The recent news of Ukrainian strikes on separatist forces in Donbass with Turkish-made UAS has reminded me that I’ve never quite managed to put together my scattered thoughts about last year’s conflict between Azerbaijan and the Armenian-backed separatist Republic of Artsakh in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Of course, the thing is I haven’t really done a particularly in-depth study of the conflict, so most of my knowledge about it is second-hand at best. But even then I’m pretty sure I’ve learned enough to know that some of the ways the conflict has been presented in the popular imagination can be misleading at best (and outright wrong at worst). Note that I was actually planning to write this for an Indonesian audience, but I’m writing this in English first because I usually find it easier to sort out complex ideas in that language before translating them into Indonesian (as opposed to writing them in Indonesian from the get-go).
Maybe the lowest-hanging fruit out of all those media takes is the sensational idea that, thanks to the proliferation of armed UAS and loitering munitions, now “the tank is dead” or “tanks have been rendered obsolete” somehow. It’s almost not worth debunking since we’ve been seeing the same idea touted repeatedly with every new development in antitank weaponry, tactics, procedures, or whatever, and it has been proved wrong pretty much each and every time. Seriously. It’s just about as old as the tank itself, starting with the equivocal performance of British tanks in their combat debut at Flers-Courcelette (1916). The next major episode was probably the one related to the development and adaptation of dive-bombing to attack enemy bunkers/strongpoints and tank reserves gathering behind the front in the 1930s; this is pretty comical in hindsight since we now know from the German experience in the Spanish Civil War and World War II that yes, dive-bombers worked well against enemy tanks, but they were only really effective when there were also friendly tanks to exploit the disruption they caused (see the thing about combined arms below). Then it surfaced again with nuclear warfare in the 1940s and 50s, and once more it turned out to be quite comical in hindsight since people soon realised that tanks were some of the most survivable weapon systems on the nuclear battlefield if equipped with the appropriate CBRN protection. Antitank missiles in the 1960s and 70s presented a much more serious threat, but most certainly not an insurmountable one; for instance, Israeli tankers during the Yom Kippur War (1973) didn’t need all that long to develop countermeasures against the 9M14 Malyutka (AT-3 Sagger) missiles used by their Egyptian adversaries, such as the “Sagger dance” (driving in zigzags and other irregular movements to make it more difficult for the missile operator to track the tank) and simply returning fire at known or likely launch sites in the hopes of disrupting the missile operator’s concentration. These countermeasures may not have entirely negated the threat but at the very least they managed to restore some measure of parity between the tank and the antitank missile team in terms of their ability to neutralise each other. And of course US experience in the (Second) Gulf War against Iraq clearly highlighted the repeating theme that antitank missiles (whether launched from the ground or from the air) tended to work best when there were also friendly tanks around.
I guess the main issue with this kind of “tankz is ded” reporting comes from the naive assumption that tanks are supposed to be invulnerable or something. The fact is they never were; there have always been weapons capable of gaining asymmetric advantage over the tank for as long as the tank itself has existed. Indeed, developments in tank warfare (not only in terms of technology, but also tactics and arguably even rear-area procedures like repair and refuelling) were usually driven by the need to overcome these threats. The Western Allies in World War II learned to smother German anti-tank guns with artillery fire or airstrikes (or both) as soon as those guns revealed their position by opening fire. The Germans similarly learned to disperse and camouflage their tanks more carefully to reduce the risk of being spotted and targeted by Allied airpower (including — or maybe especially — artillery observation aircraft). When the Israelis decided to design and produce their own tanks, those tanks (i.e. the Merkava series) incorporated the lessons from the 1973 encounters with antitank missiles by incorporating features to disrupt missile guidance (such as smoke projectors) and to resist the shaped-charge warheads commonly used by both infantry antitank weapons (such as the Soviet/Russian RPG-7) and antitank missiles. Even the US Army in the 21st century is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into admitting that maybe its armoured and mechanised assets need to be protected by a much larger number and variety of short-range air defence (SHORAD) assets after all, what with the possibility of fighting without air supremacy on one hand and the increasing threat from unmanned platforms on the other.
The other side of the coin is that tanks have never been particularly effective when they weren’t used as an integral part of a combined-arms system anyway. Both the Soviets and the Germans learned this the hard way during the Spanish Civil War; numerous tank offensives failed when the defenders successfully separated attacking tanks from their supporting infantry by laying down mortar and artillery barrages that the tanks could drive through with minimal losses but the infantry couldn’t. With the friendly infantry lagging behind, the tanks became extremely vulnerable to ambushes by antitank guns at long ranges and enemy infantry up close. Similarly, British defensive tactics during the North African campaign in World War II emphasised that infantry facing an enemy tank attack shouldn’t try to stop the tanks on their own, but rather let the tanks pass and then engage the supporting infantry so that those enemy infantry would get separated from the tanks; this way, antitank defences in the rear would have had an easier time dealing with the Axis tanks (and the British frontline infantry might even be able to turn around and attack the tanks from the rear once they had succesfully driven off the Axis infantry). Later in Normandy, British shortages in infantry replacements during the Normandy campaign forced them to launch Operation Goodwood as a very tank-heavy offensive with inadequate infantry support, with the result that the British tanks took far heavier losses than they should have. Much later, during the Iran-Iraq War, there was the unfortunately little-known tank battle near Susangerd (1981), where a major Iranian tank attack proceeded with practically no infantry support (since the infantry, already numerically inadequate, was stuck behind a bridge destroyed by Iraqi air attack) and was massacred by dug-in Iraqi tanks and mechanised infantry.
None of these mean that the tank is useless. It’s still a very powerful platform when used properly, and one thing people tend to forget is that the tank tends to be more survivable than the infantry as a general rule. Casualty statistics from Normandy show that infantry soldiers were at least twice or three times as likely to get wounded or killed than armoured vehicle crews (especially tank crews) under similar combat conditions. It’s something we see during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict too. Reliable casualty figures are hard to come by, but let’s be lazy by using the total military deaths quoted in the Wikipedia article (4025 reported killed on the Armenian side, 2908 on the Azerbaijani side) and compare them to vehicle losses documented through OSINT (open-source intelligence) at Oryxspioenkop. And to tilt the odds against the tank, let’s unfairly assume that all tank crews were killed when a tank was destroyed and half of them were killed when the tank was damaged or captured (let’s say three men dead per destroyed tank and one and a half for every one damaged or captured), even though the real survival rates were probably rather higher than that. This gives us about 580.5 tank crewmen lost on the Armenian side (let’s round it up to 581) and 132 on the Azerbaijani side. Even with this unfair weighting, tank crewmen only made up less than 15% of the deaths on the Armenian side and less than 5% on the Azerbaijani side. These numbers were no doubt significantly lower than the percentage of comparable losses among the infantry. (And yes, I know I should be comparing them proportionally instead — whether the tanks made up a higher or lower percentage of the losses than the percentage they made up among the forces actually involved in combat — but data on that is even harder to some by.)
Bottom line? No, the use of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) and loitering munitions as seen in the Nagorno-Karabakh war hasn’t rendered tanks obsolete. If anything, it has given a savvy commander an additional item to add to the usual toolkit of combined-arms warfare — alongside the tank and other less novel weapon systems. But then how do the new weapon systems work within this context?
Well, it’s getting quite late here (going all the way into the early morning hours, as a matter of fact), so I guess I’ll save that for another time.
sillynewsboy 