Tank

A tank is an armored fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armor, and good battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engine; usually their main armament is mounted in a turret. They are a mainstay of modern 20th and 21st century ground forces and a key part of combined arms combat.

Valley Forge, Custer's ranks,
San Juan Hill and Patton's tanks,
And the Army went rolling along
Minutemen, from the start,
Always fighting from the heart,
And the Army keeps rolling along. ~ Harold W. Arberg

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Valley Forge, Custer's ranks,
San Juan Hill and Patton's tanks,
And the Army went rolling along
Minutemen, from the start,
Always fighting from the heart,
And the Army keeps rolling along.
- Harold W. Arberg, second verse of "The Army Goes Rolling Along" (1956), added to the music written by John Philip Sousa in 1917.

Those heralding the demise of the tank are premature. The tank – the tracked, armoured and heavily-armed fighting vehicle that has dominated land warfare for a century – is wounded, not dead. Drones are responsible for the wounding, of course. But it’s not a fatal injury.
- David Axe, "Tanks remain kings of the battlefield. Drones have not made them obsolete", The Telegraph, 28 February 2024

When Russia widened its war on Ukraine two years back, tanks led the attack – and led the defense, too. The Russian army that rolled farther into Ukraine included as many as 2,000 tanks including some of the latest T-72 and T-90 models. Each had three crew and a 125-millimeter stabilized main gun and weighed more than 40 tons. Ukrainian tanks, around a thousand of them including locally-made T-64s – also with three crew and a stabilized 125-millimeter gun – met the Russian force and first battled it to a standstill before counterattacking and, over the next nine months, driving the Russians back to the current front line in southern and eastern Ukraine.
The fighting was brutal, and it didn’t spare the tanks despite the vehicles’ hundreds of millimeters of steel and composite armor. From the start of the wider war until the culmination of Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive, when the front line froze around their present positions, the Russians lost around a thousand tanks – and the Ukrainians a couple of hundred. The weapons that killed those tanks were, for the most part, the weapons everyone expected from decades of warfare: mines, artillery, anti-tank missiles and – yes – other tanks. But then, as the war ground on, something changed. Both sides, and the Ukrainians in particular, began weaponizing small drones. The kind you can buy online for a few hundred dollars.
- David Axe, "Tanks remain kings of the battlefield. Drones have not made them obsolete", The Telegraph, 28 February 2024

Ukraine now builds and deploys more than 50,000 single-use drones a month; Russia seemingly builds and deploys slightly fewer. In any event, the tiny robots are wreaking havoc on tanks on both sides. The Russians losses now exceed 2,600 tanks. That’s more than 10 times as many tanks as are in the entire British Army. Ukrainian tank losses exceed 600. The Russians in particular have lost so many tanks that their factories can’t produce enough new tanks to make good their losses; instead, they are pulling thousands of old tanks leftover from the Cold War out of long-term storage and giving them a quick overhaul before shipping them off to the front.
- David Axe, "Tanks remain kings of the battlefield. Drones have not made them obsolete", The Telegraph, 28 February 2024

The drone apocalypse the Russian and Ukrainian tank corps are experiencing might seem to argue for an end to the tank’s 100-year domination of land-war theory. But that argument misses a key point. That point: it’s a fairly straightforward adjustment for engineers to rebalance a tank’s design and add armor to the top at the expense of the front. That should offer reasonably good protection against small drones.
Indeed, Swedish engineers did this years ago when they added thick armor to the tops of their Strv 122 tanks, local versions of the German-made Leopard 2, which itself is broadly similar to the M-1. The Swedes were worried about top-down missile attacks, but their solution to that problem fortuitously addressed a future problem, too. The drone problem. Sweden donated 10 Strv 122s to Ukraine, and it’s worth noting that these tanks have survived multiple attacks by Russian drones. To survive in this dangerous new era, tanks need to be more like the Strv 122 and less like the T-72, T-90, M-1 or Leopard 2.
With some small tweaks, tanks – with their combination of protection, firepower and speed – can and should continue to play the central role in ground combat that they’ve played since World War I.
- David Axe, "Tanks remain kings of the battlefield. Drones have not made them obsolete", The Telegraph, 28 February 2024

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Find the reporter, Trombley. If Little Miss Rolling Stone gets run over by an Iraqi tank, Ray's band won't make the cover.
- Sgt. Brad "Iceman" Colbert, Generation Kill, Episode 4: Combat Jack

D

We call ourselves the "6th Panzer Army", because we've only got 6 Panzers left.
- Sepp Dietrich in early 1945, as quoted by Mitcham, Samuel W. (2006). Panzers in Winter: Hitler's Army and the Battle of the Bulge. p. 166.

