Nothing ever posted about this guy has made me want to check him out, so I'll continue not doing that lol
I looked at his videos once, they all have to start with "let's talk about" for some reason. I'm not going to enable that kind of behavior, name your videos
"The end of tanks" has been a common thing for somewhat informed military guys to say for almost a century now. They haven't been right yet. If anything this most recent conflict has shown that the Soviet tank concept was probably the right way to go.
“The end of tanks” has been a common thing for somewhat informed military guys to say for almost a century now
a century
I love the idea that, the day tanks were invented, some armchair general was like "is this the end of tanks?"
I mean Budyonny in 1939 when told to transition to tanks said
"You won't convince me. As soon as war is declared, everyone will shout, "Send for the Cavalry!"
The Soviets put the tanks in the center of their advancing force, with combined arms supporting them from all sides. More medium tanks that can be repaired quickly are better than a few heavy tanks that need specialized service facilities. Bypass towns that don't need to be taken instead of stopping to fight the enemy and giving the rest of their force time to regroup. Assume that the enemy has longer range and better guns than you do, but that that advantage will disappear if you get close enough (that doesn't mean run straight at them completely exposed, but it also means don't stop advancing if you can help it). Soviet doctrine gave junior officers a list of hard and fast rules of thumb and discouraged being too creative, based on the assumption that people aren't at their best mentally when under fire.
This was all based on their experiences fighting the Germans in WW2, and while details were updated over time as technology advanced and data came in from places like Korea and Vietnam about what did and didn't work, the general character never changed.
They weren't fighting against tanks, only apcs. The few times they did fight tanks they got completely fucked.
This. I don't think there were a lot of well equipped tank battalions fighting against ISIS for most of the war.
Smaller and cheaper is better. Your armor being enough to force the enemy to use heavy equipment to deal with it is about the right amount, being immune to heavy stuff doesn't matter if the heavy stuff isn't immune to you.
Western tanks focus on crew survivability to the point its like tankers are supposed to impossible to kill and combat isn't supposed to be at all dangerous to them. Even when that is to the detriment of the rest of the army.
I'm over-simplying and mostly talking about context for people unfamiliar with the topic. If you want the details look at the list of requirements the Soviets have their design bureaus vs the requirements Western countries gave to their contractors. And look at how they have been modernized.
Autonomous vehicles still require a bunch of nearby logistical support. Establishing a mobile base of operations means building a defensive perimeter and mobile artillery is critical in forming that perimeter. Enter the most effective form of mobile artillery in existence to date.
People forget that the origin of the tank was to support infantry pushes on line fortifications. Unless groundworks go out of style (which if Ukraine is any indication it is unlikely) tanks will remain relevant.
That being said, the usage of tanks as urban or rural warfare viechles has always been suspect, and there have generally been better option available to most militaries, be they technicals or APCs.
Unless groundworks go out of style
Half the Ukrainian drone kills I've seen have been on fortified positions, similar to the carnage that Azerbaijan managed to inflict on Armenia with theirs. If any model is being validated in Ukraine it's small semi-autonomous infantry units with lots of handheld anti-vehicle options. Armies need to become insurgencies that blend into the environment, and even then it's only a matter of time until drones with thermal cameras start patrolling the skies above warzones en masse.
That's a great point. But stuff has to be stored and shipped places, and people have to sleep. Groundworks have been all over the place in Ukraine, but normally as the 'last-ditch' defensive line when those small semi-autonomous infantry units eventually get smoked. I'm not saying they don't deliver more per pound, but transforming your entire army to that model is probably not viable if you want to hold ground. We'll see what the take aways are. My real curiosity is on the artillery tactics, though not much seems to have changed there.
The drone-directed artillery is a real step up from anything I've seen in previous wars. Along with consumer-grade drones dropping AT/HE grenades, the observation drones are precisely directing mortars and howitzers in cities. Even the best AA defenses will have to contend with miniaturisation there and I think the CIA made insect-scale ones. When those cheap rounds can be as precise as cruise missiles, big nope.
Oh yeah, the artillery skirmishing is like, civil war wheeling but incredibly rapid. The tactics haven't changed, but the pace at which it is taking place is just so much faster. God, man I am afraid of when that stuff truly reaches scifi hieghts.
I support the decision to send Gundams in to NeoTokyo during teh 2156 uprising.
Synopsis for those who didn’t watch the video:
He’s not claiming that the age of tanks has ended. He says Russian tank failures in Ukraine amount to those tanks being unsupported and therefore irrelevant to end-of-tanks discourse, that that discourse comes more from modern anti-tank weapons, and that the US military will be keeping tanks alive in the future by deploying unmanned tanks
unsupported armour pushes didn't even work in ww2, there's no reason why they would work in modern warfare with man-portable anti vehicular weapons systems. the whole tanks being obsolete thing is unfathomably stupid, of course military hardware looks bad if you misuse it. that's like looking at world war 1 and saying infantry is obsolete because british paedos kept ordering teenagers to charge into machine guns.
