Drones make rich nations spend more and poor nations more effective. The US will buy the systems necessary to counter them. Countries that can’t afford to are in a world of hurt.

Do something else? Counter it? Use infantry to assault the microwave or whatever is supporting it?

You’re going to assault an armored unit with infantrymen and no air support?

Short war I guess.

Infantry with support. Like tanks.

Horse cavalry.

There was a list published not too long ago that showed the official weapon aid given too Ukraine, with tons coming in unofficially without a doubt, the number of Javelins given to them from close to the entire western world is at least 10 thousand. There are enough Javelins to rain down on any Russian tank in the area, and if that doesn't get them, then the gifted grenade launchers will. My point is that it's a apples to oranges comparison here as the outside aid to Ukraine has made the weapons expendable. If a A1 Abrams tank had 10 Javelins launched at it I doubt it would survive it.

It certainly is easy to tell who gets their experience from video games.

Came to say this. Although we could just @ him. I don’t remember his name though

If you can maintain that.  There are always opportunities and weak spots in the lines.  It's coming to a battlefield near you, count on it.  DARPA is and has been working on this.  You can bet China is too.

DARPA offensive swarm drones

For almost everyone here a lot of this stuff is theoretical at best. Not a lot of us have been in modern tank battles. Or gone up against a near peer.

How many missiles can be defeated before saturation of the system?

You are wrong, but it's not really your fault because a solid half of the western news reports on the Ukraine conflict are thinly-veiled "advertorials" for products of defense contractors.

The country that can make a radical new tank design that works against javelins will have a advantage. Drones just look so good because so many countries have been ignoring defense against drones. I expect drones to get better and better then in some war a vast number of drones just get obliterated by a country that finally takes the threat seriously.

It's kind of surprising that there isn't a dedicated "TROPHY" vehicle, something to protect forces against missiles and drones.  Dunno how far you can stretch it's coverage beyond the vehicle, but we saw the need for that sort of thing recently when the Armenians got their asses handed to them by drones/smart weapons.

How’s that working for Russia?

The Ukrainians, with similar equipment, are using tanks to break through lines. And asking for more tanks.

I would love to see a 22 caliber C-RAM mounted on the tank. Put it on a tower above the back of the tank. For added funzies make it controllable by the crew, with an automatic override for incoming.

Imagine. You’re bopping along the rio grande on a patrol. Ramon pops an RPG at you. Brrrrrrrrrr. The grenade explodes 40yds away from the tank.  You flip off Ramon. Then grab the joystick and aim it at Ramon.  You shoot him with a 22 and leave him looking like Swiss cheese.  
Sounds like a big time.

Yes, let's face it if the Iraqi insurgents had Javelins, they'd be a lot of Abrams turned into smoking wrecks.

With properly employed combined arms it wouldn't be as easy as just blasting tanks. We'd have infantry clearing out buildings where the javelins were. This is why tanks should have infantry support.

An army on the offensive suffers more losses than one fighting from defensive positions. The close range fighting in Normandy during WW2 is what gave the US Sherman its bad rep. Lots of M4's lost to panzerfausts and panzershreks. But it has been known for 80 years that tanks unsupported by dismounted infantry are vulnerable to shoulder fired antitank missiles especially in urban areas. Apparently the Russians were not expecting the Ukrainians to oppose the attacks.

The electronic age has allowed the development of top attack munitions that bypass the traditional protected areas of the tank.Thus the improvised cages on the turret tops to try to disable the fuses on the Javelins. It doesn't seem to have worked at all.

How does warhead on the Javelin knows when to detonate when its over the top of a tank?

I remember in basic all the fuel truck guys bragging about their sign on bonuses until the drill sergeants explained why they were so high. You could have heard a pin drop.

I can’t wait until you guys find out about swarming munitions. That’s going to be a real game changer.

You go over and around them.

The combined arms breach was developed for when you can’t do that. Losing that means a lot of options are taken off the table.

I keep hearing this but it doesn't look as easy as it sounds. Most atgms have a range of at least 2-3km. There is no way that infantry is going to be pushed out that far in front of the armor. Like in Ukraine, the atgm guys will target the APCs/IFVs that are moving the infantry around, and their fuel trucks. 2 guys with a javelin launcher in a tree line or on the back slope of a roof on a house 3km away aren't easy to spot. The terrain in Ukraine isn't doing armor any favors. Most engagements are happening in and around small towns and muddy terrain from melting snow is keeping vehicles close to the roads or else they bottom out and have to be left behind  

Good point.

Yeah. The entire force would be big enough that even if the tank unit and direct support doesn't see them, another element would.

With kamikaze drones instead of ATGMs the missile crew doesn't need line of sight. They can set up launch tubes near a window an hour before and fire one off periodically to do an autonomous patrol.

Kind of a dick post, but I'll allow it. Show me any competent Russian CAS support. There is none. Show me any opposing nation's army that has reactive tank armor capable of defeating ground infantry armed with multiple, inexpensive, handheld anti tank systems. Pleez. The way we wage war is changing.

No - Tanks are not obsolete.

Russia's tactics are obsolete.

Nope

This is why I proposed the honey badger tank.
An unmanned drone tank, powered by a nuclear reactor.

Go ahead and javelin my tank. Honey badger don't give a shit. You fools salted your own back yards.
Enjoy the cancer and mutants.

HAHA FUCKERS

If the navy can have nuclear powered subs... army can have nuclear powered unmanned tanks.
Just need good encrypted comms for everyone to unass the area ASAP should the honey badger get hit...
Mobile Chernobyl. Just add 1 anti armor round/missile.

