Plenty of videos of tanks getting destroyed by ATGM and drones.
Indeed but there have been ATGMs and air power threats to tanks for the last 60-70 years and people have been claiming the tank is dead for most of that time, but there has not really been anything that can replace the tank and the tanks have only gotten better.
Numbers of video or even testimony by tankers about tank duels --> one or two.
The job of the tank is to take on any enemy armoured vehicles in combat... enemy tanks are their number one priority but in normal combat they can often serve as direct fire artillery and engage bunkers and firing positions too... and of course if they break through enemy lines then all sorts of light vehicles would be engaged by tanks and BMPs operating with them.... this is not new.
Even in Gulf war it was bradleys that mostly destroyed iraqi tanks with atgm.
Not totally true... Bradleys got in close with the enemy T-54/55s and used their 25mm cannon against the enemy tank sides... which they could do while moving. To fire their missiles they had to sit stationary for half a minute to guide their missiles which is not a good idea if the enemy has a 100mm plus calibre gun firing APFSDS rounds back at you...
Most Iraqi tanks were dug in and destroyed in place by B-52s in their fixed positions which stood out from the air and were easy to engage.
A lot of other armoured vehicles were destroyed when they were retreating from Kuwaite, also by air power.
Tank vs tank is not gonna happen anymore, only few such event can happen.
Every few years someone says that, but you need a heavily armoured vehicle that can protect your troop carriers with a gun powerful enough to defeat any other vehicle on the battlefield.
Missile armed tanks have been tried and put into service but always ended up as terrible failures... except the Soviet and Russian concept of adding missiles fired down gun tubes to their armory... the French 142mm gun didn't get into service... lucky for them, and the US 152mm armed vehicles were horrible wastes of money and time... a version of the M60 and the Sheridan which were bloody awful... it turned out an M113 with TOW missiles was much more efficient and effective when a vehicle in that role was required... not to mention cheaper.
Peer vs Peer conflict does not happen often but when it does there will be tank on tank engagement situations...
The Ukraine recieved over 20K each of Javelins and Stingers... and the return has been pathetic... and that is with tanks not fitted with APS systems, and not the latest and bestest tanks and vehicle either.
The vast majority of ATGMs over the years have been used against things other than MBTs most of the time... in the Falklands war a few LAW M72s were used against amphibious landing vehicles of the Argentine navy but the Milan ATGMs they took with them spent most of their time engaging MG and snipers positions and bunkers. RPGs are better suited but many lack the range to really reach out and touch from a safe distance...
These days sniper rifles can be effective to over 2km...
Plenty of new missiles in production with longer ranges to destroy enemy from far away.
But none have so far actually proven themselves in that role... it is like AAMs... you can have a missile with a kill range of 300km but is it effective?
The current push into the Ukraine is largely airpower and artillery but tanks also form an important part of the force... equally you need troops too and they need to travel in armoured vehicles too so they will need tanks to protect them...
When operational APS will be defeated by new solutions.
Really because we were told Javelin was a super missile and would wipe the floor with enemy armour and that in hit and run attacks there is nothing better... and why don't the Russians have any of those type weapons.
HATO has no solution for their older armour, but you think improved designs with jammers and laser dazzlers and APS systems would be just as easy to deal with?
When western strong boys talk about western armour and its experience in war they take pride in vehicles being hit dozens of times and continuing to operate... there are situations in Chechnia and Syria and other places where Russian vehicles manage the same but you think they are obsolete and useless... would they be safer in a Tigr?
Ukrainian Javelin and nlaws sucks.
The core of western anti armour weapons has been sent to the Ukraine including Panzerfaust 3s and other so called high tech stuff and it has all failed too... against Russian forces not equipped with their latest stuff...
HATO says their stuff is better and that the Russians are poorly trained and don't know what they are doing... gotta say it seems they are wrong on all three counts... not just Syria but now the Ukraine as evidence.
But overall Russia has the advantage in recco so they have no time to use them because Russia use, not its tanks to attack them, but long range weapons like drones, artillery and air force.
Orc recon likely includes western professionals... they are also trying to be a guerilla force so hiding as the enemy forces move past and then popping out to engage their supply forces would be the name of the game... but they suck at that too because not only are Russian forces being supplied but they are also supplying food and medicine to the civilians in the areas they pass through.
Tanks aren't outdated or shitty but their work will be to survive long range weapons and attack lighter forces. Tanks main enemy today are missiles. Not other tanks.
The APFSDS round from a tank is the one few thing most APSs can't deal with, which makes tanks necessary for both sides.
Most tank kills in the Gulf War was by engineers planting explosives in empty tanks.
Isos has a point.
The Gulf War was not a peer to peer conflict... if you look at small arms and aircraft and ships and weapon systems the Falklands war was about teh closest the west has come to a peer to peer conflict but even then the training of the Argentine troops was more like WWII than modern training to kill your enemy and the effects on the battlefield showed that.
I would say the best asset the Brits had was the SSN which prevented the Argentines using their Navy properly... and of course a lack of fighter aircraft with medium range AAMs for either side which would have been a real influence even if most missed.
