Tanks have been in the news recently: The United States, Britain, Germany, and Poland are all preparing to provide the Ukrainian Ground Forces—to give that country’s army its formal title—with numbers of their most modern tanks. From the US will come the M1A2 Abrams, from the UK the Challenger 2, from Germany and Poland the Leopard 2. In all, probably 100-150 tanks will be transferred.
This news has touched off a firestorm of outrage in Moscow and, in the West, a fresh epidemic of hand-wringing over “escalation.” Russian threats to retaliate against NATO can be discounted; the last thing that V. Putin wants is to bring that alliance into the war on Ukraine’s side. As for fears of escalation, they seem almost comical in light of the actual situation: a war that Russia started by invading its neighbor, accompanied by indiscriminate destruction and countless war crimes.
But what is the actual significance of this tank transfer? Most people have scant technical military knowledge, and no doubt there are many misconceptions concerning the modern main battle tank’s basic characteristics and its role on the contemporary battlefield. The concept of an armored fighting vehicle is no recent development; it goes back many centuries. Leonardo da Vinci sketched his design of such an infernal engine in 1487. But it took the technology of the Industrial Revolution and the military imperatives of the Great War to make the tank a practical reality.
The sanguinary trench stalemate that prevailed on the Western Front from late 1914 to early 1918 was due to the fact that the firepower of the armies and their strategic mobility had multiplied by orders of magnitude between 1815, the year of Waterloo, and 1914. But their tactical mobility had not; on the battlefield itself, the armies still moved on foot or horseback. Thus the defender, installed in trenches and bunkers behind belts of barbed wire, armed with magazine repeating rifles and machine guns, supported by rapid-fire artillery, enjoyed a decisive advantage over the attacker. This grim reality, attested to by the horrifying casualty lists of failed offensives, prompted a search for new tactics and weapons.
While the German Army concentrated on tactical solutions, its opponents, particularly the British, concentrated on a technological solution. The tank—it was so named for security reasons, the cover story being that it was a mobile water carrier—was conceived as an infantry support weapon capable of crossing No Man’s Land, crushing barbed wire obstacles, bringing armor-protected machine gun and cannon fire to bear against defending troops. Tank support would, it was hoped, make it possible for the infantry to press home its attack without suffering crippling losses.
The first tanks fielded by the British were clumsy and mechanically unreliable; their debut in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme was not impressive. But as the British and French armies gained experience with them, tanks evolved into an effective weapon, and they were able to play a major role in the great battles of 1918 that finally broke the German Army.
During the twenty years between the world wars, armies and military theorists explored the potential of mechanized warfare—though parsimonious peacetime defense budgets limited development. Enough was done, however, to convince most soldiers that mechanization was the future of war. Not without regret, cavalrymen gradually exchanged their horses for tanks and armored cars. But when war came again in 1939 no army was completely mechanized, and it was the power defeated in the previous war that had taken the concept farthest.
The disarmament provisions of the 1919 Peace Treaty had effectively disarmed Germany, leaving it with a tiny professional army of 100,000 officers and men. Its leaders regarded this corporal’s guard, the Reichswehr, as the germ cell of Germany’s future mass army, once the shackles of Versailles were thrown off. Among other clandestine activities, the Reichswehr evaluated the potential of mechanization in light of wartime experience.
Toward the end of the Great War, the Germans had evolved a tactical solution to the problem of the trench stalemate. Though it was difficult in the extreme to pull off a genuine strategic surprise—preparations for a major offensive were hard to conceal—the effects of surprise could be replicated by other means. Attacks, therefore, were to be preceded by a short but intense “hurricane” artillery bombardment, designed to stun and disorganize the defenders. When the attack went in, the leading echelon would consist of Sturmabteilungen (assault detachments): mixed battle groups consisting of infantry and combat engineers armed with stick grenades, light machine guns and flamethrowers. These Stoßtruppen (stormtroopers) were specially trained in infiltration tactics. Bypassing surviving centers of resistance whenever possible, they were expected to press on, making for the defender’s vulnerable rear areas. After them came larger battle groups including mortar and light artillery detachments, whose mission was to mop up bypassed pockets of resistance. Finally, with the breakthrough accomplished, the reserve force, standing by in readiness, would be committed to exploit it.
