Russian invasion of Ukraine

https://youtu.be/i9i47sgi-V4

I’m not sure we have seen the death of the Tank.
The Telegraph article alludes to the tactical and doctrine errors made by Russia.
Their Army was equipped for a massed attack of hundreds of tanks, supported by thousands of infantry in Fighting vehicles supported by massed artillery. Employing it in small packets proved beyond their training and ability. They also failed to get air superiority.
The massed tank attacks should have been shot in with tube and MRLS strikes and supported by SU25 ground attack aircraft and Helicopters suppressing any defending infantry armed with NLAW etc.

(Obviously quite happy they didn’t)

As an opinion piece it's inevitably quite one-sided, but it does a good job arguing it's case though. Instead of spunking your entire budget on a small selection of super expensive things you can instead turn your forces into a nimble swarm of much cheaper things. Drones together with hand held things that go boom.

Drones silently dropping 50 year old anti tank grenades with added 3D printed stabilising fins through the open hatch of a tank at night is so not a scenario you could plan for.

There is an article I read from a month or so ago that takes all the same facts and argues this not the end of the tank.

yup, good article

EDIT: also it seems like Ukraine as most conflicts today is more of a guerilla war rather than main army vs main army in classic tank battles. This is how smaller armies and people with a will overcome larger conscript armies.

In a guerilla war the Main Battle Tank is useless as it's only real use is to go up against another MBT. It just becomes a sitting duck for more mobile operators including NLAW and drones.

There is an article I read from a month or so ago that takes all the same facts and argues this not the end of the tank.

Probably not the end of it no, but this moment could be the end of a far too cozy relationship between top brass and the military industrial complex. Procurement contracts will be put under much harsher scrutiny in terms of proving value and efficacy.

That's how I play Company Of Heroes. Pure infantry with 60mm canons. Let your opponent waste their cash on tanks then pop them with much cheaper units.

It's kind of long, but make sure you get the bit at the end where the journalists call up and confront the baddies. Really funny.
(There are subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcXVTC012U&t=879s

Lightweight mobile forces can do most things but at some point you will want to advance across open ground against an entrenched enemy. You can do this at speed in an armoured box or walking kicking a football.

You can do this at speed in an armoured box or walking kicking a football.

However, if the armoured box can easily be taken out by shoulder-mounted weaponry carried by infantry, you'd probably be better off with the football.

In a guerilla war the Main Battle Tank is useless as it's only real use is to go up against another MBT.

And in conventional warfare, it's only useful in the sense that horse-mounted cavalry is only useful against other horse-mounted cavalry. Didn't stop them from trying to use chaps on horses against machine guns in WW1. Equally ineffective though.

The football can be easily punctured by artillery, you need a Combined Arms approach with your own artillery shooting in the armoured attack keeping the defenders heads down until it’s too late. Then the infantry de-buss and deal with the ATGM teams. If you can add in a bit of air power that’s even better.

If you can add in a bit of air power that’s even better.

And therein lies the real issue. Air superiority is all. No ground troops are secure in the absence of control of the skies. And with drones, air superiority is a very hard thing to achieve.

We may see an armoured attack soon by the Ukrainians. If the Russians are as short of manpower as it seems.

I we will see a little arms race of drones and anti drones until there is a new balance. Rheinmetal already have a anti drone cannon module for Boxer afv which the uk could add to the order. Drones have to emit a radio signal so will be vulnerable to being tracked and ecm.
Small drones that are hard to see and hit paired with guided munitions and suicide drones will be tricky.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5_F4_Eod8

Is it fair to say that tanks do look less effective as a means of invasion/conquest in modern warfare? If this makes invasion harder, surely that is a good thing?

Drones have to emit a radio signal so will be vulnerable to being tracked and ecm.

Not necesarily. Sure, its much simpler to manually control a drone in on a target but its trivial to code consumer drones to operate semi autonomously with return to base conditions especially if targetting static targets or doing reconaissance.

I'm not up to speed on recent developments in kinetic anti-drone measures but I know that the US and Iraqi military found it extremely difficult to shoot down consumer drones with standard weapons when Islamic State started using them to drop grenades over the last 8 years or so.

Anybody wanting to understand that Gatwick drone incident clusterfuck would do well to read up on how IS had been using drones at the time...there's a reason why the response was so massive.

Husband of a friend works on anti-drone e-scan ground radar systems (apparently). Was always jetting off to South Korea pre-covid to go show off how well they could shoot down commercial drone.

Was on-call for the Gatwick thing too.

That sounds like great fun, maybe I need a career change

Yeah, everyone loves weapons developers.

shooting drones aint shooting people

Was always jetting off to South Korea pre-covid to go show off how well they could shoot down commercial drone.

The problems the anti-drone companies have are as follows:

• Commercial drones are too small to reliably be detected by radar without a load of false positives from birds, litter etc.

• Current radio jamming techniques have a major impact on airport and other radio operations.

• Custom drones can use any frequencies that the designer desires...full spectrum radio jamming causes more operational problems that it solves.

• Commerical drones can be hardened against radio jamming (admitedly with some loss of control).

Claims by drone defence companies that they can reliably intercept commercial drones should be taken with a very large pinch of salt at the moment. Staged demonstrations using stock drones are a long way away from real life scenarios.

Large drones are easy to deal with because they are large enough to be targetted by anti aircraft tech.

What about shooting the drones the Ukrainians are using to defend their people?

Boring.