Urban Fighting with MBT

last SG · 2004-03-26T13:26:41+00:00

Then again, I reiterate my previous statement for SAF's long-term if not immediate requirement for radically new armour platforms in view of the devastating...

eurofighter SG

Are our bionix and ultras sufficiently armoured to survive in urban fighting? I suggest converting the tempest to APC like what the israelis have done to their centurion.

paulho SG

Very True, in the battle for Grozny, After being initially mauled the russians re-grouped, adapted and changed tactics but in the end they paid a very dear price in terms of manpower equipment and materiel just to re-take and defend every single every building in the city took 60,000 troops against just 12,000 Chechian fighters, even then this was at times not enough.

Also interesting how the russians later used counter ambush tactics against the AT gunners waiting to ambush them.

Some points and suggestions raised by other posters co-incide with the russian fact finding.

I tried to paste the original text unfortunately the post is too big

the full story can be found here
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/grozny.htm

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

I doubt the quality of the Iraqi "army" was that deplorable back then. Rather consider why, some tanks, getting hit by RPGs nearly 20 times, all took their shots to their strongest areas?

While AT gunners can be this good, tankies themselves can also do much to make life difficult for them. There is more then one way of protecting yourself from AT gunners then just armour.

As you say a tank is vulnerable at the top, rear and side being less shielded. Which means that any tank be it abrams, leclerc, T72 or amx13 already has such vulnerability.

It's more about how you manage the vulnerability then actually having the vulnerability.

In the given Chechnya ambush scenario where knowledgeable AT gunner teams are deployed in advantageous locations on high floors with full panoramic view of the oncoming MBT convoy into the canalised kill area where known vehicle movement is restricted and the tactic used which not uncommon is to disable the first and last vehicle thereby trapping everything in between for destruction.

This is expected, but however, there are ways to manage these scenarios, such as having close air support or a backup convoy at hand to relief each other. Such vulnerabilites can also be limited by having good intelligence.

Would you say that in such a scenario a lighter tank trapped in the center sharing same vulnerabilities which you speak in the MBT but being smaller and more nimble will be able to respond better and maybe escape destruction than its heavier lumbering counterpart?

On the flip side, it's far more likely for a lighter tank to be caught in such a sceneriao because it is far more likely to get knocked out, even by a frontal shot, and lacking the firepower or armour to stay in the fight long enough to survive it.

And of course, the term "heavier, lumbering" is pretty much a misnomer as well, modern MBTs like the Abrams or Leopard have as much mobility then any light tank (in fact, more so then our AMX-13) and in an urban envionment, a 15 ton tank will block a road as easily as a 60 ton one. All that "mobility" (which is false anyway), hardly counts for much when you can't get anywhere.

So in such a sceneriao, one finds that the light tank actually fares far, far worse then an heavy unit.

This was proven in WW2 when American lighter armour was usually toast when it was ambushed or caught in a quickdraw situtation with German armour. In an Urban situtation, light tanks have problems surviving because when you are a tank, light and small is a misnomer.

You also spoke of the armor tactics employed by the Americans when taking bagdad, being a gunner myself I am curious to know what these tactics are. Maybe you would like to share this information?

I don't have the specifics but they apparently employed a type of rolling fortess convoy defence consisting of Abrams and Bradelys when they went on their armoured probes. Where every single unit covered his own quadrant and protected the flank of another. Anybody trying to get a shot in at the weak area of one of the AFVs will have to content with fire from the units guarding that flank.

Note that the primary form of anti-tank activity in GW2 was not tank battles, but insurgents setting up anti-armour ambushes.

They no doubt chose their routes with a lot care and intelligence before hand, to prevent the kind of ambush you described. By using high mobility (they didn't creep around on their probes) and overwhelming firepower whenever they encountered resitance, they gave the enemy very little time to react to their moves.

The ruskies on the other hand, went in dumb, slow and blind. No surprise why they ended up this way.

Anyway the point remains that using light tanks in an urban context is sucide unless you are on a light operation where you do not expect much anti-armour resistence.

Our AMX-13 won't last long in an urban battle.

paulho SG

I tend to disagree on that point. If I was the AT gunner in the ambush scenario and had to choose between 2 tank targets in a split second, I will go for the bigger broomstick first. 2 reasons.

1) The surprise only last for a while. The bigger tank though more difficult to kill but is potentially more dangerous foe. All the AT will be gunning for it.

2) This one self intuition. The bigger tank more visible & has more 'target value' than a lighter one. Lighter tank has lesser value take second priority after all if bigger tank is stuck for the time being then so is the lighter one, can come back again for second round.

And abt mbt mobility. In an ambush situation most likely one end of road in the kill area will be barricaded. If the big tank cannot move forward, light tank also cannot. But based on above 2 reasons within the limited confines in the midst of the chaos a lighter tank may have more chance to return fire or can at the very least dive into a hole or a small alley to escape destruction. Your mbt cannot move at all is a roasted duck for the dinner table.

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

That's why intelligence is extremely important, you can have the fastest, or most protected tank in the world and they won't be much good if you send them in blind. They very reason why the Ruskies failed miserably seems to be an effect of their poor training, inflexible thinking, lack of respect for the enemy, poor intelligence, and clunkiness in their movements, rather then a fault on their hardware.

Do you think they will fare any better if they had light tanks instead of their T-72s and T-80s? I suspect they'll take heavier losses.

Light tanks are useful as they can be rapidly deployed into global hotspots to provide rapid response or armoured support to light units, however in a protracted FIBUA situtation, they are not a subsitute for heavy armour.

What an MBT provides you however, is tatical options. With good intelligence, you an MBT like the Abrams, with heavy firepower and protection and mobility, you can keep the enemy off balance by literally storming their positions. In Iraqi, most RPG gunners couldn't get off more then one shot before they were overrun or killed, if they fired at all, and most of their shots were wasted anyway.

The Iraqi "ambushes" were knocked out and overrun before they could even be effective. By overrunning the enemy and keeping him off balance, you can effectively spoil all of this efforts to set up an ambush, let alone a defence.

However, if any light tank probe were to try this, they would have almost certainly been knocked out, they have a hard time surviving, let alone do their job.

Your "reliance" on light tanks taking cover and escaping ambushes (which is a marginal advantage over the MBT anyway) seems a shaky and rather narrow view of the true nature of armour in FIBUA, focusing on ambushes rather then the entire spectrum of armour in FIBUA situtations.

At the end of the day, when you do the math, you'll realize that MBTs are far more useful in an heavy FIBUA situtation then a light tank. You don't use a ball pen hammer to do a sledghammer's job.

panzerjager SG

Useful, nifty and sly tactic is to use heavy armour upfront against expected concentration of threat, i.e. chokepoints for possible ambush. Reading the ground well enough, lighter armour will execute continuous pincer movements on successive objective, in conjuction with heavy armour along it's route of advance, together with IFV/infantry/robot scout support. All elements will be networked on a single coherent threat environment in the same battleshpere. For added firepower, attack choppers with top-attack missiles/missile artillery (with fibre-optic missiles) can be on-station on outskirts of FIBUA area to execute fire missions to demolish entire buildings if required.

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