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.