NATO’s war problem: weak armor

NATO has a huge problem that will take decades to overcome. Put most simply, the armor vehicles NATO has won’t survive in a firefight with the Russians, notwithstanding the fact that Russian armor is far from the best.

Russia has demonstrated in Ukraine that in conventional warfare it can knock out some of NATOs best tanks and decimate Western armored fighting vehicles like the US Bradley and the German Marder.

NATO does not have enough tanks, does not have sound logistics to support them, and faces significant problems coming up against modern Russian ground forces.

The Leopard tank has performed poorly, despite Ukrainian efforts to try and fix some of its many problems.

Even when it comes to the American M-1 Abrams tanks, Forbes reports the Ukrainians have not put it on the battlefield – probably because US advisors have told them it wouldn’t survive and the destruction of the Abrams would give the US a black eye.

So, instead, the Ukrainians have been urgently trying to “upgrade” the Abrams by gluing on Russian reactive armor and building cages on top of the tanks’ turrets to ward off Russian Lancet unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Germans, meanwhile, say that Ukraine no longer has any operational Leopard series 2 tanks; those that were broken down or salvaged from the battlefield have been sent off to Estonia for repairs.But Estonia does not have spare parts to fix them, so they are rusting in marshalling yards.

Modern tanks, like modern aircraft carriers, face serious challenges to survive in hostile environments.

Today tanks are vulnerable to anti-tank weapons, land mines including

• air-launched mines,
• killer drones such as the Russian Lancet,
• helicopter and aircraft-launched missiles and bombs, and
• accurate artillery strikes.

Anti-tank weapons today use tandem shaped-charge warheads designed to penetrate armor even where reactive armor appliques, known as explosive reactive armor (ERA) protect the tank.

I have not included the hand-held RPG-7 into the analysis since using them on a modern battlefield is a suicide mission. Western armies, of course, don’t have the RPG-7. These are well distributed to Russian clients and to terrorists. The Egyptians used them in the Yom Kippur war, but usually the operator was killed.

They use a shaped charge but not a tandem warhead configuration. The US equivalent is the precision shoulder-fired rocket launcher-1 (PRSL-1).  It is not part of the regular US Army kit but is sometimes used by US Special Forces.

ERA are explosive panels that are put on tanks to defeat the impact of a tandem warhead weapon.

Neither the Abrams nor the Leopard has reactive armor (ERA) because the highly classified passive armor of the tank body (sometimes called Chobham armor) was supposed to be able to protect the tank from modern anti-tank weapons like the Russian 9M133 Kornet (Comet).  Kornet uses a tandem HEAT warhead, where HEAT stands for High Explosive Anti Tank.  It was designed to defeat explosive reactive armor.

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