Ukraine’s Nato tanks have one major problem which can leave them stuck like sitting ducks

Ukraine’s Nato tanks have one major problem which can leave them stuck like sitting ducks

[Music] NATO tanks have one common problem which may have actually contributed to the failure of Ukraine’s summer counter offensive just inside a tank on our way into Gaza there is rubble and destruction as far as you can see they’re digging in their positions they’re practicing P Point accuracy over Target is what has transformed so much of this conflict this is World at War I’m the sun’s Defender editor Jerome starky and joining me today is Dr Jack Watling land Warfare expert from the Royal United Services Institute here in London Jack you’ve written that tanks aren’t dead but they are too heavy yes certainly NATO tanks so NATO tanks were developed in terms of the modern fielded fleets uh for defending West Germany in the 1980s and therefore they knew that the terrain they were going to be fighting over and they weren’t expected to maneuver very much they needed to survive for as long as possible in place to knock out as many Soviet tanks as possible and what that led to was tanks which are fantastically accurate very survivable and extremely heavy now to give you an example of the consequence of that most bridges in Eastern Europe will not support vehicles that are over 60 tons within the weight distrib tion that a tank and let’s be clear the the the German Leopard 2 the American ABS the British Challenger 2 are all significantly over yeah yeah so leopard is about 69 challeng is 72 Etc um compared to the Soviet tanks which are much lighter in the 40s and 50s and so that’s problem one pro the second problem is that in order to keep a tank alive today you need some additional things you need electronic warfare protection you need active protection the will intercept anti-tank guided weapons and those things come at significant weight an APS an active protection system needs radar it needs cooling it weighs about three tons and so when you start not only adding that on the vehicle but adding it on top of the vehicle so it’s becoming more topheavy you end up with uh a vehicle which will sink into the ground quite literally unless it is on the ideal type of terrain and so in terms of the consequences of the counter offensive last year it meant that the Russians could look at a map they could look at the weight of the vehicles they could look at which routes would actually allow uh the passage of those vehicles and then optimize their defense against those routes because it was obvious that an attack with those Vehicles would have to go down those routes so they knew where the ukrainians were coming I mean they knew where the ukrainians were coming for other reasons too right so we shouldn’t say this is monocausal they they understood the plans but yes this absolutely contributed and it means that when us officers talk about maneuver uh and how you can achieve Surprise by by out flanking and actually there’s a lot less maneuver space in that environment than people often imagine because their vehicles simply will not work on the ground that you might want to exploit so I spent time with the Challenger Squadron in Ukraine and they they told me exactly this that uh in fact the commander said he he’d driven a t72 and he’d driven a challenger and he said uh the Challenger kept on get gets stuck good tank gets stuck exactly accurate well defended but really couldn’t move it around in fact the day we were with them we got stuck in the mud on on a training range so saw it uh in in real life and and it’s worth noting that that is what will get the Challenger destroyed because as soon as it is in a known position and not moving from that position that’s when you’ll get a whole series of drones coming over and knocking away at it and they will destroy it we’ve seen that indeed it that’s what happened yeah is there a sweet spot is there is there a correct weight that a tank should be so from a uh I mean the answer is as light as possible from a Mobility point of view obviously you also want the cruits to be able to survive hits against most weapon systems and what you tend to find is that something which will knock out a tank at 55 tons will still knock out the tank even if it has enough armor uh at 80 tons it won’t necessarily completely destroy the tank but it will still probably blow off its sensors immobilize it Etc so you don’t actually you start getting declining Returns on the level of protection at the same time if you go below about 45 tons then you start to make some really significant compromises in protection where an awful lot of things will simply destroy the vehicle so the question then is how many how much Sensors how many or how many sensors and how much Firepower do you want in the vehicle above that kind of 44 45 ton range and that brings you to about 54 55 tons as the Tipping Point where you have an optimal balance and yet I mean you work very closely I know with the British and the American militaries um all of their tanks are significantly all the NATO tanks I mean main NATO tanks the Abrams the Challenger the leopard the French L clerk slightly lighter but still lighter um I mean even the the new vehicles