Angry Planet - You're Wrong. Tanks Aren't Done Yet

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

The tank is an iconic weapon of modern war, but the truth is that it’s more than a century old. When we think of tanks we think of the battles of World War II. The Tiger and the Sherman squaring off, the relentless push of the Soviet T-34s into Eastern Europe. Or maybe you think of beige ones driving through the deserts of Iraq, keeping its crew snug and safe.But how safe are you?In Ukraine, Russia is losing many tanks. It’s hard to know how many exactly, and what is wartime propaganda. But, as of this podcast, the OSINT researchers at Oryx have documented a loss of 345 Russian tanks. 155  of which were destroyed.Is the tank no longer an important part of war? Is it as outdated as the cavalry charge in the face of the Maxim gun?Here to answer that question is Nicholas Drummond. Drummond is an Ex-British Army officer, a Defense industry analyst, and an advisor to the House of Commons defense committee. He writes at UKlandpower.com.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. My co-host Jason Fields is stuck on the road at the moment. The tank is an iconic weapon of modern war, but the truth is that it's more than a century old. And when we think of tanks, we think of the battles of World War II, the tiger and the Sherman squaring off the relentless push of the Soviet T-34s into Eastern Europe. Or maybe you think of the beige ones driving through the deserts of Iraq, keeping its crew snug and safe. But how safe is a tank, really?

In Ukraine, Russia is losing many tanks. It's hard to know how many exactly, and what is wartime propaganda and what is the truth. But as of this podcast, the open-source intelligence researchers at OREX have documented a loss of 3455 Russian tanks, 155 of which were destroyed. So is the tank no longer an important part of war? Is it as outdated as the cavalry charge in the face of the Maxim gun? Here to answer the question is Nicholas Drummond. Drummond is an ex-British Army officer, a defense industry analyst, and an advisor to the House of Commons Defense Committee. He also writes at U.K. Land power.com, where he has a really great article answering this question from about a year ago,

but we wanted to have him on to talk about the Ukraine of it all. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Good afternoon, Matthew. Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to have you on the show. So we'd like to get specifics out of the way here at the top of the show,

kind of set the terms of what we're talking about. So what exactly is a tank? You know, there's a lot of armored vehicles with guns on the battlefield. What separates a tank from an APC? So generally armed vehicles can be divided into two categories. Those that carry infantry, which we call protected mobility, and those which provide the infantry with fire support, because they have a gun on top, which is a tank,

but they also take out other vehicles. So this is mobile firepower and protected mobility. Those are the two main categories. There are two further categories, which is self-propelled artillery and engineer vehicles, but they're secondary to the primary purpose of the tank and the infantry carrier. So in modern war, how safe is it to be in a tank? Well, the best way to answer that question is to say, what is the alternative?

Because everybody who says, you know, tanks are obsolete, we shouldn't have, we shouldn't use them. What are they going to go to war in? And, you know, if you look at the Sherman tank from World War II, everyone said, you know, it was a, they called it the ransom because it caught fire so easily. But in actual fact, American tank crews suffered one in 20 casualties, whereas infantry was one in five. So anybody who traveled in a tank, yes, they could meet a nasty end, but a much lesser chance of dying in a tank than dying as an infantryman. So tanks do offer a very high degree of protection. Why do you think part of the narrative of this war has been Russia is losing so many tanks?

you know, tank warfare is over. Why is that kind of this big headline piece when people talk about this conflict? When you have a conflict like this, the first thing to say is that people just not used to seeing high-end warfare being fought on a day-to-day basis. And they're just not used to seeing the destruction, but is common to that level of high-end warfare. And there's also something very disconcerting about seeing a 60-ton vehicle. upended and eviscerated like it was a sardine can. So people begin to ask these questions. And of course, the media want to have stories.

