less fuel. How many M-1's can you get in a C-17... 1, How many UAV's, anything from 10 to 50..... How much fuel does an M-1 use to cover 100 miles compared to a UAV.

In terms of protection it can avoid the vast majority of field weapons and is difficult to detect let alone hit. They have low visibility and signature and can quickly move away from concentrated defences.

As to firepower a networked UAV can direct everything from a Javelin team to a Trident 2, so that's really no contest.

A stand off UAV will soon be able to target for GPS rounds that can hit a moving target without terminal guidance. But it can also direct conventional dumb rounds or guide in aircraft.

£ for £ and indeed lb for lb the UAV is a more efficient way to do it than a tank.

Peter.

[luderbamsen]

OK, so the attraction of the MBT is the three key features: Mobility, armour protection and firepower.

Mobility: A lot of vehicles have similar (or in certain circumstances superior) mobility to the MBT. Moreover, light vehicles have superior strategic mobility (i.e. being air portable).

Armour Protection: MBT's have an awful lot of armor protection. And they can mount slat cages and active protection systems just like any other vehicle, so they still have a huge advantage in terms of protection.

Firepower: The main gun is a powerful and versatile weapon. It can engage a wide range of targets at very long range.

When and if any and/or all of these features no longer offer any significant advantage over the enemy, then MBT's will dissapear. If not before then when superior weapons turn them into burning hulks.

[Secondbrooks]

Originally posted by M1A1TankCommander:
Thank you Mr Kettler
I think the new active defence weapons might make AT missiles obsolete (until something else come up)
Now we have lazers that shoot incoming missiles, mortar and RPG rounds. When they are portable enough to be placed on each tank, they will be pretty much invulnurable to AT infantry weapons.
How about this jammer:

The TShU-1-7 optronic jammer ensures effective protection of armoured vehicles against anti-tank guided missiles such as TOW, HOT, MILAN, DRAGON, COBRA, АТ-3, HN-5 etc. The modulated IR flux formed by the TShU-1-7 makes up the jamming noise inside the missile's "track loop" and exploits its guidance system. The hit probability is decreased practically up to zero.

The TShU system consists of two emitters, two power supply and control units, a control panel. It is mounted on tanks like Т-72, Т-80, Т-90 (as a part of the protection unit "ShTORA-1"), as well on other military and civil objects. I would like too see that untranined ATGM-dumbass who desides to lase target which is using Sthora. I can fire my fine, nice and manly TOW to tank and if tank doesn't see it comming enough early or i'm not so stupid that i actaully laser that tank, then Sthora is dead weight. Infact, if i remember right, Sthora didn't prove itself in tests against Kornet, it couldn't much distract them.

This far (with info i'm having) i'm more conserned about Arena and it's likes which are using radars. Then again i've heard that they still are very-very costly. Some Russian said that they are giving 1.5 times more protection to tank (however that is calculated).

[flamingknives]

Against UAVs:

Mobility - extended endurace, able to get around, but they are slow, and operate in the air, where there is nothing to hide behind.

Protection - a UAV only has the outside layers of the onion - don't be detected, seen, aquired and hit. Only small size protects them from a hit and once hit they are toast.

Firepower - minimal, and slow to react. At best they will have a few missiles, or can call in supporting fires. Not very useful against short-exposure targets.

On top of this, current UAVs are severly limited by bandwidth - you need an operator in the loop to fire, so you need to be streaming video back to a ground station.

AFVs are starting to support defensive aid suites that can engage and destroy incoming missiles - the armour/anti-armour battle isn't over yet.

[dima]

Originally posted by John Kettler:
M1A1TankCommander,

Please Google Valeriy Fofanov. He's a contributor to CMSF, and his site has some marvelous material on the issues you raised. Please also see the pertinent parts of www.warfare.ru (http://www.warfare.ru)

Regards,

John Kettler John, I am curious, where did you get the information that Valeriy Fofanov is a contributor to CMSF?

