this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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Definitely moving into an era where armor is near useless if your enemy has effective antitank weapons and there isn’t extremely tight integration between unmanned surveillance vehicles and your armor. I suppose someone could have shot the UAV down here, but if the IFV doesn’t let the pressure up you can’t exactly sit there and gaze around in the sky looking for a tiny little robot while a 25mm autocannon on treads hunts you.
Not trying to extrapolate too much here, the tank was by itself and likely had a panicked, poorly trained crew but still just imagining the commander in the bradley being able to watch where the tank turret is pointed in real-time and peak only when it wasn’t looking the right direction definitely seems like an utterly decisive advantage (if they were able to do this), especially in an environment that isn’t a full scale battle with so much chaos that the UAV would be destroyed or the information useless. Heck in this situation if the tank started to raise its turret to hit the drone with its coaxial, and the drone is in close contact with the Bradley than that is just a perfect opportunity for the Bradley to attack right?
I know people say the death of the main battle tank is greatly exaggerated but I think the role of the tank will vastly shift towards emphasizing integration with UAVs like this over most other factors. I know missiles aren’t the same thing as cannons but I don’t understand why an APC with a complement of javelin type missiles couldn’t just sit behind cover and annihilate direct fire armor vehicles with a suite of drones providing targeting. It wouldn’t work at great ranges but for a situation like this a cannon kind of seems a pretty inefficient weapon.
aka network-centric warfare. you can make reasonable use out of other bradley's sensors as well, and it works even better in air, with radars and such. you're forgetting about jammers and some other EW, and also, T90M team missed the first shot (and were fucked from that point on)
ukrainians are using drones as artillery spotters (for mortars, howitzers, AGLs, even for tanks when used as howitzers) since forever by now. more professional drones like MQ-9 or Bayraktar can carry laser designator, i guess putting one on a mavic is a little bit too much tinkering and too risky
tanks will go on. tanks are still pretty good at doing things only tanks can, so until someone invents something that does tank things but is not a tank (tank drone maybe?) i'd instead expect another layer of countermeasures like per-vehicle jammers
I don’t expect tanks to go away, I just think in many urban environments or closer range engagements (which for a tank, “close” is still a pretty damn far distance) a vertical launched missile system contained within armored vehicle with guidance by a suite of unmanned surveillance vehicles makes way more sense than a big direct fire cannon.
I think the problem is mainly recovery and launching of unmanned vehicles in a quick, reliable matter that doesn’t expose the crew, or some long haul ability for the unmanned vehicles to loiter for extended periods… which may prove to be a very big problem idk.
Yeah a trophy system that detonates antitank missiles before impact definitely provides a deterrent but I’m not so sure that those systems will keep functioning after the tank has been attacked by any significant caliber weapon or artillery. It also seems like a sensible counter to just launch multiple dummy missiles. How smartly can a trophy system really differentiate between real threats and false ones? I feel like direct fire tanks will always be a thing but it seems odd to not pair them with the kind of anti armor vehicle I am thinking of at this point unless the tank expects to encounter no armor.
yes, missile spam is always a threat. sometimes two is enough (see RPG-30). sensors need to be outside, so if you can destroy them, things get easier. same goes with ERA, but the first hit tends to alert crew pretty reliably
do you want to put VLS on IFV? this gets expensive really quickly, and you don't always need this capability. sometimes you need to clear a trench, or a bunker, or level a building, or something like mortar site, you can do it all with a big gun and it's cheap, easy and fast. tank vs tank fights do seem to be pretty rare in current war, but happened in ie desert storm. TOW can do some of these things you're thinking of, and it seems that few people considered these corner cases
Yeah I am not talking replacing a tank as a mobile machine gun nest/cannon used for creating and exploiting holes in a defensive line during an assault, a normal direct fire tank is as you say better suited for that. I am talking about normal tanks having an armored mobile close range vertical missile launch system that also manages unmanned surveillance vehicles as a compliment for extremely high threat situations as well as edgecases where cannon isn’t ideal.
When people say the tank isn’t going to die anytime soon I get what they are saying it is easy to sit in an armchair and speculate but I just don’t see how direct fire tanks make sense operating without a vehicle nearby with the capacity to hit non-LOS targets with guided missiles.