They need to keep the whole thing going. So they're trying to encourage this debate. But fundamentally, the issue with Ukraine is that we've seen a really bad strategy, poorly executed, bad tactics, bad leadership, and an inability to change that plan when it was obviously it wasn't working. And if you use bad tactics, tactics, you're going to get killed. That's, you know, a law of modern warfare, a law of all warfare, actually. Can you talk a little bit about what this plan was? You know, we've heard a lot

about how this isn't going to plan and that this was kind of like an armored blitzkrieg strategy that they attempted to employ. What exactly happened here? So, Russia's narrative was that the government in Ukraine were a bunch of Nazis and therefore they needed to be replaced. And the belief was that the Russian forces would be welcomed like liberating troops, setting free the Ukrainians from this yoke of oppression. But really, that was not how it was at all. And obviously, we know the Ukrainians were in a very different light. So when the Russians attacked, they thought, yeah, this is going to be easy and straightforward.

and they did not bother to use proper combined maneuver tactics. They just advanced in procession, down roads, head out of the top of the vehicle, and expected everything would be okay. And instead of being greeted like welcoming, you know, like liberating heroes, they were attacked with a volley of anti-tank missiles. And so that was a fundamental mistake they made. But secondly, you know, Blitzkrieg is about advancing on a single line of advance, a massive force along one main line of approach.

The Russians didn't do that. They advanced 20 different lines of approach. So they were very diluted. There was no main effort even before they got into it. And so they made the whole process of logistical support. very difficult and they couldn't respond to what the Ukrainians were doing because this was an infantry battle for them. They were dug in, they were defending, and they were very effective in taking on that unprotected armor. Right. And it's another kind of piece of the story that

we're hearing a lot is about these loitering munitions that the Ukrainians are using. What exactly are you loitering munitions and how have they changed things for tanks? So a loitering munition is essentially the convergence of two technologies. One is a drone and the other is an anti-tank missile. And what it enables is two things. First of all, it gives you eyes and ears above the battlefield. So if you have lots of these flying around, they can literally go and search for targets. And even when they don't find targets, they tell you what's going on down below.

And that's incredibly useful. And secondly, when they then find a target, they can then prosecute that target and then obliterate. themselves in the defeat of that target. And that's very handy. And the really useful thing about these things is that they have a long dwell time. So some, you know, it can be several hours in the air and even the larger drones. It's 10 or 12 hours, which is very useful. It's flying around, seeing what's going on. And of course, the operators are located well back out of the line of fire. So they're not exposed to any danger themselves. So it's a win-win. Right. And that's kind of of what separates it from, say, the anti-tank weapons of World War II, right? The ability to, for the

operators stay well back from the actual fighting and the fact that the munition loiters, right? Yeah. No, exactly. You, in another conversation we'd had, you called it the, what did you say, it's the democratization of artillery? Is that right, or am I misquoting? No, it's democratization of air power. A democratization of air power. You know, a loitering munitions essentially a very inexpensive combat aircraft. So you're calling an airstrike using a very inexpensive system.

So suddenly you're doing to air power, you know, what anti-tank missiles did to expensive anti-tank guns. So everybody can use them. When anti-tank guns came out, you had maybe one regiment attached to a division. So maybe that was 40 sighted along a line of defence. Now, every platoon in every battalion has anti-tank missiles. So that's democratized anti-tank weapons. And what loitering munitions do is the same thing, but for air power. And that is a game changer.

But there is a response to these things. It's a new thing. It's an effective tool. But what we need to do is invest in air defence, like we haven't invested for a very long time. And right up to the 1960s, we were using air defence cannons. to take out anti-aircraft, so for anti-aircraft tasks. And we stopped using them when missiles became very sophisticated. But now, you know, with low-cost drones, you can take them out with a 30-millimeter cannon shell very easily.

And so that's what we need to invest in. Right. It's not that we need, it's not that the military, it's not that the tank is obsolete, but that it just needs to be used in combination with other things, right? because the tank still has a very important actual use in modern warfare, correct? It does. And what you have to remember, that modern warfare is a very complex game of rock, paper, scissors. And all too often people are concerned about the design of the scissors or the design of the paper. That's actually irrelevant.

It's how these things are used in conjunction to achieve a design tactical effect. Another way to describe it is it's like if you imagine playing a game of chess and then somebody invents a new piece and you have to say, well, is this piece actually relevant to what we're doing? And I think the really important thing to say about tanks and infantry working together is that in battle, the process of attack, the assault, seizing and holding ground is really tough. and that's why you need protection and that's why you need firepower because if there's a guy in a trench

who's dug in, he's very hard to root out and so you need that level of shock that a tank provides and firepower and then eventually you need the guy with a rifle and bayonet who literally goes and

digs the guy out of his trench so yes it's a complex game and yes the quality of systems matters but it's that whole process of the strategy and tactics of their employment that really make a difference. Well, and it's also another reason that this war specifically is coloring our experience of tanks is because we're constantly seeing the person with tanks attacking, right? Ukraine is on the defense, which puts them in a much different position than if they were attacking, correct? Yes.

