(December 6, 2018 at 5:42 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Governments around the world have been letting their tank programs die for the simple reason that the tank is just not what it once was even though they've become exponentially more expensive to field. Small arms are more lethal than they used to be...airpower is cheaper (and also more lethal), and less and less of a conflict plays out where a tank could even conceptually shine.
Then there are the issues of engagements where tanks should have done well, but got rolled. Often enough by the far cheaper but just as lethal afvs and their infantry buddies, without whom tanks can't operate anyway.
It can't be stressed enough that anyone thinking about ways to fight the past engagement has already lost the next. In the mostly urban, low level, assymetric war of the future, a war that russia is itself pioneering, tanks are more tools of propaganda than instruments of battlefield superiority. They've become the sort of battleships of the land that they were always envisioned as....but, you know, see: battleship.
No. The notion that tanks are the battleships on land is a totally inaccurate perception of the role of the tank and the role of the battleship.
In classical battleship era naval thinking, battleship is there to provide the ultimate muscle for sea control. Battleships are meant to take on the strongest component of enemy naval power - the enemy’s battleship - and slug it out until one side or the other loses the ability to exert sea control. Battleships enable the winning side to control the seas.
Tanks were never meant to control land. Nor were tanks really meant to slug it out with other tanks, the primary role of tanks is to avoid precisely those things. Instead they are mean to oil for weak points in enemy defenses, break through and attack vulnerable rear areas. Tanks don’t control land. It tries to find the path of least resistance, avoiding other tanks whenever possible, and infiltrate the enemy’s rear, leaving the enemy still in control of most of his land, but you attack a few crticiical points behind his front line. Controlling land is for infantry.
So ironically, the component of land forces most analogous to naval battleships ofvthe classical battleship era were not tanks but infantry.