[Steiner14]

Peter Cairns,
and what happens, if only a few satellites are knocked out?
Hard enough for the US-soldier already, to find the toilet without GPS, but if all heavy weapons are based on extremely high precise satellite navigation, then someone just can switch off the light and they sit in the dark. Not that i would be sad about it, if it hits USrael, :D but it doesn't seem very clever to me, if an army goes that route.
A weapon system must not only be effective under perfect conditions, it should also be robust, fault tolerant and not built on too much functioning sublayers, to be useable at all.

[JasonC]

BigDuke6 - yes missiles are cheaper. They still cost a darn sight more than an AK. Therefore, they will be sparser on the battlefield.

Infantry with lots of missiles and not much else can't deal with firepower arms delivered over the horizon, and still maneuver. They might hold ground, in a sticky goo sort of "don't wade into these tarpits" way. But they aren't going to attack anything. Not under MLRS strikes, bomblets everywhere from everything, and everything automatic hail. You don't have to suppress the things in the 10-20 seconds of flight, you can suppress the whole grid square and go around.

Success at inflicting occasional losses on opponents unwilling to lose anything, or against incompetent opponents, are really at the end of the day not much to write home about. Show up and don't be brain dead, and you can accomplish that. Tech be darned.

As for the range issue, it is way oversold. Only in desert terrain or a few types of open steppe do full missile ranges matter - and even then, at night they don't go the full distance, for sensor tech reasons. Those environments are dominated by smart weapon air power. Most of the world, ranges are terrain limited, not weapon spec limited.

[Bigduke6]

Jason,

All fair comments, but I think it goes double for tanks. If you have the round count to saturate an area with artillery submunitions so that the infantry has no chance, then it should be easier to do the same to a tank. Tanks are easier to find, larger targets, and more limited than infantry in the places they can go.

Of course, infantry can't do much about the over-the-horizon stuff but hide. My point is, these days, if the trends continue, neither can tanks - and tanks are pretty bad at hiding.

I'm not trying to read too much into Sinai and Chad, but I think those examples do demonstrate missiles in sufficient density can indeed stop armor. My arguement is, the tech trends are making missiles cheaper, more accurate, easier to operate - and at the same time the trend for tanks is to make them heavier, more expensive, and arguably easier to find and hit.

That's why I'm suggesting we may be witnessing a land warfare tech change similar to the introduction of the rifled musket. Where once there was relative balance and opportunity for combined arms, because of increased firepower of the infantry the maneuver arm of the combined arms triad is made obsolete.

You are quite right, this may well mean modern infantry given the probable defensive firepower of the other side, armed as it would be with modern sensors and munitions, may be able to do little but hold ground, and absorb casualties inflicted by artillery.

But indeed, for practical purposes that was the basis of tactics from the introduction of the rifled musket, to the advent of the tank.

Sic transit gloria, and all that.

[ January 30, 2008, 12:58 AM: Message edited by: Bigduke6 ]

[cool breeze]

I believe it takes a lot more unguided sub munitions to wipe out or suppress tanks than infantry. And I would argue that tanks are a much smaller target to hit than infantry, because against tanks you need a direct hit, while against people or tires an air burst 155mm does not have to go off within what I call close.

Didnt you guys notice how easy the campaign levels were when you took advantage of the large stashes of 155mm? It simply wrecks infantry even if you only guess around where they are. and One of the javalins costs as much as a ton of those 155 shells.

Tanks will soon regularly sport anti missiles systems that beat almost all missiles. Any nation can use google earth, pre registered artillery aim points, and low tech coms with good procedures to have artillery control on comparable level to USA, and perhaps the anti air defense to protect it. To me tanks/apcs seem very necessary to winning a war. And, as i said, I have a tech that makes this more true faster, maybe I use it. Any wars I can stop by making missile defense available to anyone cheaply and fast?

