>>Speed,Speed,Speed!<<
den beste talks of the end of an era with tanks in that regard.
denbeste.nu
Stardate 20030207.1346
(Captain's log): Are we reaching the end of the era of the main battle tank? I think we might be.
Weapon systems come and go. The march of time and technology waits for no man. Tanks are rightfully seen as the modern equivalent of an armored knight on horseback. The idea was that a man on a horse could move faster and strike harder, and his armor would make him harder to kill. And for several hundred years in Europe, the knight ruled the battlefield. Of course, they were useless for such things as siege, but in open-field combat, armored knights would dominate.
Life began to be perilous for armored knights when archers began to use armor-piercing arrows, but even as late as the 30 Years War, knights were still the dominant force on the battlefield. However, as gunpowder weapons improved, with faster fire rates and more lethal projectiles and longer range, it became clear that full body armor was no longer worth the cost to produce and maintain it. By the time of the Napoleonic wars, armor on heavy cavalry had been reduced to the cuirass, a metal shell around the upper trunk of the cavalryman intended primarily to defend him against the lance and bayonet. It was no longer possible to actually defend against musket balls or cannon fire (as this picture clearly demonstrates) and they didn't try.
By the time of the American Civil War, musketry had improved even further and neither side even tried using cavalry as such on the battlefield. When cavalry participated in battles, it moved on horseback but dismounted to fight. If anyone ever attempted a cavalry charge against infantry on the battlefield in the Civil War, I've never heard of it.
Cavalry were still important, as scouting forces, but infantry dominated the battlefield.
[Technical note about terminology: the standard infantry firearm on both sides in the Civil War is referred to as a "rifled musket" and its fire was referred to as "musketry". The firearm used by the Union Cavalry was referred to simply as a "rifle", but it was breech-loaded.]
At the beginning of World War I, the major armies still maintained large formations of cavalry but it soon became clear that they had become useless. There was no scouting possible with continent-wide trench systems, and aircraft were better at it anyway, and if a cavalry charge in the American Civil War was useless then by the time of WWI it had become suicidal.
And along came the tank. It was developed to break the stalemate of the trench systems, and in principle it was very similar to the original reason for development of knights: to give fighting men armor so that they would be invulnerable to the weapons of enemy infantry, and make them mobile so they could move to the enemy infantry and slaughter it. The original tanks were huge, loud, slow and in their own way quite deadly, and they did succeed in breaking through the trench system and made victory (and defeat) possible.
In the inter-war period, tanks got smaller, faster, more heavily armored and were equipped with much better weapons, and a lot of theoretical work went into how to use this new capability. The two greatest visionaries of this work were Basil Liddell Hart and Hans Guderian, and it was the Germans who first used them as envisioned on the battlefield. The basic idea was to use combined air/artillery/infantry assault to break a hole in the enemy line and then throw concentrated formations of armor through the hole to move into the enemy's rear and exploit the breakthrough. The armored formations could move rapidly (relatively speaking) and could ignore light enemy opposition; and by so doing could disrupt the enemy's plans on a strategic level. Westerners dubbed this new form of war Blitzkrieg and eventually the Germans came to use the term as well. It didn't always work, but when it did it produced truly phenomenal gains. The Germans used it in Poland, and again in France, and yet again against the Soviet Union in 1941. The British used a modified form of it in North Africa after el Alamein. The Russians did it at Kursk, and then the Americans did it in Normandy with the Cobra attack, which led to mobile warfare which liberated most of France before the situation once again stabilized. And the Germans tried it one last time in the Battle of the Bulge.
But for all the concentration on this kind of warfare, the majority of tank operations in WWII used them as small-caliber self-propelled artillery rather than as the modern equivalent of cavalry. Tank-versus-tank battles (such as the largest such in history at Kursk) get a lot of attention, but most tanks spent most of their time shooting at infantry, doing exactly what they did in the Great War: breaking open fixed defensive positions which were too tough for infantry to crack without huge numbers of casualties. In the US Army, the difference between a standard "infantry division" and an "armored division" was a matter of degree: infantry divisions had more riflemen; armored divisions had more tanks. But both of them had both, and the majority of the time tanks fought with friendly infantry nearby.
