Remote control vehicles have all of the lethality yet none of the risk of crewed tanks.
By August 2024, we may finally have prototypes of tank drones., as Michael Ouellette reports in last week’s article. Four defense contractors will each supply two working prototypes of remote control vehicles (RCVs, aka tank drones) to the U.S. Army for three different types of tanks—one small and expendable version (RCV Light), a medium version (RCV-M) and a large version (RCV Heavy), the latter an automated version of the M1 Abrams.
The RCV Heavy will be capable of “defeating all known enemy armored vehicles,” according to an April Congressional Research Service report. “Light” is a relative term. The RCV Light could weigh up to 10 tons, more than twice the weight of a Humvee.
Why is it that armies trail navies and air forces in the use of drones? Ukraine’s navy, what little there is of it, relies on drones. The U.S. Air Force is on the verge of using “robot wingmen,” drones that multiply a manned fighter’s abilities. But on the battlefields everywhere, it’s man-to-man fighting.
The success of an army relies on overcoming fear, but that is too often not the case. Surely, removing fear as a factor, as the use of drones would allow, could not only improve the success of an army but also could change land warfare altogether. Here would be waves of drone tanks, a force the enemy could not scare off with a few successful missiles strike. The leading wave of tanks could be decoy drones meant to deplete the enemy’s anti-tank missiles or blow up mines.
The Fear Factor
An armored tank, despite all the innovations in military technology, remains a deathtrap. The M1 Abrams, a third-generation battle tank, has piled on so much armor in order to survive that it weighs over 70 tons—at the sacrifice of agility and mobility, which are also vital for survivability. Inside an M1 is still a bad place to be once the missiles and bullets start flying and land mines start exploding. Tanks, designed to hit targets on land, have proven to be extremely vulnerable to attack from above. The U.S. Air Force’s A-10 goes by two names: Warthog for its ungainly appearance and “tank-killer.” It is an aircraft built around a gun, the GAU-8, which fires a 30mm round with a depleted uranium core that can easily pierce tank armor.
Not that piercing armor is necessary, a point made startlingly clear in a lab experiment during my undergraduate program at Drexel University. A projectile was fired against a steel plate but it did not penetrate. That was a dud, we thought. Then the plate was inspected, and we saw that a fragment of the plate on the side on the other side of the impact was missing. “That’s called spalling,” said the droll lab technician. The fragment would have almost all of the energy of the projectile. It would be ricocheting around the tank’s interior. There was a hushed silence as we imagined the condition of the tank crew.
There are also a number of shoulder-fired missiles that add to the nightmare of serving in a tank. There’s the Javelin, used by Afghan forces to destroy Russian tanks. The Ukraine army, with few tanks of its own, has stopped Russian tank columns by disabling the lead tank and trailing tank with shoulder-fired missiles, then picking off the rest at their leisure.
Cocktails, an Unhappy Hour for Tanks
Stopping a tank can be frighteningly low tech. It can be done with a Molotov cocktail. The Russians were the first to be served Molotov cocktails when their tanks invaded Finland in 1939. The Finns knocked out 2,000 Russian T-26 tanks. The lumbering, armored tank was surprisingly vulnerable to such a low-tech weapon. The fire smoke from the flames would enter the tank’s air intake and choke the crew. The flames would enter the engine grill and burn through or melt rubber hoses, alighting fuel and combustible fluids. The T-34 tank design did away with many of the T-26’s vulnerabilities, but the Molotov cocktail found others.
Flames on the tracks can soften or melt the rubber rollers, bringing a tank to a standstill. In The Bridge at Andau, an account of the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956, James Michener tells of the fierce resistance mounted by the Budapest population, with boys running toward Russian T-54 tanks with Molotov cocktails. Tanks were diverted into oil-slicked narrow streets and showered by Molotov cocktails thrown from upper floors of buildings. A total of 400 tanks were destroyed with Molotov cocktails during the 1956 Hungarian revolt. The Russian tanks that rumbled into Prague in 1968 to quell a Czechoslovakia uprising were also victimized by Molotov cocktails.
A Little History
A tank first rolled onto the scene in World War I. No hail of machine gun bullets could stop it. The bullets would just bounce off the steel plate. And then the cat and mouse game started. Bigger bullets. Then thicker armor. Then armor-piercing munitions, grenades, and better armor followed.
One might think of the battleship as the same concept, because battleships also have used thicker and thicker armor, but unlike a ship, the confines of a tank offer no safe place to be when the vehicle suffers a direct hit.
Just as big ships are big targets at sea, so are tanks on land. And yet, lessons from the past are ignored and tank crews continue to pilot their bigger-than-ever tanks into kill zones. Ukraine’s allies have sent many tanks and armored vehicles to Ukraine, but Russia’s defenses, including land mines, missiles and especially helicopter gunships were able to wipe out 20 percent of Ukraine’s armored vehicles in the first 2 weeks of the counteroffensive. For Ukraine’s military, the lesson learned was less dependence on Western tactics with big armor and a return to what it had found to be most effective: small mobile teams, drones and artillery barrages, and missile attacks.
Perhaps the army has finally learned its lesson, launching a program that will eliminate all risk to a tank crew—by not having a crew at all.
1. The opening monolog of “Patton” is based on a series of speeches, more or less identical, by General George S. Patton to the Third U.S. Army in the days leading up to the 1945 Normandy invasion. Patton delivered the speech without notes, but the speech was transcribed by a military historian after the fact from the recollection of soldiers who were present. The quote above is not found in the transcript, though “bastard” appears seven times in the speech along with plenty of other colorful language.