Exactly whenever I see that argument, it seems that the person making it thinks attacks are coming from a couple of hundred yards away using unguided RPGs. Missiles like the Javelin will just keep getting more range, more advanced sensors and warheads. The day of the tank as the king of the battlefield is over, they're just easy targets.

Not to sound like some Russian puppet, but there are videos of Russian tanks, which are notorious for their turrets coming off, taking 4-6 hits before ending. Javelins are adorable, I really like them, but when artillery is being properly used, they really have little purpose. Light infantry gets torn up from heavy artillery. Proper tank and artillery use has artillery shooting spreads as tanks advance to phase lines, meaning in open country guys in the open are being suppressed with rounds that have a 50 meter kill radius, a wide spread and light infantry is done. Cant shoot a javelin if your dead. Tanks can drive through this type of fire and still engage the enemy. Just have to use combined arms, mechanized infantry when properly employed is the most powerful force on earth, excluding nukes.

I know this is going to sound a little different then what most are saying, but I feel the Russians were too concerned with collateral damage and did not use artillery in the right way. They should have been using their forward observers better, assuming they could communicate to the gun line. They should have been using artillery as their suppression, when tanks are rolling through any town, they should have been hammering danger close with artillery. Those javelin teams would not be knocking out Russian armor had they been doing this. Or just used more smoke from their gun line to help cover tank movements. The problem with this is that war becomes very slow, tanks cannot advance beyond gun tube range, and then they have to wait for artillery to advance and set up before forward movement.

Russian tanks are kind of cool, they can self entrench once they stop, leaving only the muzzle being exposed, making it harder for the javelin to find the tank. Russia has been too concerned about the wheat harvest, they wanted everything done before May so the crops could get in, and instead ended up fighting in mud, which only benefits the defense.

Having tanks still forces the enemy to invest in Javelins thus diverting funds from critical areas of R&D and weapons production.

theres a bunch of books about this...

giant ai tanks fighting various rediculously powerful enemys.

Bolos.
https://www.fictiondb.com/series/bolo~13064.htm

It weighs 60 pounds and travels at 85mph and you think Raytheon and Rafael won’t figure out how to shoot it down?

How are you going to breach an enemy armored unit without tanks?

I’ve kind of wondered this myself. Is a tank still useful if your enemy possesses a weapon useable by infantry on foot that can reliably destroy tanks for a minimal cost?

They make those sex bots right?
Hear me out.

Get a big titty sex bot moving with help from Boston dynamics.
Add nuke inside the body.

Send the sex bot out looking like a disheveled refugee.
Walk straight into the convoy and detonate that nuke.

HAHA FUCKERS!

We'll call it. Project atomic tits.
We'll make sheep/goat versions for the sand box.

Another problem might not be detection of the drones but assessing them as a threat. They aren’t invisible on a radar but they don’t look like a threat either.

Not a soldier here, so I'm asking out of ignorance:
What does "support the tanks with infantry" mean?

I'm trying to wrap my head around it and not getting very far.

The way it looks to me, is that the opposing infantry unit(s) will likely spread out their missile systems.  You probably won't have one in every squad, but maybe every platoon?  
Regardless, the infantry will be scattered about and as soon as a missile crew has line of sight on a tank, I'd expect them to fire, out to 2 or 3 miles or whatever the javelin or equivalent system's range is.  Even with a disparity in budget, the opposing infantry should be effectively saturated with anti-armor systems and able to deploy them anywhere.

How does infantry support tanks against this?  
Sure, you can push infantry out and screen the tanks, but the enemy can still effectively fire on/kill your tanks as soon as they have line of sight.  If you keep your tanks back and out of view, then the missile teams can't fire on them, but at that point, are your tanks even in the fight?  The traditional tank has to be up close with line of sight to employ the gun and engage the enemy.

Just pulling numbers off google: if an M1 Abrams costs $6.2 million, and a javelin about $80k, you could have over 75 missiles for the same cost.  For a fraction of the cost of a tank, the opposition can be swimming in anti-armor weapons.

Do you screen the tanks with infantry, but keep your tanks close enough to the fight to see and fire on the enemy?  It seems that in this case, you're hoping that the missile crew(s) don't see & engage before your tanks?
That's talking current systems.


I expect near future and next gen anti-armor systems to eliminate the need for the missile team to put their eyes on a tank to engage it.  We've already been testing NLOS systems, but I could see a slightly smarter javelin gaining the ability to fire over terrain/buildings and enage a target.  Spotters with GPS connected rangefinders could designate specific targets, or, a near future system could theoretically blind fire over terrain or obstacles and pick its own target.  At that point, you'd just need a guy, drone, or security camera to give your missile crew a rough direction to shoot.
If we're talking future systems, do we just rely on active protection systems and ECM?  Hope APS ammo is cheaper than missiles, and that the opposing infantry doesn't ripple fire and overwhelm the APS?

I'm not going to jump out and say tanks are obsolete, but I'm having trouble seeing how you effectively employ them against a near-peer who's invested in anti-armor weapons instead of their own tanks.

ETA:
Saw a few posts while I was typing that.

If we're opening this up to combined arms and laying waste to everything with artillery and CAS, what's the point of the tank?  If you're not pushing it up and shooting people with the tank, it's not in the fight.  If it's not in the fight, why'd we bring it?

What’s the going guess on area drone defense? Something high tech like directed energy weapons with an area effect, or old school, like radar aimed flak / ZSU type systems?

The tanks are just one part of the overall strategy. They don't need to stay in the fight but they can quickly do damage and also back up the infantry and other forces. They don't need to stay exposed. In conventional red line/blue line warfare they can breech defensive lines more effectively than infantry can.

I know there are others that know way more about this than I do. If I'm wrong correct me.