Tank Duel: Follow Up

One of my great pleasures from this blog is to receive comments, especially those that lead to excellent scholarly discussion. On my recent post I received a comment from David Wilma.

"I suspect (I have not studied the issue) that tank development since WWII has been based on both mission and the likely opponents. Smaller nations (except Israel) do not do tank development so they take what the market offers. And these procurement actions are not always based on good science, i.e., corruption and politics. 

So a question would be what is the likely outcome of both and individual encounter between an M-60 and a T-72, and larger battles. Is the M-60 necessarily second best? How would the M-60 units prevail?

I remember reading about the 1968 war in which Israeli tanks overpowered Egyptian(?) tanks because the Soviet-supplied hardware lacked air conditioning. I'm sure there were other factors, but the crew with the most on the ball has a great advantage. "

I thought my response was lengthy enough to warrant a new post as a follow up rather than as a comment response. For the 2nd paragraph of the question I was forced to speak with a good friend of mine, a former M1A2 commander to find the answer.

The Soviets have always adopted the principle of more and cheaper.. Even down to their steel sabot ammunition. We scoff at this in the U.S. but it has been the fundamental core doctrine for their armed forces since even before WWI. It led directly to the development of the A-10 Warthog (Satan’s Cross as the Russians call it) and the Apache. The Soviets during the Cold War had more tanks than we had infantry platoons.. Quite scary when you think about it.

 

Strategic Fit

What fits for the Soviets does not fit for smaller countries usually, because they field a very small army. Sweden is a good example, they went a completely different direction in tank design. One of their recently retired tanks (Stridsvagn 103)* is a fixed gun that has a breakthrough suspension that allows them to elevate the front of the tank (over snowbanks and what not). Because it is designed to fight in the snow and in large forests they didn’t feel like they needed a rotating turret. Put that in any other country and you have a possible disaster. The Israelis developed the Merkeva tank, which is an excellent tank but again it is designed for desert warfare. It is inadequate when placed in any other role.

M60 vs T-72

The T-72 has the advantage of a superior gun, superior penetration and superior range- the 125mm gun vs the M60’s 105mm. The T-72 also had superior armour protection, and a very low silhouette. The M60’s advantages were its fire control system, and rate of fire. But overall the T-72 is the superior tank and will be victorious in the majority of fights. The T-72 was really not of the same generation, and a better match for the M60 would be something around the T-64 series. The U.S. did not really leap ahead in tank design until the development of the M1 Abrams, of which the T-80 is essentially a copy (and which also doubled the price of the average Soviet tank). Since the T-80 the Soviets/Russians have made mostly cosmetic improvements on their tanks; Jane's Defense calls them "same whore, new lipstick".

The System

When you are fighting satellite nations or countries that import the Soviet designs, one important consideration is that the Soviets designed the T-72 to fill a niche in what my friend the Abrams commander describes as a system of legos. The T-72 is designed to operate with ZSU-23s for low level air defense, followed by BMP2s carrying infantry, BRDM-4s for scouting with anti-tank missiles, and all followed up by the tracked MTLB with platoon sized detachments. In the air the Soviets field the SU-24 for air superiority and the SU-25 "Frogfoot" for close air support. Once you remove any piece of this system it starts to collapse, so importing nations not only have to possess all the equipment but train their soldiers in replicating the Soviet system.

David also asks how well the Russians have been able to maintain their level of training and readiness with this system. It is an irony of the post-communist era that the Russians have maintained one of the largest armies in the world - but they cannot really afford to send it anywhere. The war in Afghanistan was like our war in Vietnam, and had major impacts on the morale and thinking of the modern Russian military. Above all there is simply very little money available for improvements upon old equipment and expansions in training programs, and the former Soviet lego system has already become obsolete on the modern battlefield. 

My thanks to William Wallcoen for his insights that helped shape my response.

* Thanks to Parab from Battleground Europe forums; he has informed me that Sweden has recently retired the 103 tank and has adopted the Leopard.

Tank Duel: Modern vs WWII

German Leopard II

Comparing the modern MBT (main battle tank) and that of a tank from the second world war is similar to comparing the Porsche to the Model T. Tank design and doctrine has changed so much since WWII that to many tankers of the period our MBTs would seem quite foreign.

In WWII each army had subdivisions of tanks, usually into Infantry Support (normal tanks like the Sherman and Panzer IV), Tank Destroyers (Stug or M10 series) or Self Propelled Guns (Wespe, Priest). The first and the last groups are still very much alive in today's military but the role of tank destroyer has essentially dropped out. Why you ask?

It is not so much that gun design has changed - in fact it really hasn't changed much in the last hundred years. It is still a rifled barrel (or smoothbore in case of the Leopard and Abrams) that is designed to withstand a controlled explosion and hurl a projectile. They have only gotten bigger. But they are not much bigger than the larger anti-tank guns or artillery of the period; so what is the big difference?

The difference is the ammunition they fire. Towards the end of WWII the British especially began to experiment with something called sabot rounds, which are projectiles loaded into oversized shells and fired at hyper velocities. Discarding sabot involves a smaller projectile loaded inside the round, the shell of which strips away from the internal package as it leaves the barrel. You can think of it as wrapping up a pencil and shooting it out of a shotgun - the wrapping comes off but all that energy is still behind that pencil pushing it extremely fast.