that the British arm is bringing into uh service you know are very heavy the Ajax it’san not as heavy as 50 tons it’s 44 how is this message being received uh by those armed forces that you work with him it sounds almost like heresy what you’re saying to to the tankies I was having a conversation with a a senior us tank officer who uh is very very uh in the weeds should we say on the future of armored vehicle design and he was vly disagreeing with me that I about this 54 ton point and I said well what is the optimal ton he said 58 few less than 60 I was like okay like I’ll concede the point like you can have your four tons extra weight but broadly speaking among technical experts this is not in dispute um the Israelis have a slightly different view because they are using their tanks again for a very limited role where they can optimize them um but the point really isn’t in dispute the issue is we have very large fleets of these tanks we have production lines in process um we have all the training facilities Etc and so while this might be relevant for Designing the next generation of tanks that doesn’t mean that it’s worth scrapping the ones that we’ve already invested in the Challenger 3 for example the one that the Britain Britain is now upgrading its Fleet 2 is going to be as heavy if not heavier than the Challenger 2 it will be heavier than the Challenger too and that is going to be a very serious problem and what does this mean for Ukraine what does it mean for Ukraine now I they’ve got you know they they put in a lot of political capital in requesting tanks from NATO allies Britain obviously the first sending 14 Challenger tws that appear to sort of open the gates for the leopards and the Abrams to follow they’ve also got the Bradley the are infantry fighting Vehicles they’ve got these vehicles they’ve also got their sort Legacy Fleet of of Soviet era and Soviet design tanks the t-72s the t8s what does this mean for them now as they look at trying still to roll back the Russian invasion so the challenge the ukrainians have is that they are in a fullscale war and mass matters so for example a NATO tank Battalion um usually has 44 to 56 tanks in it right by the beginning of the offensive last year the ukrainians had received 55 leopards from all of their Partners so just over one doctrinal battalion’s worth for a offensive Brigade armored Brigade you would want to have two battalions of main battle tanks and so the lead Brigade That was supposed to do the initial Breakin the 47th which received leopards uh was under strength against what we would consider the doctrinal minimum to perform that task and yet that one Brigade essentially consumed the vast majority of leopards that had been donated right and so you go back through the brigades that were supposed to complete their tasks and Beyond the 1 and the second the 33rd and the 47th you start seeing that they were manifestly undere equipped the 82nd had challenges as you say they had 14 they had one company’s wor right a brigade should have a battalion at least as a mechanized Brigade um and so the ukrainians were asking for anything they could get hold of to even meet what we would consider the minimum threshold to be able to conduct the operation that they were endeavoring to to execute but they have and they didn’t get there but they have also received and they did they do also have or they did Al did have large numbers of t-72s they’ve captured some they’ve been donated many I mean am I right in understanding are those tanks the Soviet era tanks better than the NATO tanks it’s particularly for what Ukraine is trying to achieve now because they’re lighter um well they offer more options in terms of their mobility in the t80 in particular because of its engine um but they are far worse in their protection and that’s not just you know a weight thing you could achieve much greater protection for weight uh on those tanks it’s just that they are very very old designs right they are updated designs from the initial t72 design and there’s a limit to how much you can protect them and so uh those tanks are very vulnerable on the battlefield to to a range of systems um but in from the Ukrainian point of view in terms of their utility at an operational scale they are roughly comparable so you know that it’s not the ukrainians were not saying we need leopards to win the war they were saying we have a requirement for a certain volume of equipment to achieve the operation and we didn’t get there Jack thank you very much for joining me on World at War I’m the sons defense editor Jerome starky if you’re watching this on YouTube and you have any questions for me or for Jack please ask them in the comments below and we will try to answer them next time

NATO tanks were developed for defending West Germany in the 1980s and weren’t expected to manoeuvre very much. This has led to tanks that are fantastically accurate, very survivable, but extremely heavy.

Most bridges in Eastern Europe will therefore not be able to support NATO’s tanks, posing a serious problem for NATO forces.

Watch Jerome Starkey and Dr Jack Watling discuss the implications of NATO’s heavy tanks in this week’s World at War.

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