You know, when you have a defensive position and you're protecting against an assault coming in, you're not going to leave your tanks exposed for the enemy to take out as a advance. You're just going to have your infantry, hopefully camouflaged in their foxholes and bunkers, and they will just mount a static defense, but they'll also mount a mobile defense. So moving among the enemy as they advance to take them out. And that's what the Ukrainians have done so well, combining static and mobile defense. So I also want to talk here about some of the adaptations we've seen that are on the tanks themselves that don't necessarily involve changes in how the wars are being fought. The first one that I really noticed, I started noticing this in a little bit in Syria and then mostly in the Armenian and Azerbaijan conflict, this slat armor, what we call it coquoise.

What is this stuff? What's the idea behind it? It doesn't seem to work. So the idea behind Slat armour is that it creates an extra layer, a barrier layer, between the outer skin of a tank and its main armour and the point at which a chemical anti-tank weapon works. So an anti-tank weapon has a heat warhead, H-GAT, which stands for high-explosive anti-tank. and what that does is it shoots a cone of molten metal into the tank at very high velocity to pierce the armour. And if you increase the distance at which that is detonated from the tank's armour, then it has to go, the penetration distance is lessened.

So you're blunting the impact of that weapon. That's clear. And so if you have that slat armour, it forces the anti-tank weapon to death. detonate earlier. But actually, some of the bigger, more modern anti-tank weapons have what's called

tandem warheads. They have an initial warhead which goes off and then a second warhead that goes off. And very often the initial warhead will defeat the slat armor

and the second warhead will go right up against the main armor and then detonate and go straight through. So yes, you're right. It's not very effective. There's also, And I don't know how much of this is actually on Russian tanks, but I wanted to ask about it because I thought it was interesting.

This reactive armor? Yeah, for me, one of the real surprises of Ukraine is just how useless Russian reactive armor is. So it's meant to explode when it's hit. So one explosion contracts the other explosion coming in to neutralize it. But it just doesn't seem to be working. So, you know, they invested in technology that they thought was great, but it doesn't really work. Do you think that's specifically a problem with Russian reactive armor or reactive armor in general? I think it's a problem with Russian reactive armor.

I've seen the German stuff that goes on things like the Puma, I-FV and Leopard. And very impressive. It works very well. Can you explain to the audience a little bit more? I mean, it kind of is similar to Slat armor, but with an explosion attached to it. But can you kind of get into exactly what reactive armor is in like, exactly how it works. So what you have is you have an explosive slab, which is an a pliquet slab of armour that goes

on the outside of the main armour. And when that's struck by an anti-tank weapon coming in, either by an armored piercing, finistabilized, discarding Sabo rounder, a long-road penetrator, it will deflect or push that back. And also, it's resistant against the heat rounds, one I described earlier. So in both cases, that the two explosions cancel each other out. And that's how it. And it is very effective.

And the test that I've seen that we've done in the UK, the Germans have done, and I think the US Army as well, although I'm going to see with that, all show. But it's a very valid means of protection. Do they have it on the top? Forgive my ignorance of tanks. No, not usually. It's on the sides. Okay. Well, because that's how the javelins work by going up and then.

coming down, right? Yeah. Yeah. So you need a different kind of protection against something that's coming at you from the top. Javelin is the first really good top attack weapon. I mean, it's really reliable. N-law gets a lot of headlines in Ukraine, but javelin is really the state of the art. If you said to me, would I rather have a javelin or an in-law? Javelin every time. Obviously, it's much more expensive. It's $100,000 versus $20,000 or $30,000. So, but that top attacks, system. So what makes it so expensive is hugely effective. And it comes right down on top. And yes, we do. And absolutely, we need to protect against top attack weapons. We're not doing that enough at the moment. But the javelin is expensive, but it's less expensive than a tank,

right? Absolutely. It's a war of economics. So I want to get into a little bit of history here because, as you know, from a conversation we've had off the air that I'm working, on a piece about like the tank and why people keep saying the tank is obsolete. And one thing that struck me is that every, basically every time a war has happened since World War II, people, like something bad happens to a bunch of tanks and then people say the tank is over. Like it's kind of this perennial thing that comes up over and over again. Why, and the first one, and it's something that you've written about, or not the first one, but one in fairly recent history that I thought was interesting, is the Six-Day War. Can you talk about what happened?