The 17 pounder in particular was tested with sabot, which proved to be somewhat of a failure due to the fact it would literally just skip off the Panzer V Panther's armour. The early sabot rounds were very small and most importantly short. They later realized that the longer (lengthwise) a sabot round was the less likely it was to deflect off armour (this led to the development of what is known as the long rod penetrator).

Armor

The armour protection of the tank has drastically changed over time. In WWII the convention was to use steel or even rolled homogenous steel (RHA), typically anywhere between 30-100mm thick. Better guns and penetrators forced tank designers to adapt, adding more armour and introducing the concept of sloped armour. Sloped armour will either cause an incoming round to skip off the surface, or force it to penetrate a larger effective armour value than the tank actually has due to trigonometry. 

In the 1980s we saw the first uses of what is known as composite armour like CHOBAM, most of which is still secret. It is known, however, that it uses several different layers of material including steel, aluminum, ceramics and possibly even depleted uranium. The sandwiching of these layers makes the effectiveness of the armour much greater than an equal amount of steel RHA. Reactive armour has also been developed, which allows the armour to literally react and defeat both kinetic energy penetrators and chemical-based explosives. The Russian T series in particular has incorporated explosive reactive armour, which can potentially defeat some incoming sabot rounds.

In modern tanks we have seen the effective armour value rise to enormous levels that would have left a WWII tank stuck in the mud. The M1A2 Abrams has effective armour values of over 900mm on the turret and 600 on the hull against kinetic energy penetrations, and over 1200 against HEAT(high explosive anti-tank) rounds. The Russian T-80 has anywhere from 280-800mm of effective armour on the turret, and 750 on the glacis of the hull. Compare this to the Russian T-34 which was put into service in 1941, which had only about 90mm of effective armour.

Penetration

The newer sabot rounds fired by the M1A2 can penetrate over 600mm of armour at 2,000 meters. This is easily capable of slicing through the front armour of the Russian T-72s we saw during Desert Storm. If push came to shove, the U.S. could field its depleted uranium sabots capable of even more penetration. The typical Soviet sabot from its 125mm gun (mounted on the T-72 and T-80) has similar penetration of 600-650mm at 2,000 meters. An interesting note is that the Russians (as per their long standing doctrine) prefer to use cheaper steel sabots because they reduce costs. Oddly enough they also carry more muzzle velocity than typical U.S. sabots and are similar in penetration.

Tiger vs Abrams

Recently I was asked if any WWII gun would be capable of defeating the armour of a MBT, and the answer is no. Even at point blank range to the flank of a modern tank the rounds would not penetrate, even the mighty 88mm L71 mounted on the Tiger II tank. Even spalling damage would not be possible, as the MBTs have built in spall liners for the crew cabin that prevents shrapnel kills from partial penetration. The only possible penetration would be in very small vulnerable areas like the turret ring, and even that would probably only cause partial penetration if at all.

A WWII era tank would never even make it to point blank range with a MBT. Most likely the modern MBT would spot it first through its series of electronic visual aids, and score a first round kill at extremely long range. The computerization of modern tanks is simply astounding; the Leopard II tank in particular has a fully integrated virtual map of the world outside the tank that it uses to coordinate with other members of its platoon and to mark enemy targets. New technology is in prototype stage which will detect the origin of incoming rounds and plot a counterfire solution before the enemy has a chance to reload.

The people that make the best Leopard II tankers are those who were very good at video games when they were children. This is the trend that will continue in the forseeable future as tanks are modernized worldwide. The German Leopard II is widely considered the finest and most modern tank in the world (its gun is also the same as the M1A2 Abrams, and was made by the same company that built the Panzer V Panther's Gun in WWII). The M1A2 is beginning to get a little long in the tooth, and efforts are underway to design a new U.S. MBT. 

My own personal conversations with a M1A2 commander led to a funny analogy. While playing a favourite game of mine, I was commanding a Panzer IIc built in the late 1930s. I complained about how the commanders view on the turret spinning around made me slightly dizzy. He remarked to me "Then you will never be a tank commander, because the view is pretty much like a video game". Whatever the next generation of tank, it seems it will be more familiar to the XBox generation rather than that of the Greatest generation.

Panzer III L42 vs L60

Hitler often bypassed the normal channels of logistics and strategy, most times creating problems ranging from minor inconveiniences to major catastrophes. One of the larger ones regards the "upgrade" of the Panzer III series between the Spring campaigns of 1941 and 1942. Hitler had ordered that the Pz3 tank was to be upgraded from the standard 37mm armament of 1940 as seen on the PzIII F and 38T models to the 50mm L60 gun. (L in this case is the length of the barrel in diameters of the gunbore).

Because the normal channels for procurement were bypassed some unforseen errors occured, resulting in the first batch of Pz3s to be equipped with the 50mm L42. This significantly hampered the range and velocity (and as a corollary the penetration) of the gun, and it is interesting to think how much of an effect that had on the renewed German offensives of spring in 1942.

This was designed to be an intermediate step to prop up the Panzer divisions until enough of the Panzer IV G and later models could be produced in enough numbers and delivered to the front (IVg being armed with the excellent 75mm L43 and later models the L48 which were also mounted on the Stug IIIg).