Tanks but no thanks

Advanced Western tanks are on their way to Ukraine – where advanced Russian tanks have become self-propelled coffins

History’s largest tank battle – I’ve avoided “greatest” tank battle – occurred at Kursk in 1943, as Nazis and Reds warred over the Donbas. It’s more than passing weird Ukraine and Russia now fight with armor in the same area. Russia won the tank battles of 1943 and is losing the tank battles in today’s Donbas. “The Ukrainians are wrecking [Russian tanks] as fast as they arrive,” David Axe reports. Francesca Ebel reports Moscow is taking Stalin-era tanks out of mothballs to ship to the front, where they will become fodder cannons. (Sorry couldn’t resist.)

Even as Ukraine smashes Russian armor, Kyiv beseeched NATO for advanced tanks, the German Leopard and America’s cost-no-object M1 Abrams. The latter request went straight to the top at the White House. Tanks and Ukraine have been on the front pages regularly this month.

Photo by Stephanie LeBlanc on Unsplash

Leopards are on their way ton Ukraine. (All Predictions Wrong will use simplified language, rather than “Leopard 2A6” and such; there are as many tank models as trim levels for cars.) Joe Biden promised to send some Abrams, a bespoke edition that wouldn’t be ready till 2024. A few days ago, the United States moved the timetable up to sometime this fall.

What’s a “bespoke tank?” See below.

That Russian tank columns are being obliterated by Ukrainian riflemen means Ukrainians are heroic. It means incompetent Russian brass is callously wasting lives of its own soldiers. And it might also mean tanks are outdated.

“Historically, top leadership of military organizations has not abandoned obsolete prestige weapons until compelled to do so by a calamity,” Stephen Wrage, a professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, told me for my 2021 book The Blue Age.

Wrage, who studies naval power, was speaking of battleships, which the British, Japanese and German military establishments clung to long past their sell-by date. But his comment may also apply to tanks, the dreadnaughts of terrain. Especially, to the most heavily armored gun carriages – the Leopard, Abrams or Russian T-72 and T-90 – a class analysts now call “main battle tanks.”

Fighting in Ukraine is showing that fairly new super-accurate light antitank rockets make the main battle tank a sitting duck. Hundreds of Russian tanks have been burned to carcasses by the American-supplied Javelin (Kyiv’s soldiers joke about praying to Saint Javelin), by the similar Swedish-built NLAW and by Ukraine’s homegrown Stuhna.

Light antitank rockets have been around for years: the latest represent perfection of an engineering form. New ones guide themselves – fire-and-forget to soldiers – so whoever launches the rocket can take cover before the other side shoots back. Sensors are passive and can’t be jammed; new rockets have no guidewires to cut. Their shaped-charge warheads cause a liquid metal “spall” that goes through armor to burn people and detonate explosives.

Is there a more horrific way to die than splattered by liquid metal? That’s the fate to which the tyrant Putin is sending Russia’s good Christian boys.

Javelin and other new-tech antitank rockets don’t hit the sides of tanks, where armor is thick. As the rockets approach they pop up, impacting the top of the turret, a tank’s weakest link.

Thirty years ago when the Abrams proved devastating in battle, Moscow put a huge investment into its T-90 tank, which is low to the ground. Getting low makes the T-90 hard to hit with a straight-line cannon like the Abrams uses – but vulnerable to Javelin and NLAW, since these rockets get atop a low silhouette. In Ukraine dozens of T-90s have “gone jack in the box,” turrets blown upward by an NLAW or Javelin breaking the top and igniting cannon rounds in the tank’s magazine. Good Christian boys from Russia burn to death screaming, their mothers lied to by Putin about the boys’ demise.

Javelin and NLAW are light enough for soldiers to carry, relatively easy to hide. Ukrainians have been laying traps for incompetent Russian officers, luring armor down a seemingly clear road (tanks rarely crash through the forest like in the movies, they use pavement) with Javelin units concealed. Once the Russians take the bait and drive down the road, gunners destroy tank at the rear of the column, so those at the front cannot retreat, then plink the rest one-by-one.

Early during the invasion, Russia sent tanks into Ukraine’s cities. Antitank  gunners had plenty of places to hide, while tanks were exposed and obvious. Urban tank battles were routs, favoring defenders.

The latest rockets cost far less than the tanks they destroy. Will lessons from Ukraine cause militaries of many nations to view the main battle tank as passe?