[Hat Trick]

Originally posted by cool breeze:

Tanks will soon regularly sport anti missiles systems that beat almost all missiles. Is this really true? I know that some systems are under development, but the history of anti-missle systems does not provide great confidence in the effectiveness of future systems.

[SgtMuhammed]

It's the old cycle. Attack defeats defense which improves to defeat attack. Most change is evolutionary.

Will tanks, as we know them today become obsolete? Sure they will.

Will militaries always need units that can hit hard, manuever, and take punishment? Of course they will. Right now those units are tanks, in the future they may be Heinlein's Mobile Infantry.

Things change and adapt.

[rollingt]

There's another cycle that no-one seems to think about.

Suppose that infantry routinely carried a weapon that could easily defeat tanks. Tanks would become obsolete, right? But then why would the infantry continue to carry that weapon? But if the infantry stopped carrying such a weapon they would be vulnerable to tanks. It's a classic Lotka-Volterra (predator/prey) relationship.

So there will always be a balance between tanks and anti-tank weapons, or high mobility firepower and weapons designed to defend against them. Sure the balance will shift about quite a bit over time, but neither will be eliminated because in a sense each relies on the other.

[MarkEzra]

Originally posted by SgtMuhammed:
It's the old cycle. Attack defeats defense which improves to defeat attack. Most change is evolutionary.

Will tanks, as we know them today become obsolete? Sure they will.

Will militaries always need units that can hit hard, manuever, and take punishment? Of course they will. Right now those units are tanks, in the future they may be Heinlein's Mobile Infantry.

Things change and adapt. Well said Sarge...There is but one Constant...boots on the ground.

[JasonC]

BigDuke6 - I understand the thesis, I don't buy it. The rifle era was not caused by the vulnerability of cavalry to infantry fire, it was caused by infantry fire having the same range and as great effectiveness, for less investment and slowness, as artillery of the era. As soon as artillery improved to steel breachloaders with modern recoil systems, infantry ceased to be the dominant arm.

Tanks do not succeed because they beat infantry, but because they beat artillery and artillery beats infantry. They beat artillery simply by not being nearly as vulnerable to unaimed, area fire effects. Artillery (and air, also using mostly unaimed HE) was the dominant killer from WW I through Nam at least.

Tanks can concentrate in the presence of enemy artillery, infantry cannot. Infantry can survive under artillery only by going stationary in an operational sense, digging deep, and staying sparse. But in those deployments it has no offensive potential whatever.

Better missiles are not going to change that logic. Much better smart, over the horizon artillery weapons might do so. But they certainly haven't yet. The theoretical ability, in things like smart 120mm mortar HEAT, has existed for some time. But it has not seemed effective enough to actually be fielded by anybody. Few powers can remotely contemplate spending 50000 to 100000 per shell, when indirect weapons regularly consume 1000-2000 rounds apiece over their operational lives.

Those who can afford it have invested in even more expensive air power instead. That leads to an escalation chain certainly, but not one dominated by infantry and its modernized missile-"rifles".

Infantry has remained a war winning arm only by being adapted to protracted warfare strategies in which offensive maneuver is not important to achieving the strategic outcome. In practice, that means political limits on capital intense powers, and societal attrition processes (directed at civilians and force mobilization) for others. None of which relies on missiles. Perhaps they will help to make low intensity warfare more expensive and so fit such strategies. But this is quite a different argument than "missiles will make infantry tactically dominant and replace combined arms with a single arm".

Infantry still has no effective counter to improving artillery weapons, besides disperse and go stationary. What it would take to make it single-dominant again, is active anti-round systems that beat firepower arms - not antitank systems. And if those succeeded they would probably work just as well against AT missiles.

I don't think they are going to. For the best in the world maybe, not for most militaries.

A much more plausible version of your thesis would require smart over the horizon firepower to become the single dominant arm, reducing all maneuver forces to the role of forward observers - and targets. But there will then be little point in having those FOs remain human infantry instead of distributed automated sensors. That ends in the dominance of air power and the air superiority mission enabling over the horizon strikes at will, not in the dominance of missile equipped "snake eaters".