Tanks will still have a necessary military role, but have been proven to be vulnerable when unsupported. The age old idea of the tank being present to support the infantry has kinda flopped around. Tanks are still valuable due to the fact that they are mobile artillery pieces that are vital for close support.
seems more like the conflict in ukraine points to close air support from manned aircraft being obsolete rather than tanks
If you look at data from WW II, it looks like CAS never worked well.
the effect of air power against ww2 era ships and armour has always been hugely overstated. rocket attacks against armour had something like a 3% success rate against stationary targets painted white or something like that.
Where can I look at the data? Genuinely curious what sort of data we have WWII tactics.
Look at the sources that the Military History Visualized and Military Aviation History YouTube channels use. Particularly their episodes on the Stuka have good information on this topic.
Once we crack the myomer artificial muscle problem we'll be able to fit out mechs with more armor per ton than conventional ground vehicles. /battletech
my futureposting sci-fi prediction: i think tanks will get shorter, more compact, with autonomous anti-infantry/anti-drone weapons and possibly replacing the main guns with multi-purpose guided missiles (basically like a tiny modern AEGIS ship). possibly with a swarm of both aerial and ground based drones that support and are controlled by a single future "tank". i could also see the crew reduced to maybe 2 or even less, replacing some of the space with reactive armor or other stuff that improves survivability.
treads may disappear soon, not replaced by legs as fucking cool as that would be but maybe by skirted inflatable omni-directional wheels that give increased speed and multi-directional manuvering...basically the closest thing to a "hover tank" we may ever see. the tank becomes more of an urban warfare system less of a cold war era open field engagement platform.The land carrier is a platform I'm worried about. We already have swarming drones that interface with planes. If you modify an APC-size vehicle to house and maintain a drone network, that's an entire city locked down. Drones to triangulate sound and track gunshots, to observe with night and thermal vision, to bomb from the sky and suicide bomb any window/door/roof/vehicle when they detect firing or EM radiation. That's going to be a real Agincourt moment for urban warfare.
RAND corporation writing think pieces on the war crime gap, and how we have to fund our own war crime apparatus to at least twice that of Russia and China
I think infantry-carried anti-drone weaponry will catch up and outperform drones. Rockets are just fundamentally cheaper than drones can be.
For me it all hinges on how good consumer-grade drones become. If I can cheaply make an octocopter that accomplishes an insurgent goal, nothing save bullets or a less effective net gun will be cheaper. The anti-drone tech can be near-perfect but then it's a similar issue as ICBM interception. Only one needs to get through to achieve a disproportionately expensive goal. If the net gun has six barrels I send seven $300 AliExpress/3D printed drones and destroy the $4.5m T-90 tank. If the infantry squad can expect to manually shoot X drones down, I send Y and maybe one of them detonates a hand grenade overhead. Those infantry go somewhere drones can watch to sleep, and when they do whatever expensive defense can be overwhelmed cheaply enough to get one or two through and bomb a barracks. If they can shoot accurately to 1000m vertically, I just need to 3D print fins into whatever I drop and do so from higher.
It's an arms race but it's one built around a mechanic rockets can't cheaply match- precision. Those Azov mortar videos out of Mariupol are terrifying, with them guiding strikes with pinpoint accuracy in congested streets onto vehicles and infantry. If a drone can cheaply strike itself or guide a strike from another cheap weapon like an unguided rocket/mortar, fancy guided rockets won't be able to match the cost-effectiveness and the logistical footprint to supply them will be larger/more vulnerable. Anything that launches a rocket short of a nuclear vessel or a silo is so fuel inefficient that you need those big Russian convoys in the drone/ATGM videos just to keep them moving.
edit: Minus electronic warfare solutions like jamming, but a software problem seems easier and cheaper to overcome than a hardware one. If they can find a way around that then it's only manual interception stopping them.
It's somewhat plausible that anti-drone "rockets" end up physically being some sort of rotary craft, like a suicide drone that's incapable of turning around. But a thing that only goes in one direction, one time, is still going to be cheaper and simpler than something that has to be able to slow itself down and reverse course. That's why I'm fairly confident that anti-drone weaponry ends up cheaper than drones in the long run, even if it's fairly high-tech stuff. It's also why I think this is different from ICBM interception (which I've posted a few times about being mostly impossible), since in this case you're intercepting something slower with something faster (and all the speeds are less than ICBMs).
Minus electronic warfare solutions like jamming, but a software problem seems easier and cheaper to overcome than a hardware one
There's only so much you can do with software. If the parts of the EM spectrum you have antennae for are full of enough noise, there's nothing for software to do. But I don't actually know how much noise it's plausible to put out in a war setting.