Three years ago the United States Marines began mothballing Abrams tanks; many have been transferred to Poland. Marine analysts felt three years ago that main battle tanks had become too vulnerable to contemporary portable missiles, which is just what experience in Ukraine is showing. The Marines are replacing the 70-ton Abrams with light armor and smallish battlefield missiles. Probably the United States, Germany and other well-run militaries will never again build heavy armor similar to Abrams and Leopard.

Though “main battle” tanks are aging out in martial terms, Ukraine might be able to put the Abrams to good use against the bungling Russians. If instead Abrams sent to Ukraine go jack-in-the-box from hits by new Russian antitank rockets, the result could be embarrassment for the United States – and political pressure to escalate.

We can hope that if it takes till Halloween to provide Ukraine with the Abrams, the conflict will have ended by that time.

The challenge isn’t just training Ukraine crews. The White House said it will send 31 M-1 Abrams tanks and eight M-88s (both numbers may be in flux). The M-88 is an armored support vehicle that helps keep the complicated Abrams running. An M-88 itself weighs 50 tons, and M-1s don’t travel far without them.

The armor contingent the White House promised Ukraine weights about 2,500 tons just for vehicles. That’s before crew, fuel, ammo and spare parts. The whole package will weigh about as much as a modern United States Navy guided missile frigate – and will have to be moved stealthily to the Poland-Ukraine border, then taken by train to the FEBA (Forward Edge of Battle, army lingo for the front).  Imagine the logistics of moving several thousand tons into wherever you live – then add doing this while people are shooting back.

Plus there’s the fuel problem. The Abrams runs on jet fuel. Ukraine will need to build up a jet fuel battlefield infrastructure, no small task.

When Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, the Wehrmacht possessed advanced tanks that were the M-1 of the day, and discovered as winter began that their high-performance gasoline engines would not start in Russian cold, while diesel powered Soviet tanks ran fine. German engineers have not forgotten this lesson. Their Leopard advanced tank runs on diesel, so will be more practical in Ukraine.

In 1991 in Kuwait then 2003 in Iraq, Abrams performance was phenomenally good – huge kill ratio over Chinese- and Russian-built tanks. But Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom offered ideal conditions for tank fighting: flat, smooth terrain with long sightlines and no place to hide “dragons teeth” and antitank gunners.

Heavy armor does not do well in agricultural areas, where sightlines are poor, or urban areas, where tanks are exposed but gunners have lots of hiding places. Most of Ukraine either is farmland or urban. Midweight armor (like the wheeled light tank the French are sending), air-to-ground munitions or man-portable rockets are what work in crowded conditions such as Ukraine. The Abrams may simply not be useful in Ukraine’s battlespace, again putting pressure on the United States to escalate.

Promising to send the Abrams shows American resolve. If resolve brings Moscow to a truce conference, it was money well spent. But a lot could go wrong.

Bonus: The “Bespoke” Tank. The Abrams has a unique form of armor involving depleted uranium, which cannot explode, but is among the most dense substances known. Though 40 years old, the recipe for depleted uranium hull plating is considered a military secret by the United States. Before the surplus M1s were sent to Poland, the depleted uranium was removed and replaced by tungsten, which is nearly as hardened.

Whatever Abrams tanks go to Ukraine will have the same armor refitting, plus “situational awareness” add-ons specialized for range-finding and night vision under Ukrainian conditions. Thus a bespoke tank. 

The M1’s top advantage is the ability to fire on other tanks before they are close enough to fire back. Stabilized range-finding on the Abrams is dramatically better than on any Russian armor. So is infrared vision gear. For a generation the United States Army has preferred to fight at night, when its superior optics trump all others. Abrams tanks are more dangerous in the dark than in daylight.

Bonus: Forbes Has A Weapons Reporter So Maybe Capitalists Really Do Love War. David Axe of Forbes, who writes about advanced weapons – quite the beat – has done some of the best coverage of Ukraine-and-tanks questions.

Bonus: Women Admitted to the Gun Club. Carlotta Gall of the New York Times and Francesca Ebel of the Washington Post also are covering this topic well. Gone are the days when only boys report on things that go bang.

The Gun Club is military strategists and independent analysts who follow really big cannon, including this Jules-Verne attempt to fire a satellite into space with a really big gun.