The cold war scenario with 500+ tanks on one side and 500+ tanks on the other meeting on some empty field is unlikely to happen anymore.
That is not important though... and not what he is saying... he is saying tank on tank combat wont take place because drones and anti tank missiles and artillery and air power will stop that from happening... but this conflict it has already happened, despite both sides starting the conflict with excellent anti armour weaponry.
In a peer-to-peer scenario there will be to many long-range precision weapons, aerial vehicles and so on on both sides, in the end you will get a handful of tanks
from both sides getting close enough to each other to fight.
It depends on the peer... in this case both sides had dangerous air defence systems which effect the effectiveness of air power including drones.
It would be fair to say that Ukrainian drones despite being unlimited because they are supplied by the west don't seem to be lasting very long leading to high attrition and not so great efficiency... certainly not as good as they might achieve against an opponent with less capable air defence.
A replay of Kosovo with the Serbs using drones extensively wouldn't matter much against HATO because HATO were such pussies they didn't even send in ground troops till the Serbs promised not to shoot them... but would be catastrophic against the KLA, and HATO aircraft operating at 8km altitude would be powerless to interfere.
Stingers and Mistrals simple don't cut it against small drones... the version of Starstreak would be totally useless too because the chance of three darts hitting a small drone is very low.
Even the T-14 will use guided missiles or shells most of the time from beyond visual range to kill enemy vehicles.
In a desert or flat open plains, but most of the time there will either be cover or concealment or both... and where there isn't they can always launch smoke...
In the end most tank battles will be very small compared to the cold war fantasies. 404 is an example of this. 2 or 3 tanks fighting each other is barely a footnote.
Large scale tank battles are unlikely, but for every weapon there is a counter weapon... how can your artllery be killing tanks when their artllery is killing your artillery? Their airpower killing your air power...
How will you move your forces around the battlefield are they going to be walking?
If they are travelling in armoured vehicles then you will use tanks to operate with those armoured vehicles to defend against enemy armoured vehicles...
Maybe, maybe not. The thing hasn't even entered service, we ought to temper our expectations a bit.
Exactly... after Desert Storm the Abrams got a reputation amongst its fanboys of being and all seeing all shooting all killing invincible tank... its thermals its gun its powerful engine... it could see everything and shoot everything and drive anywhere... but it turns out they blow up too... the tank gun can only point in one direction at a time and when it is not pointing at you the turret bustle ammo storage is exposed to enemy fire.... when it first went into action in Iraq and Kuwaite the enemy didn't know where to hit it... they learned its weak points soon enough and every tank has those same weak spots too...
Russian planes and artillery are way safer in Ukraine than their tanks that got on daily bases hit by atgm. Russians have so far shared plenty of videos of atgm and drones destroying ukrainian armor. Not a single tank vs tanks shared since the begining. I only remember an ukrainian btr hitting two russian tanks from behind with a 30mm gun in a city/village.
We need to wait till this conflict is over and all the information is in before we start changing the way war is fought... videos released to the enemy (the West) are not a good basis for discussion... apart from what do they want us to know works and doesn't work right now... they know the people sending weapons to the Ukraine will be watching these videos closely...
Abrams did almost nothing in gulf war. It was A-10 and Bradleys which had missiles enabling them to hit a long range.
The Bradleys did **** all at long range.... their missiles only reach about 3.5km anyway and from that distance even a T-55 could take a shot at those 3m high monsters with a good chance of a hit.
Once battle started the vehicle churned up the sand in the form of a very fine dust and it was the Bradleys superior thermal imagers that allowed them to spot Iraqi tanks and shoot them with their 25mm cannon to destroy them... there would be no way they would stop in the middle of a battle to launch a TOW, because those things are slow and give away your position and attract enemy fire.
Even in WW2 tank vs tank engagements were rare. You had a couple major tank vs tank engagements in the Soviet Union but that is all. Most tank kills were done with anti-tank guns like the 75nm/85/88mm or 100mm AT guns.
When they were putting T-34s into service they had a choice of two guns... the 76.2mm gun and a high velocity 57mm gun... the 57mm gun had excellent penetration but against lighter armoured vehicle (which were abundant on the battlefield) they tended to punch right through and did not do a lot of damage unless it went through a crewman or ammo or fuel. The 76mm gun had less penetration... much less at short range, but at greater ranges it retained penetration better but to 2km or so the 57mm had better penetration, but it had a much more effective HE round so that is what they went with for both the T-34 and the KV-1.
Personally I thought the KV-1 should have gotten the 57mm gun as a sort of tank destroyer with heavier armour and lower speed but they put the same calibre gun on both tanks... again I would have said double the barrel length on the KVs gun to at least give it better performance...
The point is that a tanks gun is used against a very wide range of targets and it is only the western view of combat that it is a tank vs tank vehicle.
The normal load out for Soviet tanks was for half the ammo to be HE Frag, and of the remaining half they would be split between APFSDS and HEAT rounds with the latter being a dual purpose round for all sorts of targets.
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