Hence the advanced recce groups in lightly armoured vehicles were given a good shoeing by the courageous and competent resistance shown by the Ukrainian army and militia groups that confronted them. I think most people now accept that the likeliest Russian strategy adopted by them at the start of the war was to drive down the motorway to Kyiv meeting little if any resistance and replace the Ukrainian government with one of their own choosing. Has the kit been fitted to their tanks and proven unreliable or have the Ukrainians managed to disable it in some way? I don’t know the answer here. It happened during the Battle of Grozny during the First Chechen War, where they lost over 200 vehicles to Chechen rebels armed with hand-held anti-tank weapons, so it’s not that they have no experience of this. Which begs the question why haven’t they done so? The Russians must have known that their vehicles would be attacked in this manner. So it would appear that Russia has the technology to defeat many of the anti-tank weapons ( Javelin, NLAW etc) which have been used so effectively in Ukraine against its MBTs and armoured fighting vehicles. The current Russian APS is called Arena, a hard-kill system like Drozd, designed to destroy an incoming missile’s warhead through the use of munitions before it reaches the vehicle being protected. This system was designed as an addition to passive or reactive armour against anti-tank weapons using shaped-charge technology. It was, however, the Soviets/Russians who developed the first active protection system between 19, named Drozd. The best known of these is perhaps the Israeli Trophy system which has saved many a tank or armoured vehicle of theirs for a good few years now, and which I understand is being procured by the British Royal Armoured Corps for Challenger 3, of which more later. The key to defeating loitering munitions and kamikaze drones lies in the latter, usually referred to as active protection systems (APS). So tank protection can now be considered in the categories of passive (armour plate or composite), reactive (exploding bolt-on boxes), or active (interceptor missiles, disruptive munitions, or jamming), sometimes categorised into soft-kill and hard-kill systems. And finally, active armour, which senses the incoming round or missile and intercepts it before it even reaches the MBT. Then explosive reactive armour, placed on the outside of conventional protection, which detonates to disrupt the incoming attack. Then spaced or composite armour designed to defeat an attack by high explosive shaped-charge warheads designed to penetrate steel plate using molten, focused metal jets. This competition has continued ever since. The enemy quickly devised and deployed anti-tank rifles which fired a bigger, heavier round to penetrate the tanks’ armour. When first deployed on the Somme the tank was proof against German machine guns (although not against artillery rounds). And it won’t come to pass this time either, not yet anyway, for reasons I shall now explain.įirst, the history of the tank in warfare since its first introduction by the British in 1916 during the Great War has been one of a see-saw battle between its protection levels and the potency of weapons designed to defeat that protection.
I have heard this cry numerous times before over the past forty years and it has yet to come to pass.
If you would like to submit your own article on this topic or any other, please see our submission guidelines. This article is the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the UK Defence Journal. What has been widely portrayed in the popular media has led, once again, to predictions that “the age of the tank is over”. Unfortunately, the abiding images in the public view are of heavily armed and armoured, not to say highly expensive, armoured fighting vehicles being destroyed and neutralised wither by plucky individuals with hand-held anti-tank weapons or by cheap – relatively speaking – armed drones and the so-called ‘loitering’ or ‘kamikaze’ munitions. Recent conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, more tellingly, the current war in Ukraine have brought a renewed focus on the role of the main battle tank in modern, conventional military operations.
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