In the course of the on-going Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, an interesting thing happened on October 13. An Israeli Merkava tank ran for its life, and took shelter in the UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) camp, deliberately breaking its gate in the process. IDF’s international spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said, “Hezbollah had fired anti-tank missiles at Israeli troops, wounding 25 of them. The attack was very close to a UNIFIL post and a tank helping evacuate the casualties under fire then backed into the UNIFIL post. It was a tank under heavy fire, mass casualty event, backing up to get out of harm’s way.”
Merkava is no ordinary tank. In the Western world, it is ranked alongside the mighty American M1Abrams and the German Leopard 2 Main Battle Tanks. It was a sad sight to see this tank running for its life under anti-tank fire. In fact, just before the invasion started, I had predicted in my article ‘Should Israel Invade Lebanon?’, “Besides the signature weapon of terrorists, the RPG-series anti-tank weapons, Hezbollah has, a number of ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles) acquired from Iran and Syria. These can significantly blunt an Israeli tank offensive.” How prophetic I was!
Move over to Ukraine and, even as both sides have been giving confusing figures, it is generally accepted that tank losses on both sides have been heavy, running into thousands, falling mostly to anti-tank fire and cheap drones. So, what has gone wrong with tanks?
Why Nations Remain Fascinated with Tanks
As the military-political analyst and US Defense and State Department consultant James Dunnigan points out, tanks fascinate laymen and military men alike because they are so macho, so utterly masculine. They are big and made of an enormous amount of steel. That gives the impression of being strong and muscular. They also rumble when they move. The rumble resembles the menacing growl of an aggressive beast. The display of tanks on ceremonial parades therefore touches some primal instincts in the subconscious mind as a display of raw male prowess.
Modern ground combat continues to revolve around tanks. Tanks account for about a third of a mechanized army’s firepower and over 20% of its equipment cost. They are to ground warfare what battleships were to naval warfare once upon a time. They are still taken to be the “arme blanche” or the “arm of decision”.
Tanks Have Never Been ‘Really Tested’
Tanks were developed in the First World War to deal with entrenched infantry hiding behind obstacles like ditches and barbed wire fields. The basic design consideration was therefore to make them immune to small arms fire of the infantry. They easily decimated the infantry and a legend was born.
Their major role in a battlefield is to overwhelm enemy positions and infantry-held lines by using their armour, sheer firepower, mobility and manoeuvres. Mechanized infantry assists the tanks and later helps in securing the confronted targets.
However, as the celebrated military theorist and historian Martin van Creveld points out, tanks and tankers’ skills have, however, never been really tested in battle since the World War II. Tank-to-tank battles by themselves have not been seen since the Battle of Kursk Salient (1943) and hence it would be preposterous to draw any inferences from that. We waited for a conflict in Western Europe. It never came. We really wanted to see how the NATO tanks, claimed to be technically superior, would fare against the vast Soviet armada of allegedly somewhat less sophisticated tanks, but the opportunity never arose. We should be careful enough not to draw inferences from smaller conflicts. Yom Kippur War (1973) was a very small affair, and the use of Abrams in Iraq does not prove a thing; the Iraqis were no match for the Americans anyway.
Tanks’ Achilles heel lies in maintaining a continuous supply of fuel and ammunition if they have to maintain momentum. Those lines are vulnerable to interdiction and disruption by artillery fire, rocket fire, helicopters and aircrafts. They need extensive reconnaissance to advance. They need the infantry to follow. They cannot operate in massed formations. They cannot move long distances without suffering breakdowns.
Creveld draws our attention to the fact that like the cavalry of old, armoured warfare too is most effective in broad, open plains like those of northern France, the Western Sahara, and southern Russia. In other terrains like mountainous, forested, swampy, or urban built-up areas, tanks’ effectiveness is limited because of diminished trafficability and insufficient room for them to deploy.
In a rare display of intellectual honesty, a study at the Frunze Military Academy, Russia admitted that the limited mounted manoeuvre space in the Battle of Grozny where the tanks operating in urban space came under anti-tank fire from all the three dimensions, made life indeed difficult for them.
Tanks Extreme Vulnerability to Anti-Tank Fire
Even as the mobility and concentrated combat power of tanks makes them capable of forcing a decision quickly and decisively; their vulnerabilities and limitations in the face of a ‘prepared’ enemy dictate that they be used in that role as rarely as possible—that is a paradox, which has not been resolved till date.
The problem with tanks is that they could cost up to $10 million apiece. And yet, can be defeated by anti-tank guided missiles which typically cost between $33,000 (French MILAN) to $250,000 (American Javelin), that is, weapons that cost just 0.33% to 2.5% of the tank’s cost or drones in the same price range ($193,000 for Iran’s Shahed).
Also Read: What are battle tanks called in different languages?
That way, as military historian Mark Cartwright points out, tanks are acutely reminiscent of the medieval knights on their powerful horses, both clad in plate armour that cost a ton. They were the most-feared and best-protected warriors on the medieval battlefield and the flower of European chivalry.
