Why Have So Many Abrams Tanks Been Destroyed in Ukraine? | War on Tape | Daily Mail

Why Have So Many Abrams Tanks Been Destroyed in Ukraine? | War on Tape | Daily Mail

this is an American ab’s Tank being hit by a Russian drone near the city of adiva back in February and this is the very first piece of footage we’ve seen of one being destroyed by the Russian army the abam is among the world’s best but the ukrainians managed to lose three of them in a little over a week and they have lost even more since then which begs the question does the Abrams have a place on the battlefields of the future we’ll analy this footage delve into the history of the Abrams and speak to an expert to find out this is one of 31 Abrams M1 A1 tanks given to the ukrainians by the US and used to equip the 47th Brigade the M1A1 entered service in 1986 it weighs around 60 tons is powered by a gas turbine engine that’ll run on pretty much any kind of fuel and is armed with a 120 mm main Cannon it is coated in ch composite armor which provides some of the best protection in the world to the crew of four who sit inside the turret at the back of the turret is an armored compartment where the ammunition is stored which is separated from the turret by blast doors that means even if the ammo explodes during battle the crew will be protected and on top of the compartment are blowout panels deliberately weak sections which pop off and vent the Blast away from the crew the Russians claim this tank was spotted by soldiers of the 15th motor rifle Brigade who used a piranha fpv or firstperson view drone to disable it there are two kinds of piranha drone the piranha 7 which is smaller and the piranha 10 which is larger both are made up of a quadcopter drone with a top speed of 140 km per hour the piranha 7 can carry a load of up to 2.5 kilos and has a limited range because it only contains a small battery the piranha 10 can carry a load of up to 4 1/2 kilos and has an extended range because of its larger battery and more powerful propellers both are controlled using multiple radio frequencies which the pilot can change inlight making it very difficult to jam the drones only cost about $500 each which makes them ideal for destroying high value targets like a $4.3 million Abrams tank the Russians claim this tank was hit by one piranha before they started filming like ly targeting the engine or the tracks which has disabled it in military speak this is an M kill or a Mobility kill it means the vehicle cannot move but is probably repairable if it can be rescued what we’re about to watch is the Russians trying to convert that M kill into a k kill or a catastrophic kill meaning the tank would be out of action for good how are they going to do it by flying another drone into it the Russians have clearly done their homework because the second drone hit hits the Abrams on the back of the turret the blast causes the ammo to start cooking off which means the heat from the fire is setting off the shells but the ammo compartment armor keeps the blast confined to the back of the tank and the blowout panels pop off here and here venting the explosion upwards if you look here you can see at least three of the four ab’s crew make it out alive and even though the ABS catches fire it doesn’t explode the Russian mission to turn the kill into a k kill ends in Failure this took place in late February and was initially dismissed as a one-off but barely a week later two more Abrams were lost in the exact same place in almost the exact same fashion for a tank that is supposed to be World leading that seems like a problem to really get a sense of how the Abrams is fairing in Ukraine we need to dive into the archives and compare it to other tanks Russia has mostly relied on Old Soviet t-72s to fight this war and they’ve not handled it well Ukraine claims to have destroyed around 7,000 of them and when they go they can really go in case you wondering this is what a kill looks [Music] like this is a legacy of the t72 Soviet past when these tanks were built during the Cold War the USSR had an army numbering in the millions it needed a lot of Tanks so they had to be cheap and easy to make make the t72 was the result it weighs around 40 tons much lighter than Western tanks and has a crew of just three which means it is much smaller as well the fourth crew member has been replaced by a piece of Kit called an autoloader which automatically reloads the Tank’s 125 mm Cannon after each shot because of the way the autoloader works the spare ammunition is stored directly underneath the crew and inside the turret if a t72 is hit and the blast sets off the ammo inside the tank the result is a catastrophic explosion that results in these huge turret tosses otherwise known as the Jack in the Box effect Russia’s newer tanks like the t80 and T90 fa slightly better but not by much they generally have better armor than the older t-72s but are still based on the original Soviet designs which means the ammo is still stored in and around the crew Western tanks are by no means indestructible but they do a much better job of protecting the men side America’s Abrams Britain’s Challenger and Germany’s leopards are also products of the Cold War their designers knew they could never match the Soviets for numbers so to stand a chance their tanks would have to take multiple hits and keep going and if they were destroyed it was important that at least the crew survived to fight another day compared to Soviet tanks like the t72 the abam and Challenger are bigger and a lot heavier but that’s because they are better protected aside from features like blowout panels on the ABS both of these tanks use a specialist kind of armor called choam armor this is made of a composite of different materials layered together exactly which ones is a closely guarded secret but it is thought to offer some of the best protection in the world the leopards use a different kind of composite which is not quite as good but still offers high levels of protection like the ABS the leopard and Challenger have four crew members including a loader the ammo is also stored in a blast prooof container at the back of the turret rather than underneath the crew this is meant to stop the entire tank exploding in the event the ammo compartment is hit despite being heavier than Russia’s tanks