UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been getting ragged the last several days for saying, during a defense budget debate, "It's now or never for the UK armed forces. We have to recognise that the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European land mass... are over and there are other better things that we should be investing in.” People are now pointing to the Ukraine war as proof that Johnson was hilariously wrong, or something. Now Johnson is a piece of crap, but he wasn’t wrong about the death of tanks. (Analysis continues below the updates.)
The U.S. Marines just ditched their tanks, concluding that they were “operationally unsuitable for our highest-priority challenges in the future.“ As an example:
Speaking at the International Armoured Vehicles Conference on Feb. 10, Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, deputy commandant for Combat Development and Integration, argued that early experiments already are proving a smaller, more effective force for anti-armor than bringing tanks to the fight.
They were seeing armor kills using lightweight mounted fires from the joint light tactical vehicle at ranges of 15 times to 20 times the distance a tank was previously achieving.
“We can kill armor formations at longer ranges using additional and other resources without incurring a 74-ton challenge trying to get that to a shore, or to get it from the United States into the fight,” Smith said. “You simply can’t be there in time.”
He’s basically saying that Javelins from armored Jeeps could take out heavy armor, so why lug around heavy-ass tanks? The Marines also said the Army could field tanks, but the Army itself is looking ahead to the tank of the future,
and it doesn’t look like a traditional tank.
Right now, the Army is in the concept phase, determining what it wants, but reading between the lines, these “tanks” will be smaller, lighter, faster, wheeled (tracks suck), and easier to defend against modern threats—anti-tank missiles from infantry and drones. That doesn’t mean that the venerable M1 Abrams tank is going anywhere anytime soon—a newer version (the M1A2C) is starting production, and is expected to run through 2028. But it’s a stopgap (for example, it has built in radio jamming to thwart radio-controlled IEDs—roadside bombs). It’s not the future.
And if Ukraine was supposed to confirm the supremacy of heavy armor, well, it’s not. Armed with cheap anti-armor missiles, Ukrainian forces have sliced through Russian armored columns.
Tanks are heavy. They have tracks to go off road, but anything but the most firm ground is a problem. You stay on the road, you’re an easy ambush. You go off-road … seriously, click on this link and see what happens.
An M1 Abrams tank gets 0.6 miles per gallon, and I’ll bet these Russian tanks get even worse mileage. That’s why we’ve seen so many videos of tanks stuck or abandoned on the road. And note, that mileage is on road mileage. You go off road, and it’s exponentially worse. That concept drawing of that small “tank” above would have a far more easy time traversing this kind of terrain—big wheels and light weight would combine to make it more maneuverable, and use far less fuel to get places.
Tanks are nearly useless in urban combat. Without proper infantry support, they are easy pickings for small roving bands of infantry with anti-tank missiles. And even with infantry support … then what? Tanks are good at killing other tanks. But if the other side is faster, nimbler, and deadlier, the tank is just a modern day dinosaur, with furry mammals running circles around them.