That could happen, but I do not actually expect it. It is not imminent, because the economics of it are too daunting and cheaper strategies are possible. See above in re protracted warfare, also just counter-civilian and mobilization targeting.

The harder it gets to find every distributed automated sensor the less sense it will make to stay "counter-force" instead of going "counter-value". The richest countries might wish everyone stayed in that mode of warfare, but the capital poor side will find it much more expedient to abandon that high road for the low one.

In the meantime, combined arms is still with us and I expect it to remain so. The main vulnerabilities of the first world armies, meanwhile, are not technical or missile based, but strategy based. They just do not prepare for or specialize in protracted warfare or mobilization or counter-value strategies.

That, and not excess armor, is what leaves them somewhat muscle-bound but hamfisted. Armor remains remarkably useful whenever it is actually used.

[ January 30, 2008, 04:58 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[Adam]

BD6 I don't know where you're getting the idea that Saggers cut Isreali tank companies to bits. They could hardly hit anything and most of the Isreali losses occured when they came into close range with Egyptian infantry due to RPG fire. The lesson to draw from that infantry were needed more closely and aggressively with the tanks, for one, and for two, tank charges are stupid. There was never any indication that ATGMs, AT-3s no less, were making tanks obsolete, it was just a bit of media fluff afaik.

AT-14/MBT is not even Pak40/Sherman, it is hard to see how ATGMs are making the tank obsolete. Maybe in the near future with super-sonic atgms the armor will not be useful for skirmishing anymore though.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

If hyper velocity kinetic energy weapons ever become mobile, then armor will mean nothing. Tanks will be around until that happens.

If it ever does...

[John Kettler]

dima,

Oops! It appears I conflated two separate items and came up with the wrong answer. Valera Potapov (www.battlefield.ru) is a named contributor to CMBB. ISTR, though, I posted or E-mailed BFC stating Vasily Fofanov was a key guy to talk to about modern Russian tanks, gun performance, and tank defensive systems (Shtora, Arena, Kontakt-5, etc.). Must learn to keep my Vasilys and Valeras straight!

Regards,

John Kettler

[JasonC]

Verg - well, what's "mobile"? Humvee mounts of weapons the size of a TOW, that hit as hard as a tank main gun round, are perfectly feasible. Not cheap though. A tank round will be a much cheaper way to get 5 to 10 megajoule energies for a long time yet.

It is interesting that the developments since WW II have all been toward more efficient penetrators from materials and thin rods, and not toward higher overall energies. The Russian 122mm long of late WW II already had 7.5 megajoules of muzzle energy, more than you get with a modern long rod penetrator (order of 6 megajoules). The latter is just packing that into a smaller cross section.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

In this case, mobile would mean that something like an electromagnetic projectile accelerator and its power supply would be able to be mounted on a vehicle. Admittedly, this is probably quite far off, which is why I agree that armor will be useful for the foreseeable future.

A weapon of this type, would fire a dirt cheap 20-30mm projectile at velocities of 5000 to 10000 m/sec. There is no armor that will protect against that. Thus, assuming that becomes possible somewhere down the road, it will be the end of seriously armored vehicles.

[YankeeDog]

Originally posted by Vergeltungswaffe:
In this case, mobile would mean that something like an electromagnetic projectile accelerator and its power supply would be able to be mounted on a vehicle. Admittedly, this is probably quite far off, which is why I agree that armor will be useful for the foreseeable future.

A weapon of this type, would fire a dirt cheap 20-30mm projectile at velocities of 5000 to 10000 m/sec. There is no armor that will protect against that. Thus, assuming that becomes possible somewhere down the road, it will be the end of seriously armored vehicles. Unless, of course, there's some future paradigm shift in armor technology that is able to defeat such a projectile. For one, if something can theoretically be magnetically accellerated to Hypervelocity relatively cheaply and easily, then it should also be theoretically possble to magnetically decellerate such a projectile -- one of the interesting things about magnetic accelerators is that the don't necessarily require chambers and barrels like a conventional pressure gun does -- i.e., at this tech level, Star Trek-like "energy shields" are certainly theoretically possible.