Advanced engines make them faster and therefore harder to hit high-tech targeting systems mean their main goal GS can lock onto targets and fire on the move so they don’t have to slow down or stop which would make them vulnerable that is good news for Ukraine because it has saved the lives of many tank Crews which Kiev cannot afford to waste and potentially the tanks themselves provided they can be told off the battlefield for that reason the Abrams looks like it does indeed have a place on the battlefields of the future here’s what an expert thinks so here we have footage of the drone hitting the back of the Abrams which is its most vulnerable point and it’s hit it right on top of the ammunition compartment which sits at the back of the turret in an armored compartment and it’s got blowout panels on the top which you can see in effect there so that if the ammunition is hit and it Cooks off and and causes that kind of Fireball it’s directed upwards away from the crew inside the tank rather than towards them uh but this of course only works if the armored compartment is sealed so if you’re caught as you’re opening the compartment to load the gun you might in trouble as the explosive force can be directed within the turret but there it looks like it did its job and saved the crew the Abrams itself it is one of the best tanks out there but I think before you start looking at the Abrams in particular you’ve got to set the scene on on tank warfare in general and I think there’s not many examples in the last few Decades of large scale conventional conflict where we can really see how the tank fares on the battlefield and the few examples that we do have show that the tank is by no means Invincible nor is it designed to be so if you go back to 1973 with the Yum kipor War where the Israelis were fighting the Egyptians and the syrians that War lasted about a month and the Israelis lost a thousand tanks and the Egyptians and syrians lost 2,200 tanks over the course of the month of fighting and one of the reasons that the Israelis lost so many tanks was The Saga wire guided anti-tank missile which a lot of people at the time had similar conversations with drones today so this was uh you know very small weapon that an infantryman could carry on his back into battle lie down and using a little joystick and a wire could guide it onto the tank and it took the Israelis by surprise and resulted in a lot of heavy tank losses not many years after you’ve got the Iran Iraq war in the 1980s and that conflict has a few similarities to today with sort of very static front lines trench warfare and there were you know thousands of Tanks lost on both sides in that conflict as well so I think in general you know we’re just not used to seeing this kind of fighting and that we’ve been taken a bit by surprise at how many tanks have been destroyed but there’s nothing particularly unusual with that so I guess that brings us onto the Abrams which is you know one of the best tanks out there but one thing that we should bear in mind is the ukrainians were given the M1 A1 variant which is the older variant so the Abrams was first designed and entered service in the 1980s when drones were not much of a problem and the Americans were thinking about designing a tank to the Soviets on the sort of PLS and Rolling Hills of West Germany so it’s got a lot of armor on the front uh where You’ expect the enemy to be coming at you but on the top it has not got as much armor I think it’s about uh 25 mm on the top of the turret and 38 mm on the top of the whole where the driver sit so these are two quite vulnerable points so if you know a weapon strikes you there you are a bit more vulnerable uh it’s just that when they were designed this is not where they were expecting weapons to hit them it’s not just Abram’s tanks that are getting killed in Ukraine it seems no tank is safe anymore figures aren’t easy to get but from open source information um you know because the Russians and ukrainians have very high claims of what they’ve destroyed of of each other’s equipment but taking the or database which is a team that looks through what you can visually confirm uh through videos or pictures of being destroyed we can see that the ukrainians over the two plus years of fighting have lost around 800 tanks either destroyed damaged or captured and the Russians have lost uh around 3,000 tanks so if the ukrainians about one tank a day for the Russians three and a half to four tanks a day uh which I think tells you a lot about the the design features of Russian tanks they’re a lot lighter designed more for mobility and Firepower than for protection which is a sort of inverse philosophy to a lot of Western tanks so looking at the Western tanks that Ukraine has received so far they’ve only received 130 of what you would probably consider modern Western tanks uh so those are your leopard twos your Challenger twos and your Abrams they received several hundred sort of upgraded Soviet era tanks from from NATO countries but these 130 modern Western tanks are the best protected so far they have lost 19 of those destroyed and 22 damaged or abandoned which I think is actually considering the scale of the fighting and the intensity in the prolonged nature of the fighting quite impressive uh that only that many have been lost especially if you look back to when Ukraine was conducting its counter offensive they were attacking against heavily fortified with mines tank obstacles well prepared artillery fire zones and they were doing this without air superiority and without artillery superiority and despite that for being on the offensive for several months the fact that you know only 40 tanks of the western tanks given to them so far have been taken out of action and some of those will have been recovered and repaired of the damaged and abandoned tanks I think that’s Testament to the protective features of Western tanks in Ukraine which begs the question why is anyone still using tanks if they keep getting blown up the combination of Firepower mobility and protection that the tank offers simply can’t be replaced no other platform uh can do the same thing till a system comes along that can do that both sides will be desperately trying to get as many as they can cuz you’ve seen what the drones and artillery and mines can do to a tank when