However, the moment the crossbow was invented; they were rendered irrelevant. They used to spend their lives training for combat but, an untrained peasant, using a crossbow costing very little, could kill them with the very first shot of his life. The lethality of the crossbow horrified the aristocracy so greatly that, in 1097 AD, Pope Urban II, issued an edict to ban their use against Christians. No one gave a damn about it and the legendary Christian Crusader, Richard the Lion Heart, was himself killed by a crossbow fired by a French Christian!
It is not just the low cost of the ATGMs that makes them a formidable proposition. Their real strength lies in their mobility. It is not necessary that they should always inflict a C-Kill (Catastrophic Kill); even an M-Kill (Mobility Kill) is more than enough as a stranded tank is highly vulnerable. In fact, the side-skirts of tanks were introduced in design to deal with that eventuality only.
Fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia around the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave had demonstrated the tank’s intrinsic vulnerability. Houthi ATGMs destroyed or disabled Saudi M1A2 Abrams MBTs in Yemen in 2016. The ISIS had also destroyed seven of Turkiye’s armed forces’ Leopard 2A4s in Syria during the Battle of al-Bab in 2017.
The Jury Is Still Out
Heavy tank losses in Ukraine and other recent conflicts from cheap loitering munitions carried on drones and anti-tank weapons have led to despair amongst many experts over tanks’ future utility, particularly when a $500 Russian drone disabled a $10 million Abrams given to Ukraine. There is no doubt that drones are successfully exploiting a fundamental design defect. The top armour of the tanks, for obvious reasons, cannot be as heavy as the frontal armour. It is where the drones attack. The New York Times pointed out in late April 2024 that in the preceding two months, Russian drones had taken out as many as 31 Abrams tanks.
Still, it would be premature to say that ATGMs have rendered tanks obsolete. A study at the US Army Command & General Staff College presented a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the complexity of the issue. Suppose tanks moving at 30 kmph (that is, over 8 meters per second) are first seen approaching 800 meters away. The ATGM crews can get off a maximum of three or four missiles before the surviving vehicles are on top of them. The missile crews may not survive that long, as their first shot can easily reveal their position. The tanks’ machine gun fire will not make the missile operators any more efficient, as it will often spoil the missile operators’ aim. The tanks also can throw a smoke screen in front, or call artillery or mortar fire on the exposed missile operators. Tank guns have better optics and better second shot capability than anti-tank weapons but the eventual outcome has to be seen in real combat only. On the other hand, the advantage of the ATGMs is that you can afford a miss without going bankrupt. Then the missiles are light enough for the infantry to carry and operate easily.
Michael B. Kim in his ‘The Uncertain Role of the Tank in Modern War: Lessons from the Israeli Experience in Hybrid Warfare’ has shown that as a key element of combined-arms manoeuvre (CAM), the future role of the tank must be evaluated within the context of a hybrid threat, and not in isolation. Jonathan House of the US Army Command and General Staff College describes the combined-arms concept as the “basic idea that different combat arms and weapons systems must be used in concert to maximize the survival and combat effectiveness of the others.” He stresses that, in future warfare, tanks must therefore be used only in combination with other troops and not alone to satisfy the TV jouranlists’ adolescent fantasies of single combat like that of the knights. Americans and Israelis both have, in fact, developed tactics in which the tanks would get ammunition and fuel supplies through to the front line with the help of a supply shuttle of the main supply column, so that the pace of advance was not slowed down by tanks waiting to get re-armed or refuelled. Moreover, the Americans do acknowledge that tanks will have to depend heavily on rotary and fixed-wing aircraft and air reconnaissance forces to manoeuvre quickly to positions of advantage over an enemy to deliver direct and indirect fires, precision and area munitions.
Innovations are always possible. Russian tanks have been seen sporting cages to reduce the effectiveness of loitering munitions. The Israelis are believed to have developed two systems: Trophy APS (Active Protection Systems) of Rafael, and
Iron Fist of Elbit Systems. They use radars to detect a threat and deploy a projectile at the approaching missile within split seconds. Rafael claims a success rate of over 90% due to real battlefield data and advances in computing, sensors and processing speed. Their combat effectiveness will be tested in real combat only.
In view of this, several experts maintain that eventually tanks will not remain just instruments of shooting shells; they are likely to evolve into becoming rolling sensor suites and command, control and intelligence nodes for the ground war.
We Would Still Need the Tanks for Some Time
No weapon system can ever become invincible. If someday, somebody invented an invincible weapon system, they would create a dangerous imbalance in the relative power structure with serious consequences. One side might be tempted to take advantage of those weapons and go to war; the other side, apprehensive that it might lose the war, could opt for a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
Austria’s Theresian Military Academy has summed up the issue in simple words, “If you want to seize terrain, you need a tank.”
In the end, tanks remain tanks—powerful things you would not like to do without! They give you a strange sense of confidence. You can hit what you can see; you can kill what you can hit! And, if they are knocked out, never forget that champion heavyweight boxers also get knocked out in the ring! It’s part of life.