Tanks were clearly still a threat, and during the Cold War the Soviet Union built vast numbers of them. In response, the allies began to work on better weapons to permit infantry to fight against tanks. There were early crude versions of this developed in WWII, such as infantry rocket launchers, but with the development of modern electronics in the 1950's and 1960's it became possible to give those rockets active guidance, making them far more deadly.
Tanks ran up against a scaling problem: it was easier to increase the lethality of the weapons designed to kill them than it was to make the tanks harder to kill. There were attempts to change the underlying technology of the tank (in particular the development of laminated armor by a research group in Chobham, England) but that only delayed the inevitable. On a modern battlefield between two well-equipped modern armies, tanks are extremely expensive difficult to maintain targets. Even back in World War II, one of Bill Mauldin's cartoons had one rifleman saying to another that he didn't want to be in a tank because "a moving foxhole attracks the eye". It's only worse, now.
When a modern army faces one which is not modern, such as in the 1991 Gulf War, tanks can still cover ground and fight what they run into. But if the defending force is well armed and well organized, such an assault is just as suicidal now as a battlefield cavalry charge would have been in the Civil War. Modern antitank missiles have become too good.
If the defenders have HOT or MILAN or TOW or DRAGON or some equivalent system and are trained to use them, assaulting tanks won't last long. Armor no longer protects on the modern battlefield. Speed is life. The only way to stay alive is to not get shot at, by shooting first.
The M1A2 may well be the ultimate tank, and I use that term advisedly. It's not clear that it can really be improved much in terms of increasing its battlefield survivability, and it's still vulnerable. It weighs nearly 70 tons, burns huge amounts of fuel, requires large amounts of training for its crew to operate individually and in groups, and still it is vulnerable.
The paradox is that it is simultaneously too large and not large enough. It needs to be bigger/heavier so it can carry more armor, yet it's already too heavy to be easily deployable into overseas combat situations. Because tanks are so large and so heavy, as a practical matter we cannot deploy an armored division or mech-infantry division solely by air. An M1A2 can be carried by a cargo aircraft, but the aircraft won't be able to carry much else. With a full armored division having several hundred of these, and with all the other backup equipment which has to be deployed to support them in actual combat, the only practical way to deploy an armored formation of any significant size now is by ship, unloaded at a port, deployed slowly, which is part of what we've been watching happen in Kuwait now and part of why preparations are taking so long.
And it means that armored forces can't actually be used in a lot of places at all. We didn't use such a force in Afghanistan, and part of the reason why is that we could not have done so even if we'd wanted to. It would have taken a year to set up for the battle; we couldn't afford to wait. Fortunately, we didn't need to. But there's a damned good reason why all the ground fighting there was done by the 82nd, the 101st, the 10th and Special Forces (and comparable Canadian, Australian and British units); they're the only troops we have in the US Army which don't need that kind of buildup.
Have we reached the point now where the problems and expense associated with tanks outweigh their potential value on the battlefield? I can still conceive of cases where horse cavalry could be useful. In WWII the Soviets used several divisions of horse cavalry in the winter to break through a thin section of the German line and roust around in the German rear, for instance. They moved across a frozen marsh that the Germans had thought was impassible. But the reality now is that anything horse cavalry can do can be done other ways, and the difficulty and expense of maintaining horse cavalry isn't justified. The last US horse cavalry unit was disbanded about the time of WWII (though some were then created on an ad hoc basis in a few places during the war). They could be useful, but not in enough cases to justify having them. And I think we're reaching the same point with tanks.
What, exactly, is the function of the tank on the modern battlefield? Can the same thing be done using other approaches which might be cheaper and, much more critically, weigh less and be more easily deployed? The basic reality of logistics is that any weapon you have is better than a superior one you don't have. If tanks are good but can't be placed where we need them, when we need them, then they have outlived their usefulness.
The M1 was designed to defend the front between the Warsaw Pact and NATO in Germany. It was not designed to be easily deployed because it was going to be on station already when that battle happened (which, thankfully, it never did). But the Cold War is over, and the situation has now changed radically.