But this is all wild speculation. I agree that this is too many generations of technology into the future to really make any intelligent inference about what military hardware will look like that far into the future.

Cheers,

YD

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Agreed, and you make my point about armor better than I did. Metallurgy is not going to be able to decellerate something with that kind of energy (the US Navy is currently working on emrg's with 32MJ's and 64MJ's :eek: ).

If something like shield technology becomes available, you'd want to mount it on the smallest, lightest, fastest vehicle you could mount effective weaponry on, to maximize mobility and ease of concealment, etc.

[ February 01, 2008, 12:07 PM: Message edited by: Vergeltungswaffe ]

[Adam]

It is interesting that the developments since WW II have all been toward more efficient penetrators from materials and thin rods, and not toward higher overall energies.They'll up penetrators before the guns but the guns are steadily getting more powerful as well. I think they will increase the barrel sizes and powder charges whenever they need to, that is, when the ammo can't be improved to do it. The other direction was the Russian development of barrel-fired ATGMs.

[Adam]

I'm curious how well modern tanks are EM shielded - anyone know?

[YankeeDog]

I don't know about tanks specifically, but in general military electronics are very well EM shielded, and have been for quite some time. Nuclear bombs can create huge EM pulses, so shielding electronics from being disabled by EM pulse was something that both the West and the Soviet Bloc but a lot of thought into during the Cold War.

[Panzer76]

Originally posted by Hat Trick:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by cool breeze:

Tanks will soon regularly sport anti missiles systems that beat almost all missiles. Is this really true? I know that some systems are under development, but the history of anti-missle systems does not provide great confidence in the effectiveness of future systems. </font>[/QUOTE]Is this the same guy who was talking about how his secret idea would neutraløise all ATGMs? If so.. no, its not true tongue.gif

[JasonC]

Not sure why anyone would put eye pop marks after energies of 32 or 64 megajoules, when we are talking about ship mounted weapons meant to fire 200 miles for ship to shore bombardment. The muzzle energy of a 16 inch shell from a battleship was 360 megajoules, an order of magnitude larger. Then the HE when it goes off adds another 225 megajoules.

And the shell cost $500.

Chemical propellent guns reach very high energies very economically, with quite old tech.

Better range and shorter delivery time might be attractive, and maybe higher average velocity can give higher accuracy (though terminal GPS guidance is just as easy). But none of the futuristic whiz bang ideas is remotely in the same weight class as old fashioned guns, not yet.

Missiles on the other hand can exceed the range and accuracy and equal the hitting power of tube guns. But they cost 2-3 orders of magnitude more per shot.

[FAI]

Originally posted by Vergeltungswaffe:
Agreed, and you make my point about armor better than I did. Metallurgy is not going to be able to decellerate something with that kind of energy (the US Navy is currently working on emrg's with 32mJ's and 64mJ's :eek: ).

If something like shield technology becomes available, you'd want to mount it on the smallest, lightest, fastest vehicle you could mount effective weaponry on, to maximize mobility and ease of concealment, etc. Multi-layered ultra-thin auto-replacing ERA?