happened there and why, what went wrong for tanks? Before I talk about the Sixth Day War, I want to talk about the Battle of Agincourt. So at the Battle of Agincourt, the English army of Henry V, inflicted a shock defeat on the French. The French outnumbered the English five to one, and yet the English somehow managed to beat the French. And it was all due to the long bowmen who absolutely slaughtered the French knights. And the defeat was so extensive, but the French started to say, maybe heavy, heavily armored knights, the medieval equivalent of a tank, were obsolete. So every time you get a big defeat or something surprising happens, people say, oh, well, it's obsolete, isn't it?

And actually, what had happened was that the French had bunched their forces across a very narrow line of advance, presenting a very juicy target to the archers. And they got slaughtered. And when the remnant got through, they had to wade through very thick mud, and they were exhausted by the time they got to the English lines. So they were just slaughtered. So it was a case of bad tactics. But at the time people were saying, oh, no, no, no, no, you know, arm's obsolete. And of course, it was improved. And then you fast forward to the six-day war. And again, this was the first time that we'd seen, you know, anti-armour weapons used properly. And it was the Russian Saga missile that was a was one of the early wire-guided anti-tank missiles.

The latter Yom Kippa War in 73 was more interesting because these railies, by that time, had the tow missile, which was much easier to use. So with the saga, you had to fly that with a joystick, and that was very difficult to fly. You imagine the first time you use this thing, flying a drone, most of them crashed without hitting the targets. But by the time tow arrived, all you had to do was keep the crosshairs,

on the target and you would get a kill. And the Israelis did incredibly well with that. And that made you say, wow, this is new and this is different. And because of that, the US army started to field a lot of hammer units with two missiles on the top. And actually, that was a very effective way, a cost-effective way, to counter the Soviet armor that existed at the time. Let's talk about some more recent history. Your piece in April of 2021 was mostly about this conflict, And I'm avoiding saying the actual specific name because I've done it on the show before and I always screw it up. But between Armenia and Azerbaijan, we've seen. Yes, thank you.

We saw kind of a preview of what we're seeing now, right? Because a lot of the military equipment is the same. So what were the lessons of that conflict? Well, again, many of the same lessons that we're seeing today, the Armenian tactics were not good. and I think but there were lessons that came out of it and that is that with the omnipresent drone in the air

warfare has become a game of hiding and finding and so it means you have to camouflage your vehicles you have to be careful where you put them so you can hide them in cities more easily than you can hide them

out in the open but you need to be under trees with camouflage nets and the gonon and back, they just weren't. They were out in the open. They were not protected by infantry. And the Israelis had sold this harrop loitering munition to Azerbaijan, and they used that to great effect. It was a stunning system. And just shock and awe, really, is the any way to describe it. But it really emphasized this game of hiding and finding that warfare has become.

Another really interesting data point here, I think, is Syria in 2018, right? Because this is not the first time that Russia has lost tanks on the battlefield recently. Can you tell the audience what happened in 2018 between loosely aligned Russian mercenaries and U.S. forces? So there was a U.S. forward observation base, sorry, forward operating base, with the American contingent there. And they noticed about two kilometers away a battle group with tanks and armored fighting vehicles ready to approach and attack them.

So they called the Russians on the deconfliction hotline and said, is this you? And the Russian said, no, it's not. And they said, are you sure? Because we're going to take it out. And they said, no, it's not us. Good luck. So the US commander on the ground, he called in an airstrike, I think, about 15.

and they came in and they obliterated 400 people and about 100 vehicles in about three minutes flat. So a very significant effect. Because that's one thing we've not seen in Ukraine is the comprehensive use of air power to defeat the Ukrainians because the Russians have not managed to obtain air superiority. And that's a big issue. And let's forget, you know, but in the Gulf War in 91, when we had a liberal. Kuwait, before we went in, we spent a good six weeks obliterating the Iraqi forces on the ground, all their anti-aircraft weapons, everything that would affect the prosecution of the

