I think people forget how good unmanned turrets are, if your tank cooks off and the crew survives and the engine works, theres a very good chance you can bring the tank back to base to repair/scrap it
PLA Next Generation Main Battle Tank
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Even more if its made to toss out from pressure, releasing a lot of force that would disable the rest of the tank.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I think some people are getting a little carried away here wanting tanks to be able to counter drones and FPVs effectively all by themselves.
That’s just not realistic or practical, and is exactly the same thinking as saying tank designs are a ‘failure’ if they can’t single-handedly deal with enemy manned tac air back during the Cold War years.
In many ways, we can expect to see a similar evolutionary approach in countering drones as ground forces underwent to counter manned tac air, with dedicated anti drone assets added to the ground forces order of battle, just like how mobile SAMs and MANPADs proliferated to counter the growing air threat.
We will also see some token efforts made to add anti drone protection to tanks and other armoured vehicles, but those will be more about psychological comforting of the crews rather than seriously expecting that to offer a truly effective hard counter to drones, just like how tanks commander machine gun was laughably labelled as for AA.
On that basis, I think we should basically strip out any consideration for how a tank might deal with an FPV swarm as a criteria for judging if the design is good. Just like no one would call a modern tank bad because it can’t take a JDAM and survive.
That’s just not realistic or practical, and is exactly the same thinking as saying tank designs are a ‘failure’ if they can’t single-handedly deal with enemy manned tac air back during the Cold War years.
In many ways, we can expect to see a similar evolutionary approach in countering drones as ground forces underwent to counter manned tac air, with dedicated anti drone assets added to the ground forces order of battle, just like how mobile SAMs and MANPADs proliferated to counter the growing air threat.
We will also see some token efforts made to add anti drone protection to tanks and other armoured vehicles, but those will be more about psychological comforting of the crews rather than seriously expecting that to offer a truly effective hard counter to drones, just like how tanks commander machine gun was laughably labelled as for AA.
On that basis, I think we should basically strip out any consideration for how a tank might deal with an FPV swarm as a criteria for judging if the design is good. Just like no one would call a modern tank bad because it can’t take a JDAM and survive.
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JDAMs are expensive munitions that require air superiority by the enemy to be used effectively against tanks, also you could counter enemy air to prevent getting hit by JDAMs in the first place. Drones are a lot more prevalent, much cheaper to produce and extremely easy to use that still has the capability to take out MBTs in a single strike. Effective counters against drones could be made a priority IMO.
JDAMs are the wrong reference here, the US is more likely to use SDBs for that and will be far better at knocking tanks as they can be used even in contested air zones as Ukraine has shown with the Russian UMPKs.
FPVs will be better countered by a dedicated solution such as UGV escorts, actual infantry cover and other support vehicles etc. and not modern Landkreuzers.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Firstly, drones are only cheap right now because of open and free trade with China. Not saying it is likely to happen soon, but theoretically China could end the world wide supply of cheap drones and critical drone parts overnight at a stroke with one regulation change.
Countries and militaries need to think really long and hard if they want to make cheap commercial
drones a backbone component of their future war fighting arsenal when they are so ridiculously dependent on China for critical components.
But putting that aside, when you counter enemy manned tac air, do you focus on point defence against incoming munitions or try to hit the enemy launch platform at source before they can spam munitions at you?
The true hard counter to FPVs is not to try to Iron Dome the drones, but to be able to effectively and rapidly go after the pilots as they are both the bottlenecks and Achilles Heel of that entire kill chain. But that’s not a job for tanks, rather new dedicated platforms.
Yes, armoured formations still need to be able to effectively deal with incoming FPVs that slip through or during ambushes, but again, that is down to the formation having dedicated counter drone assets, not for every vehicle in the formation to be able to sole swarms of drones without a scratch.
Countering drones is a desperately urgent requirement for all serious militaries today and in the future. But the correct way to counter drones is with new generation dedicated platforms instead of trying to make every vehicle into real life warhammer superheavies.
Given that sufficiently small and cheap drones can and are distributed down to the platoon or even squad level, the task of identifying and eliminating so many distributed targets in a timely fashion is not realistic. Rather, the emphasis needs to be on disrupting their ability to communicate and coordinate so as to mass drones from many different units into a single strike package. Fortunately, there is a great deal of overlap with this mission profile and preexisting efforts to disrupt and degrade enemy C&C.
Dealing with a few drones at a time is easy for any halfway competent air defense. The trick is to keep that number down.
If that pen is true and that was achieved with a 105mm what will the pen be for the next 125 ammo? Better be crazy
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Sure jamming will play a part, it already is in Ukraine, but already FPVs are adapting with fibreoptic guidance.
It is perhaps telling that you are trying to make this into a pick one from the list kind of deals when the correct response is to pick every kind of counter drone option available and then create even more brand new methods and options. The reason why unintentionally needlessly boxed yourself into thinking you can only pick one solution is because you are still thinking of countering drones on an individual vehicle basis.
You can’t tick the ‘select all’ option for countering drones if you limit yourself to having to be able to retrofit your solution into a single tank or IFV.
This is why I keep hammering the point that the best strategy to deal with FPVs and other future cheap drone swarms is to use dedicated entirely new platforms. That way you can largely free yourself of many of the constraints that limit your imagination and solutions.
You can have a tethered duct fan heavy drone armed with AESA radar, options and lasers acting as persistent over-watch to armoured spearheads to massive extend your detection and engagement horizon against enemy drones; You can have mobile lasers to snipe drones; You can have microwave vehicles that can fry drone swarms en mass; you can have interceptor drones flying a CAP perimeter around your armour; you can have airborne jammer drones disruption enemy satellite comms to drones; you can have EW hunter-killer drones homing in on enemy control signals to go after the pivots; you can have similar optics based hunter killers with optics specially tuned to spot fibre option cables hunting pilots. You can have gun based air defence vehicles and others carrying swarms of interceptor drones. That’s just on a completely different level to defences you can realistically fit on a single vehicle in terms of the scale and scope of countermeasures available, and that’s before you even get to the most killer issue of cost.
Having dedicated systems will be a big capital outlay, but even a modestly priced solution for individual vehicles will cost vastly more if you look to outfit it across your entire armoured vehicle fleet.
The reason the Russians are reduced to individual vehicle level solutions in Ukraine is because of their systematic and chronic under-investment across the board in support assets has meant that they only have a vast fleet of tanks and IFVs. They lack basically everything else needed to allow large armoured formations to rapidly punch through enemy minefields and other obstacles, and they also lack effective rapid counter-battery capabilities and most critically, air superiority to allow them to suppress Ukrainian mobile artillery.
It is Ukraine’s NATO supplied artillery that is the reason Russia has been forced to abandon massed armoured formations and instead use their armour piecemeal, which in turn is what is making FPVs so disproportionately effective there.
People have just got it in their heads that armoured formations are over from the Ukraine experience without really critically drilling down to the root cause of why to see if that is a truly universal paradigm shift in armoured warfare, or just a Russian case special issue.