Saturday, September 10, 2016

Why Russia's Tanks Are More Advanced Than American Tanks



Alex Lockie, Business Insider: US tanks have fallen far behind Russia in a key area

In 2006, Israel sent its top tier Merkava tanks to fight against largely unarmored Hezbollah divisions, but they still faced considerable losses owing to the proliferation of advanced antitank rounds, many of which originated in Russia.

Fast forward to the 2014 Gaza conflict with Hamas. Despite Hamas having similar weapons and backing, not a single Merkava or Israeli armored fighting vehicle was lost. The reason being that Israel had perfected the Trophy Active Protection System (APS) to defend its tanks.

The US, on the other hand, has not faced a peer or near-peer adversary in ground combat in decades, and, as a reflection of that, the US's main combat tank, the M1 Abrams, lacks an APS.

Read more ....

WNU editor: The U.S. better pay attention to what the Israelis are doing.

6 comments:

B.Poster said...

Israel is our most important ally. It would be in our interst to pay close attention to ehat they are doing, try and learn from them, and request technical assistance where and when possible.

Jac said...

Good news! This will help lawmakers to pour more money into the Pentagon for improving our weapons.

efFlh43 said...

To answer the quation that the article ask, it's because US choosen another direction/focus of their developments, than Russia. But this does not mean the US made a bad decision with this direction, it's not that simple. If it would, than the US and Russia made a bad decision with their tank development over Germany during WW2, but T34 and Shermans still were good tank, even if they were not the most advanced, biggest, "tacticool" pieces on the ground, they still taken part of the victory.


Some 20-30 years ago many military expert said that the Armored Warfare, and the tanks themselves are a dead end of development, and are useless in future wars (and from now on Air Warfare will solve every problem of ours). It's clearly turned out that tanks still have use, but their roles changed a lot. I think US made a good decision when they did not committed to a whole new tank development project, and instead they started to upgrade the Abrams, which is hell of a good tank for the purpose it's used. Such upgrade projects improved the defense capability of the tank. And yes the active protection is a very important, but not the only option for protect against such threats.


Even if Israel praised on how they using this "advanced" technology, it's really not that advanced, neither the APS nor the Merkava itself. There are plenty of other technologies developed already, but the key is that does they really that good (and not in theory, but on the ground)? Because if you cannot have soft units (infantry, light armoured vehicles) around your vehicles than what is the point? One way or another every system could be played out, and they will be, that how developments goes.


I remember a video, made in Damascus, where in the urban warfare rebel "snipers" (who are not really snipers, just some dude with an FN Fal/SVD/AKM that had a scope mounted on it) aimed only at the periscopes of the tank, destroying the glass on both the driver's and commander's periscope. Even if a tank cannot be destroyed by simple small arms, it's can be damaged enough that some system stop working. What does a very expensive device worth if an underedducated/trained fighter, with a mass produced, cheap DM/Sniper rifle could destroy this APS with a few bullets from the range of 500 meters? On the other hand, regular armor, passive and reactive armor cannot be played out thsi way, bu can in others.


I seen houndreds of ATGM launches in Syria/Iraq, and in almost all cases the hit was there because of bad positioning, and bad crew/tactical decision making. The time has passed when you could stand on the top of an empty hill with your tank, and feel safe. Armies all around the world need to step over this 70 year old tactics, for the same reason that for "Line infantry" tactis are not used anymore, because it's not working. Russia and US may have different ideas on how to use the tanks, and that's fine, only wars could tell which one is working, but with tanks the "HOW" is way more important than on "WHAT" is being used.

James said...

mlacix,
"Russia and US may have different ideas on how to use the tanks, and that's fine, only wars could tell which one is working, but with tanks the "HOW" is way more important than on "WHAT" is being used."
That goes to the heart of the question.

Si-vis-pasen- said...

James::DARPA's iron curtain protection systems.:-)

TWN said...

With the vast array of excellent anti tank weapons,Mines and IED's. I wouldn't want to be in either or any Tank for that matter.The West will chew up the Russian AFV's as will the Russians chew up our AFV's. But there still good for resource stealing in the third world I guess.