Are all the modern western tanks pretty similar in performance ?

[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 ]

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[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 ]

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[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>

[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.