THOMAS MUTCH
KHARKIV, UKRAINE—On a bright, sunny day in May, as birdsong mixed with the booms of explosions, I noticed a T-72 tank with broken treads and a burned-out, rusted chassis lying before me. The infamous “Z” sign painted on its side showed that this was a Russian tank, likely destroyed by a British-supplied NLAW missile system that Ukrainian forces in the area had been using to hamstring the once-dominant Russian Armed Forces. Its turret was undamaged and it pointed harmlessly toward our small gaggle of journalists and soldiers as we stood outside a burned-out farmhouse.
These scenes are now some of the war’s defining images. Here is supposedly an indomitable part of the Russian war machine, demolished by plucky and nimble Ukrainian forces, armed with shoulder-mounted Western anti-tank weapons in true David-and-Goliath fashion. The T-72 is the AK-47 of tanks—a reliable workhorse seen in wars from Iraq to Ethiopia, from Syria to the carnage before us in Ukraine. But here, Ukrainian soldiers were obliterating them in the hundreds.
Eighty years ago, a swarm of Soviet tanks, numbering in the thousands, had liberated these same battlefields from the Nazis in World War II. Was the wrecked T-72 in front of us a symbol that the tank is now an obsolete weapon of war, doomed to go the way of the horse or the bayonet?
We wouldn’t have to wait long for an answer. About a month ago, Ukrainian tanks—mostly Soviet-era T72s—smashed through defensive lines in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine. In just a few weeks of fighting, Ukraine exploited its advantage in armor and manpower on the battlefield to take back thousands of square miles, liberating several key cities from Russian occupation.
So much, it seems, for the death of the tank.
Tanks’ Weaknesses: Exposed
This is the second recent major conflict in which the public and analysts have questioned the utility of tanks. During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan used its arsenal of high-tech Turkish- and Israeli-designed drones to pick off a large part of the Armenian army’s heavy arsenal from the skies.
Despite the two militaries having near parity at the start of the war, and Armenia having the advantage of defending rather than attacking territory, Azerbaijan used its upper hand in unmanned aerial vehicles—like the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drone—to decisively win a conflict in just six weeks that had been frozen in time for more than a quarter-century.
U.S.-supplied Javelin and NLAW missiles travel above the tank before plunging down to avoid the heavily armored “glacis” on the front of the armored shell. This targets a weak spot in Soviet design, just below the turret, where the crew sits atop the tank’s ammunition. A direct hit can cause the tank’s shells to ignite, destroying the vehicle and killing the crew. According to some analysts, the widespread availability of portable anti-tank weapons and drones—and their results in the Karabakh and Ukraine conflicts—show that the tank now has far less utility than it did on 20th-century battlefields.
In late 2021, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended U.K. tank cuts, telling a Parliamentary Liaison Committee that “we have to recognize that the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European land mass are over.” Just three months later, Russian and Ukrainian tanks were waging war against each other in the largest conventional land war in Europe since World War II.
With that in mind, we should be cautious in drawing conclusions about the future of the tank based on these two conflicts. The first few months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine were defined by Russia’s extremely poor usage of tanks, as the Kremlin’s political strategy informed its tactics, assuming the Ukrainian Armed Forces would collapse at once, leaving Moscow’s troops to parade through Kyiv after a mere three days. This led to many Russian tank units being sent ahead alone, with no protection given out to them to defend against the Ukrainians’ ubiquitous anti-tank weapons, especially in the urban environment of the Kyiv suburbs.
Tanks Are Not “Frivolous”
Traditional military doctrine says that tanks are supposed to be supported by dismounted infantry, artillery support, and air cover if available. This is known as “combined arms warfare.” So, the Russian use of tanks is exceptional in this way, based on the Kremlin’s faulty intelligence about the Ukrainian will to fight. In Karabakh, the Armenians lacked the electronic warfare capabilities to disable Azerbaijani drones that many larger militaries take for granted, giving Azerbaijan almost total air superiority.
“Tanks in terms of mobile protective firepower are still very relevant to operations.”
“People have claimed the tank is irrelevant for a very long time. Usually, the argument is frivolous,” Jack Watling, a senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, tells Popular Mechanics. “Tanks in terms of mobile protective firepower are still very relevant to operations. Tanks are being used in the Donbas usually, but with the threat of guided weapons, they are being used quite differently from normal. They are being used for long-range engagements, almost like precision artillery systems from about four kilometers.”
States looking to upgrade their firepower will still need an armored vehicle that can swiftly cover ground, protect its troops, and offer firepower of its own.
“Tanks Are Not Invincible”
The irony in Ukraine is that many of the tanks being repurposed for the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive that started in September are those that have been captured and refitted on the battlefield.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, when the Russian army fled from Kharkiv, it left behind hundreds of tanks, including modern and powerful T-80s and other armored vehicles. Ukraine is now using these machines in its push to retake territory in the Donbas region it lost over the summer; They were also crucial in the battle for the key city of Lyman at the beginning of October.
Ukraine has now captured more Russian tanks for battle than its Western allies have provided, leading its military to joke that Russia is now its chief supplier of heavy weapons. Open-source investigators found that Ukrainian forces have destroyed 1,328 Russian tanks during the war. For comparison, this is more tanks than most major European countries have in their entire arsenals. France has only around 400 tanks in its army, and Germany has just over 250.
The Polish army, which aims to be Europe’s largest, has inked a deal with South Korea for 1,000 tanks. While the U.S. Marine Corps is giving up its tank fleet to focus on potential naval warfare in the Pacific, it’s giving these to the U.S. Army, which is, in turn, upgrading its fleet of Abrams M1A2 main battle tanks. The Army is also currently conducting research to produce a prototype Robotic Combat Vehicle—an unmanned tank intended to take on the front line in modern conflicts.
Watling says “the ability to move firepower rapidly around the field and overmatch infantry is a capability that will continue to be relevant. Tanks are not invincible and never have been invincible.”
An interesting aspect to the war in Ukraine is that for all the previous speculation that modern warfare would be dominated by new technology—whether cyber, robotics, or even artificial intelligence—the weapons used in this war would be familiar to any soldier from World War II.
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