they hit it but if you imagine what kind of effect that Firepower has on much less heavily armored vehicles whether it’s you know the American Humvee or the Russian BMP you’re a lot more vulnerable and it’s only the tank that can afford you that unique combination of Firepower mobility and protection if no Army is about to give up the tank then what I wanted to know is whether there’s anything tank Crews can do to better protect themselves the massive benefit of a fpv drone is that if you attach a an anti-tank weapon to it you can literally sort of guide it around to the very specific point of the tank that you you most want to hit and there’s not much uh the moment that tankers can do about it in Ukraine for stopping drones uh electronic warfare is one option whacking some Jammers onto the tank is one way of interfering with either the drone’s targeting systems if it’s a a loitering munition or the communication between the Drone pilot you know several miles away and the Drone itself for an fpv you can try and jam them although again as part of the measure counter measure the Drone Pilots themselves can switch frequencies and try and evade the the jamming you could add extra armor to the weak points this is what the swedes did with the leopard twos that they gave to Ukraine and only one of those so far has been destroyed although several have been hit the problem with adding extra armor to the top of the tank is that it adds a lot of weight and in Ukraine that’s not ideal given the sort of Muddy pictures we’re used to seeing of tanks getting bogged down after it’s been raining uh these things are already very heavy sort of 40 50 60 tons uh so adding armor is not the route you would want to go um but beyond that there’s also active Protection Systems which are a relatively new uh feature of tanks not many have them but people are very quickly exploring options and these uh could could include of hard kill measures so you’ve got a couple of small Radars on the top of the tank and a couple of uh of projectile firing systems which basically fire a shotgun shell equivalent an incoming threat and either try and destroy it uh disrupt it or if it’s a tandem Warhead that’s coming in uh to try and uh make it prematurely fire to protect the tank the problem with an active protection system is they’re quite expensive uh and it probably adds something like 25 to 50% of the cost of the tank but if you want to protect it that’s something that I think most people are going to have to do the issue with current generation of active prodection systems is they’re not really designed to deal with drones but people are already looking into how they can be adapted to face that threat and sometimes it isn’t about the tank itself so much as how the tank is being used ideally your tanks would be used as part of a combined arms effort working in tandem with other elements of your land forces but also your Air Forces as well the artillery and air power can protect the tank from uh infantry and drone operators and enable it to work as effectively as possible and I think one of the reasons why it wasn’t supported in the the footage we saw is this lack of ammunition the other problem is uh the types of vehicles available to support wouldn’t be able to do much they’d be sitting ducks they’ve not got the kind of range or protection that the tank does and they would be very vulnerable to to drones whereas a lot of Western countries at the moment are now looking into what kind of vehicles can be sent in with tanks and other mechanized formations to protect them from the Drone threat so there’s an increased emphasis these days on short- Range air defense vehicles or sh Rad or very short range air defense Vehicles which is Vore ad and we used to have a lot of these during the Cold War to face off against low flying attack aircraft or helicopters and one of these you can see is the German Gard um self-propelled anti-aircraft gun uh which ukrainians do have a few of and they’ve been using to good effect Against drones but I think at the moment they’re mostly being used to protect critical infrastructure from the uh Shad drones whereas if they could be on the front line then they would be able to protect the tanks and the Americans and others in the west are very aware of this problem and are designing a new generation of shorad uh mobile Shor ride platforms uh the Americans very recently ordered 144 Shor ride variance of the striker armored personnel carrier as a stop Gap measure while they think about what the best approach moving forward is and now for the big question does William think tanks have a place on the battlefield of the future yes they absolutely certainly do uh it’s just about making sure that they’re as good as they can be moving forward that’s where this tape stops we’ll be back soon to play you through another episode of War on tape hey everyone thanks for watching if you want more videos like this in your feed don’t forget to hit like And subscribe to our YouTube channel

Why Have So Many Abrams Tanks Been Destroyed in Ukraine? | War on Tape | Daily Mail

The Abrams is one of the world’s best tanks, but Ukraine managed to lose three of them in their first week on the battlefield in the Russia Ukraine war – and even more have been destroyed since then. Russia has been taking out these 4.3million dollar war machines with cheap ‘piranha’ drones laden with explosives. But is that enough to stop these US-supplied weapons? And how are the armies of the future going to protect their expensive military hardware from the new threat of drone warfare?

0:00 Intro
0:36 In-depth examination at the Abrams Tank seen on the Ukraine war battlefield
1:30 Piranha FPV – the bane of Abrams tanks
2:23 M-Kills to K-Kills: How Piranha FPVs destroy Abrams tanks
3:50 T-72 to Leopards: Comparing the Abrams tank to other tanks
7:25 Military expert reacts to footage of an Abrams tank exploding
10:33 Are ANY tanks safe in 21st century warfare?
13:25 Can tank crews do anything to better protect themselves?
15:45 How much of tank vulnerability comes from how it’s used?
17:35 Do tanks have a place in battlefields of the future?

War on Tape: A foreign correspondent sifts through tapes from to reveal a closer look at the often overlooked features of war.

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