On the modern battlefield, attacking tanks largely remain mobile armored artillery to be used to crack enemy hard points. But that's not how they're used in modern American "air-land" battle doctrine. The basic idea there is that our ground pounders move forward but whenever they run into any kind of resistance they call in air strikes or artillery fire to neutralize it. Once it's been neutralized, the ground-pounders then move forward cleaning up the remnants of resistance, which, in 1991 mainly consisted of rounding up surrendering Iraqi soldiers. (As ex-artilleryman Donald Sensing says, the only time we concentrate our ground forces is on top of the enemy position.) The only time that tanks are expected to directly fight is when they're taken by surprise. The Army doesn't like to think of itself this way, but in "Air-Land" their primary job on a mobile battlefield is to find targets for the Air Force.
Speed is life. I can't emphasize this enough. The only safety on a modern battlefield is in movement. The only way to stay alive is to not be where the shells are dropping. If you stop within range of the enemy for ten minutes, they can destroy you if they have the proper weapons no matter how you are equipped.
Right now we do have such weapons, such as MLRS. The enemies we face right now don't generally have them, but in future they will. Our current tank-heavy army can still fight effectively but only because the enemy forces it's facing are using weapons and combat doctrine which is at least 30 years out of date. That won't last, though, and if in future we end up fighting an enemy which does have modern doctrine and modern weapons, then tanks won't be able to operate as mobile guns because they'll never get close enough to enemy formations to fire – just as our enemies now won't get that close to our formations.
In response to increasing battlefield firepower, horse cavalry reduced the armor it used. Have we reached the point where mechanized armor should do the same?
The US Marines have a saying: Killing tanks is fun and easy. They have been experimenting with a different concept. They have mobile formations whose heaviest vehicles are HMMVs armed with Dragon missile launchers and automatic grenade launchers (i.e. rapid fire light artillery) and heavy machine guns. The HMMVs are actually lightly armored with Kevlar and are adequate to protect the crew against most shrapnel and incidental light arms fire, and can even survive many kinds of mines. They can handle nearly any terrain that tracked vehicles can; weigh much less and can move very rapidly. If they encounter any kind of large enemy formation they call for air strikes (or they scoot). Against individual tanks or heavy APCs they fire missiles; against anything else they fire grenades and use machine guns. Since they're motorized they can carry much more ammunition than foot soldiers and they have a lot more heavy firepower than individual infantry automatic weapons. And when they're near the enemy they keep moving, never presenting a fixed target for enemy artillery. They don't need armor because the idea is to not be where the enemy is shooting. And they don't want armor because it would slow them down. Speed is life.
[Update: I remembered wrong. The missile the Marines were reportedly using in this were Javelins, which are fire-and-forget, top attack anti-armor missiles with a reported range of 2500 meters.]
The advantages of this approach are readily apparent: an armed HMMV costs less than a twentieth of what a main battle tank costs, and maintenance and support are much cheaper. A force of this kind can be much more easily deployed in quantity. And in particular, it can be deployed by air transport or amphibious assault, and the vehicles can move themselves into position rather than being carried by heavy vehicle transporters which are always in short supply. (Tanks do not drive themselves off the ship and up to the ready line. HMMVs do.) A weapon you got is better than one you ain't, and these you can have on the battlefield rapidly.
It may be that a HMMV is too light for this mission; the optimal vehicle might be an 8x8 armored car, with a small percentage carrying heavy guns. But I'm inclined to err on the side of light-and-small-and-fast-and-cheap; the military mind is likely to end up converting armored 8x8's into wheeled heavy tanks and by so doing recreate the fundamental problem: tanks weigh too damned much, cost too much, require too much maintenance and take far too long to deploy.
I do not suggest that we should junk all tanks; I can see the need to maintain two to four armored brigades along traditional lines for special duties. There are some kinds of things that heavy armor will still excel at, and a good military force should be versatile. But overall, in many of the kinds of wars I think we may fight in the next thirty years, a lighter faster force optimized for speed and firepower and deployability will be a major advantage. In future wars we cannot afford to wait six months for tanks to be moved into position before we fight. We need something heavier than airborne which can be deployed as fast and as easily as airborne, and tanks aren't it.
Update: Wes Dabney writes to tell me that the Army actually has an advanced program to create an 8x8 light armored vehicle called the "Stryker". It's a lean-and-mean 19 tons, which is an improvement (I guess). Anyway, it's clear that they're moving in the right direction, towards smaller faster vehicles which are cheaper to maintain and easier to deploy. |