[FAI]

dp

[undead reindeer cavalry]

how does a primarily infantry force defeat a primarily armored offensive?

not by destroying the armored force but by frustrating the breakthru attempts of enemy forward echelons by channeling and disorganizing it. you aren't even really trying to win the battle, you are just making the offensive so slow on tactical level that its operational execution becomes broken.

as long as the armored force can't bring the full body of its forces into the battle it is an emperor without clothes. the first echelon can't exploit as long as a good operational level penetration isn't likely, due to its extreme dependancy on logistical services of the rear echelons. the main body of the force can not join the battle as long as the first echelon is in a state of disarray, blocking its path, not offering a good highway thru enemy lines.

you accomplish the situation with classical tools, such as correct evaluation of enemy plans and heavily prepared defences laid in depth. mines, AT ditches, fortified strongpoints, massed artillery and rocket fires etc.

the special function offered by the ATGMs is their ability to keep enemy recon at bay without revealing anything meaningful about the defences. they force the enemy to commit forces in considerable strength and more importantly commit them mostly blind.

the plan is not as much to destroy enemy armored force as it is to simply disorganize and slow it down. the eventual enemy armored breakthru will not be eliminated by passive ATGM nets but by defender's own armored forces so far kept patiently in reserve waiting for the right moment to be committed.

[cool breeze]

Panzer76,
There are a bunch of over 90 percent effective systems in development. I wasn't taking about mine because as I explained I plan on taking mine to my grave. Arena works on long rod penetrators too, so speed alone doesn't get through the current systems. They need to start packing missiles with counter measures like evasion stealth and/or decoys to beat the current systems. Mine should work on them too If I change my mind and build it.

[ February 01, 2008, 10:54 AM: Message edited by: cool breeze ]

[flamingknives]

Err, how does Arena work on long-rod penetrators?

[YankeeDog]

AFAIK, the current iteration of Arena can't stop APFSDS. There are protoype improvements that would add this functionality and supposedly aren't to far away from full production, though.

Once you get past the technical challenge of the extremely short detection and response time needed to intercept APFSDS, you don't need to hit it with much to seriously reduce its penetration ability -- even a bit of yaw or shear on the projectile tends to make it break up.

Cheers,

YD

[cool breeze]

bends them and makes em wobble by hitting em hard on the side

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Originally posted by JasonC:
Not sure why anyone would put eye pop marks after energies of 32 or 64 megajoules, when we are talking about ship mounted weapons meant to fire 200 miles for ship to shore bombardment. The muzzle energy of a 16 inch shell from a battleship was 360 megajoules, an order of magnitude larger. Then the HE when it goes off adds another 225 megajoules.

And the shell cost $500.

Eye pop's because a weapon that will likely be in service in the 2020's is replacing the standard 5" deck gun and is roughly the same size, thus not impossible to imagine something along those lines being vehicle-mounted. Not talking about battleship sized weapons.

German tankers getting hit by the 7.5MJ's of a 122mm round, as you referenced earlier, were often killed or incapacitated even without projectile penetration.

So....getting hit by 32MJ's or more, even in the near future's most heavily armored vehicles would suck for the occupants.

[ February 01, 2008, 12:08 PM: Message edited by: Vergeltungswaffe ]

[flamingknives]

Capital M for Mega-, lower case for milli-, people.

It keeps looking like people are being impressed by energy equivalent of a tin of beans on a coffee table.

Cool Breeze - with what? It deals with ATGMs using fragments. That's not going to do too much against a long-rod. You need lots of force to deflect a heavy object quickly enough to have an effect.

[cool breeze]

I thought the directed shrapnel blast to the side of the rod was enough to destabilize the long rod so it broke on impact. Like how arrows don't split arrows because they wobble too much. Sounds like YankeeDog is saying it wont, so I dont know, But I remember reading an add that talked about limited but significant effect on long rod penetrators. I know it very not directly relevant, but reminds me of how even a light slap/tap deflects most of the hardest of blows in martial arts. Oh, and just being funny ;) doesnt a can of beans on a coffee table of many many M joules of energy already, if you knew how to get it out. sure feels like it sometimes smile.gif

[ February 01, 2008, 12:37 PM: Message edited by: cool breeze ]

[YankeeDog]

Everything I have read thus far says that the current iteration of Arena is not capable of intercepting something as fast as an APFSDS round. From what I understand, theorectically, a relatively light side impact will indeed destablize the flechette. It's getting that side impact that's the hard part.