These tactics proved highly effective when they were employed in 1917-18, and to create their armored force, the Panzerwaffe, the Germans merely applied mechanization to the mixed battle group organization. In their panzer divisions, the tank was integrated into a combined-arms organization, with the infantry, artillery, combat engineers and other services brought up to the same level of mobility, and with all units trained to fight as a team.
Though Britain, France, the United States and the USSR possessed armored forces at the beginning of World War II, they had not, like the Germans, evolved a unified doctrine of armored warfare. Nor was the German system perfect. But from 1939 to 1942 it was better than anybody else’s—as the Polish, French, Balkan, Russian and North African campaigns were to show.
As the contending armies absorbed the hard and often painful lessons learned in combat, their respective armored forces came more and more to resemble one another. After a 1943 reorganization, the US Army’s armored division embodied three tank battalions, three armored infantry battalions, three armored self-propelled field artillery battalions, a mechanized cavalry reconnaissance battalion and the usual service units. These units could be distributed among three headquarters elements, called combat commands, to create combined arms battle groups. This organization was very similar to both the British armoured division and the Soviet tank corps, which despite its title was a division-sized formation. And though the 1944 German panzer division’s formal structure looked quite different on paper, it was organized for combat in much the same way as its rivals.
Between 1945 and the end of the Cold War, the armored division maintained its status as the most powerful combat formation of all modern armies. The appearance of new weapons like armored infantry fighting vehicles and attack helicopters scarcely affected its basic structure. In 1990 a US Army armored division had six armored (tank) battalions and three mechanized infantry battalions distributed among three brigades, plus four field artillery battalions, a combat aviation brigade (helicopters), and an armored cavalry reconnaissance squadron. Infantry divisions classed as mechanized were armored divisions in effect, with five armored and five mech infantry battalions.
At the brigade level, battalions were organized for combat by cross-attaching their sub-units. An armored battalion, for instance, might give up one of its tank-equipped companies in exchange for a mechanized infantry company, an air defense artillery platoon, and a combat engineer platoon. In this way, combined-arms battalion task forces could be configured for specific missions.
It will be noted that such task forces replicated with modern weapons the organization pioneered by the German Army during the Great War: the combined-arms battle group.
In the early 2000s, the US Army formalized this organization by replacing pure armored and mechanized infantry battalions with the combined-arms battalion (CAB). This is the basic unit of the Army’s current modular armored brigade combat team (ABCT). Two types exist: armor-heavy with two armored companies (each with 14 M1A2 tanks) and one mech infantry company, and infantry-heavy with two mech infantry companies and one armored company (with 14 M1A2 tanks). The ABCT has two battalions of the former type and one of the latter type. Counting three more tanks in the battalion headquarters companies and 14 more in the armored troop of the brigade’s armored cavalry reconnaissance squadron, this gives the ABCT 87 tanks in total.
The tank itself, which in times past existed in light, medium and heavy variants, is now of one type: the main battle tank (MBT). Lighter armored vehicles resembling tanks do exist, but they lack the basic characteristics of the MBT: an optimum combination of mobility, firepower, and protection. Like the dreadnought battleships of the Great War, MBTs are designed to fight other MBTs.
But the popular image of tanks attacking en masse, like cavalry at Austerlitz, is highly misleading. Though there might arise circumstances in which such a charge could succeed, tanks are most effective when they operate in close coordination with infantry, artillery, combat aviation and other units, employing tactics that mutually reinforce each unit’s capabilities. For instance, tanks in a commanding overwatch position might cover mechanized infantry advancing over open terrain, or tanks operating in areas where fields of observation and fire are limited might be given close support by dismounted infantry. The heavy tank losses suffered by the Russian Army in Ukraine are mainly due to its disregard of such combined arms tactics.
Assuming that all the promised units are delivered, the Ukrainian Ground Forces will be receiving a division’s worth of modern main battle tanks (MBTs), generally superior to anything the Russian Army can field. But in and of itself, that technological margin of superiority is unlikely to be decisive. In 1940, the German Army’s Panzerwaffe, enjoyed no significant technological edge over the British and French armies. Its swift and crushing victory was largely the product of superior doctrine, tactics and leadership: the correct technique, vigorously applied. In just the same way, the value to Ukraine of a hundred-odd modern MBTs will be determined by the effectiveness with which they’re used.