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Der Motor des Panzers ist ebenso seine Waffe wie die Kanone.
- The engine of the Panzer is a weapon just as the main-gun.
  - Heinz Guderian, as quoted in Die Deutschen gepanzerten Truppen bis 1945 (1965) by Oskar Munzel, p. 159

If the tanks succeed, then victory follows.
- Heinz Guderian, as quoted in Panzerkrieg : The Rise and Fall of Hitler's Tank Divisions (2002) by Peter McCarthy and Mike Syron, p. 33

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Russia continues to produce T-90M tanks, the best tank in the world — according to Putin anyway – at a slow, steady rate. As soon as these tanks appear on the front, they are spotted by the omnipresent surveillance drones which watch every inch of the front, and targeted.
- David Hambling, "Thing Can Save Tanks From Drones And It Is Not Triple-Decker Armor", Forbes, 3 October 2024

Losing a tank track is like having a bicycle chain break. It stops the vehicle from moving, but is fairly easy to repair. If spare track segments are available, the tank crew can replace it in an hour or so. This is impossible when you are under fire, but an armored recovery vehicle can tow the tank back to safety. Russian engineers have the BREM-1M T-90 recovery vehicle for exactly this job — but it has to get there before the demolition drones.
- David Hambling, "Thing Can Save Tanks From Drones And It Is Not Triple-Decker Armor", Forbes, 3 October 2024

It is hard to exaggerate just how many tanks the drones are destroying. One exceptional Ukrainian FPV operator was recently decorated for destroying 42 Russian tanks and 82 other armored vehicles over a 5-month period. It would be hard to match these numbers with any other weapon; missiles like Javelin simply are not supplied in large enough quantities. But Ukraine aims to produce 1.5 million drones this year, enough for multiple FPVs not just to attack every tank but every Russian soldier. The Russians aim to produce a similar number.
- David Hambling, "Thing Can Save Tanks From Drones And It Is Not Triple-Decker Armor", Forbes, 3 October 2024

Western tanks are not invulnerable either, and both U.S. Abrams and British Challenger 2 tanks have been lost to Russian FPV attacks. The Ukrainians have taken to adding extra layers of reactive armor to their Western tanks, but the Russian experience suggests this will not greatly improve them. The only way for tanks to survive currently is simply not to get within FPV range. Many reports indicate the Russians now have a no-tank zone stretching back six miles from the front line.
“The heavy armor no longer comes close to the front,” one soldier told Ukrainian-American freelance journalist David Kirichenko last month. “They move on motorcycles and ATVs [all-terrain vehicles] now. I don’t remember the last time I saw an enemy tank.”
Similarly, in April Ukraine reportedly withdrew its Abrams tanks from the front line in April due to the drone threat. There have been very few sightings of Western tanks during the Kursk offensive. The Russians will continue to bolt Mad Max armor to their tanks and send them forward, but at present armored advances are producing heavy casualties rather than gaining ground. The only way to survive is to stay back.
- David Hambling, "Thing Can Save Tanks From Drones And It Is Not Triple-Decker Armor", Forbes, 3 October 2024

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As explosive drones gain battlefield prominence, even the mighty U.S. Abrams tank is increasingly vulnerable.
- Lara Jakes, "Do Tanks Have a Place in 21st-Century Warfare?", New York Times, 20 April 2024

The drone combat in Ukraine that is transforming modern warfare has begun taking a deadly toll on one of the most powerful symbols of American military might — the tank — and threatening to rewrite how it will be used in future conflicts.
- Lara Jakes, "Do Tanks Have a Place in 21st-Century Warfare?", New York Times, 20 April 2024

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We remember the fields, where our tanks held the line
We remember our brothers in arms
- Sabaton, "Light in the Black", Attero Dominatus (2006), lyrics by Joakim Brodén & Pär Sundström, music by Brodén

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Whether it storms or snows,
Whether the sun smiles upon us,
[Whether in] The day's scorching heat,
Or the ice-cold of the night,
Dusty are the faces,
But joyful are our minds,
Yes, our minds.
Our tank roars there,
Along in the storm winds.
- Ob’s stürmt oder schneit,
  Ob die Sonne uns lacht,
  Der Tag glühend heiß
  Oder eiskalt die Nacht,
  Verstaubt sind die Gesichter,
  Doch froh ist unser Sinn,
  Ja unser Sinn.
  Es braust unser Panzer
  Im Sturmwind dahin.
- Kurt Wiehle, first verse of "Das Panzerlied" ("The Tank Song"), written & composed in 1933. Popular with tank crews of both the Heer (the German Army) and the Waffen-SS (Armed-SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party) prior to and during World War II, the song is widely-remembered in popular culture for its association with World War II-era German tank crews, and was used in war films like Battle of the Bulge (1965).

With thundering engines,
Quick as lightning,
Towards the enemy,
Protected in the tank.
Ahead of our comrades,
In combat we stand alone,
We stand alone.
So we strike deep
Into the enemy's ranks.
- Mit donnernden Motoren,
  Geschwind wie der Blitz,
  Dem Feinde entgegen,
  Im Panzer geschützt.
  Voraus den Kameraden,
  Im Kampf steh'n wir allein,
  Steh'n wir allein,
  So stoßen wir tief
  In die feindlichen Reih'n.
- Kurt Wiehle, second verse of "Das Panzerlied"/"The Tank Song" (1933)

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