But like I said, apparently there are prototype systems out there that do a much better job of this.

[MikeyD]

My concern about Arena is what's the electronic footprint? How much energy does it give off doing threat detection? I imagine the opponent would be able to count and locate all Arena protected vehicles from miles away. Remids me of the Star Trek TV show where the Enterprise was always picking up the 'cloaking signature' of a Klingon ship. Sorta defeats the purpose if it broadcasts it presence.

Another thought. The driver sticks his head out to drive. Does Trophy microwave it to a nice golden brown? :rolleyes:

[YankeeDog]

Indeed. I've wondered about that myself, Especially since the US currently has a prototype terminal guidance round for the M1's 120mm cannon with a range of 10km. . . active defense isn't much good if you're constantly radiating energy that the enemy can detect and use to bring waves of guided rounds down on your head, overwhelming the active defense system.

In any first world vs. first world conflict, You'd end up with a situation not unlike Active Sonar on subs -- tankers would wait until the last possible second before activating the Active Defense system, to avoid revealing their location prematurely. Of course, this would also dramatically reduce the effectiveness of said active defense. . .

Cheers,

YD

[M1A1TC]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

Another thought. The driver sticks his head out to drive. Does Trophy microwave it to a nice golden brown? :rolleyes: Drivers close the hatch and use periscopes most of the time, especially in battle.
The only time I drove with open hatch was on a highway in Korea, and in garrison

[Sergei]

I was digging around and this Merkava-wannabe aroused my interest.

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2007/0708/a_hizbollah_museum_0815.jpg

Yes, from a very quick glance at the magazine photo, the barrel is only about half length for starters.

Hmm, the barrel looks the right length to me. The barrel of a Merkava IV barely extends beyond the hull front, and the extruding part of gun is shorter than the turret length.

http://www.army-technology.com/projects/merkava4/images/merkava4_1.jpg

Size of the whole thing is hard to establish because the people are not right next to it, but it doesn't look wrong.

It could be a Hollywood type copy of the thing, but I wouldn't find it incredible if some Merkava hulk was left behind, because the terrain in the area of operations was not something where towing 65 tons of scrap metal was going to be a piece of cake. That wouldn't explain how the Hezbollah got it to Beirut. Maybe they just had more time and motivation for that kind of thing. It's also simpler when the battle is over.

The best thing of course would be if one of us went there and took some better photos. Anyone for a holiday?

[John Kettler]

Here's the link to Vasiliy Fofanov's Modern Russian Armour Page, where you can read (under Equipment in the left frame) about Kontakt V, Shtora-1, Arena, Drozhd, etc.

http://russianarmor.info/

Regards,

John Kettler

[MikeyD]

"Abrams armor is good enough - it doesnt need ERA"

You didn't notice the ERA skirts on the Abrams TUSK recently introduced to the game? :)


"Best tank" has lot of variables. Not just warfighting but reliability, deployability, maintainability, etc.,tc. Abrams turbine engine lowers it 'overall score' in that regard. Burning as much fuel sitting at idle as at full speed. There have been attempts for two decades to give Abrams a diesel engine but the engine plant was in a powerful senator's district - so much for that new engine. And let's not forget 3rd world needs. If you're talking a war between central American countries Abrams would be useless. Utterly unmaintainable by armies of that scale. Plus there many not be any bridges in the region to take the weight. In some circumstances "good" is better than "best".

[Sergei]

You didn't notice the ERA skirts on the Abrams TUSK recently introduced to the game? :)

The thread is from January-February, so the question is slightly anachronistic. ;)

At the end of the day, a tank is never too well protected, too powerfully armed or too mobile. At least when you're inside it.

In some circumstances "good" is better than "best".
Aye, all systems have their plusses and bonuses. For example, a Panther is fast and powerful but sides are weakly protected, while Italian M13/40 is strong in... hmm, never mind.

But it's also true that in war the second best is the worst possible...