ground war was destroyed before a single soldier was allowed to cross that border. And the destruction was so intense that actually the ground war lasted only a week. and by that, by the time the tanks went in, there was very little to take out and that the will had just gone out of the Iraqis completely. They were petrified about what they were going to face. So the first sign of trouble, they surrendered or ran. So the death of the tank, though much heralded over and over again, is just not true. It's a very important piece of modern warfare, of combined arms, as you say, as many people say. But it doesn't, but it does seem like it does need to change, right? That there are problems and

issues that need to be addressed. Things need to be tweaked. How do you think armored warfare is going to change in the near future? Well, I think the important thing to say is that the one thing about warfare, which is not changing, but getting, becoming more intense, is the use of artillery. I mean, during the Second World War, artillery was the biggest killer. And a very high percentage of casualties were caused by artillery. In Korea, that percentage increased. And in all subsequent conflicts, the percentage of casualties caused by artillery has grown. And so you can't move around the battlefield unless you have protection of some sort. So the tank absolutely has this enduring role, absolutely need armor. And it's not a tank as we know it. It will be a tank in a

revised form, but it will still be a highly protected vehicle. What we have to do is to do what we did to warships. So, you know, during the Second World War, battleships had become so big, so thickly armored and so enormously expensive that they were prestige targets. And the whole, you know, navies would be completely oriented about destroying, you know, the Bismarck, the Yamamoto. So we wanted to take out these high-profile targets. And of course, it just was not sustainable to go on building battleships. So what we did is we built smaller ships that had lots of air defence assets on them. And so what these were able to do is to defend against aircraft.

And really, that's what we need to do to the tank today. So we've already got active protection systems on tanks. So these fire out these little bomblets, which cause an anti-tank missile to penetrate prematurely, completely blunting its impact. But we need to use those so they protect against top attack. And we need to further develop them so that they provide a defence against drones. And what we may see is automated machine guns on top that automatically track and target loitering munitions as they come in.

So we've got a long way to go to develop better active performance. protection systems, but I think they will be prevalent on all vehicles that enter the direct fire zone. What about the cost of this stuff? You know, earlier you said this was, you know, this was a conflict about economics and that 100,000 javelin taking out, what is the cost to produce one of these Russian tanks, like 10 million? Is that right? Something like that? Well, I mean, the Russian tanks probably much less than that because I'm going to be much older. So I would say between, you know, 2 and 6 million, depending on how we see they were upgraded. So let's say an average price of 4 million.

But, you know, a Western tank now, you know, $10 million, $12 million. That's a lot of. And, of course, when you add an active protection system, that can add another million dollars to the price. So maybe we need a slightly smaller vehicle, slightly different configuration, but with the investment going in the EPS. And this is, this particular aspect has been part of the story of tanks, I think, since World War II, right? Because the German tanks are these beautiful pieces of engineering that I think have a lot of, what's the way to say this, fans in the World War II like history community. People love the German tanks.

But you can make a lot of Sherman's or a lot of T-304. fours very cheaply and quickly. And the German tanks, no matter how wonderful, they were complicated pieces of machinery that took a long time to build and were quite expensive, right? They were. They were thoroughly over-engineered. And it started with the tiger, and when that appeared in 43, you know, that was a hugely effective beast. But, you know, they only built 1,400 in total of a tiger, whereas, you know, the Sherman, you know, was the third. 30,000 or more. I can't remember the exact number, but an enormous number. And so for, you know, the sheer number of shermans we had in Normandy, for example, this is the number of tigers.

It didn't matter. And in the end, you need mass. That's what counts. Of course, it matters if you're losing guys you can't replace who die, but, you know, mass is really what decides. It's a bit of class what's there to go out. Nicholas Drummond, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through all of this. It was an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Great pleasure talking to you, Matthew. Thank you. That's all for this week.

Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet. It is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we want to get commercial free versions of the episodes and bonus episodes every month. We have a substack, AngryPlannet.substack.com or AngryPlanetpod.com, where for mere $9 a month you get access to our premium content

that is bonus episodes and commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes. Again, it's angry planetpod.com and angryplanet.substack.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict and an angry planet.

I think I finally nailed someone down to talk to us about the Balkans and talk about this whole thing in this war. in Ukraine being quote unquote the biggest land war in Europe since World War II and how that

the legacy of the Balkans conflict shaped Western intervention I think that should be an interesting conversation and also we've got somebody that's going to talk to us about Chechnya and how that war has affected everything that's gone forward

so tune in next week and you should hear some more stay safe until Yeah.