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I'm obviously not an expert on this but avoiding the killing of tanks also depends on some sort of air-superiority. I'm saying "some sort" because you don't nee

I'm obviously not an expert on this but avoiding the killing of tanks also depends on some sort of air-superiority. I'm saying "some sort" because you don't need to control the airspace of a whole country in order to defend against tanks, you just need some "clean" space for your artillery do do its thing while stationed 20-30 km or more behind the front while being helped by a few drones. As recent events in Syria (by "recent" I mean January-February of this year) have shown drone-guided artillery strikes are almost the perfect deterrent against tanks or any form of technicals on the ground, to be honest. There were even videos of Russian strikes hitting two guys on a motorcycle. Don't see tanks having any chance against that combo (i.e. artillery + drones), unless helped by air-support. There are countless examples on Twitter, this is one of them, involving the Turkish Army [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/1233336910434783232 https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/123333691043478323...

willvarfar 7y ago
The systems tanks use for identifying and defending against incoming shells are also able to identify the origin of those shells. Artillery is more vulnerable to counter battery fire than ever? There are systems like Archer that fire and move long before the shell lands, but its still ratcheting up?
- paganel 7y ago
  By reading the technical details of the Krasnopol on its wiki page it looks like "moving before the shell lands" will do little when it comes to avoiding the incoming shell. At least that's what I can understand from this fragment on that page: > The system functions as follows. The observer determines the target location (e.g. map coordinates or bearing and distance from their own position), ensures that their laser target designator can 'mark' the target and requests or orders a fire mission against the target using Krasnopol. A gun is then aimed at the target location and a guided shell is fired. The firing unit uses their 1A35K command device to send a signal via a communications link confirming the firing of the projectile to the 1A35I observation post device with the observer. The laser target designator is then used to illuminate the target and the in-flight projectile detects the radiant laser energy reflected by the target and the navigation system steers the shell towards the point of greatest incident energy—the designated target with top attack pattern. The iris of the optical seeker head is protected by a cap which is ejected by a mechanical timer upon firing. Low visibility conditions are of course a deterrent against this type of attack. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system)
  - iguy 7y ago
    I think GP's "fire and move long before the shell lands" meant the gun moves, to avoid counter-battery fire (based on the shell's trajectory). Which is an orthogonal problem to the target moving.
    - paganel 7y ago
      Yeah, I got it that the gun moves, but this part: > The laser target designator is then used to illuminate the target and the in-flight projectile detects the radiant laser energy reflected by the target and the navigation system steers the shell towards the point of greatest incident energy—the designated target with top attack pattern I think means that the shell basically hits where the drone-laser points at any one moment, not where the drone-laser was pointing when the shell was first fired. Which means that if the target moves then the laser can still remain focused on it for the shell to hit said target, even if the target is moving.
      - nl 7y ago
        No you have still missed the point. The counter-battery fire uses radar to calculate where incoming shells are fired from and shoots at that point. But now the original artillery tries to move away from that point before the counter fire hits it. That counter fire isn't laser guided.
        wernercd 7y ago
        Then... presumably... the counter fire is tracked and counter-counter-fire is fired based on calculations about where the counter-fire is coming from. Is the counter-fire mobile as well? Has it moved from its original point of counter-fire? If not, there's only a couple rounds of this before counter-fire ends.
        logfromblammo 7y ago
        Unless the counter-fire has longer range, because it's a missile, rather than an artillery round. Or the counter-fire is protected by a C-RAM system like Phalanx, Iron Dome, MANTIS, or Porcupine/DRACO. Every counter has a counter. It's turtles all the way down.
- jvanderbot 7y ago
  "The systems", would be highly unlikely to work at longer range. Small peturbations to down-ward arc trajectories are what make artillery pinpoint accurate (essentially GPS-guided shells or even better). You can't "Back project" a long-range guided munition, and even if you could, how would you map it to topology? A defense system in nullification phase needs to know really one thing: Bearing. Once it knows the direction to the incoming munitions, it fills the air along that direction with metal as quickly as possible. Some distance information is important for timing and relative velocity is important for acquisition of targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS Now, I speak from relative ignorance of a whole bunch of possible technologies that actually could back-project and actively sense shooters. I'd welcome an education on that. I base my assumptions on the "payload" model that most military aquistions take, in which you can't necessarily do the integrated sensing, computation, and real-time display that would be required to back-project an incoming shell or rocket onto local topology to provide an actionable estimate of the firer's location. I'm less skeptical of close-in / nonballistic, especially given TFA's claims, and very skeptical of longer-range / ballistic attacks. On this, I'm fascinated by the smart-munitions arms race described in the future pistol duels from Count to a Trillion, where a series of countermeasures, decoys, and guided munitions would be pre-loaded in an attempt to outsmart your opponent.
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  counter battery fire The max effective range of a M1A2 is 3,500m. Max effective range of a Howitzer (155) is 18,000m. You don't set up artillery where you'll be overrun by tanks. People ITT talking about using the tank main gun as counter bat are confusing indirect fire with direct. Tanks cannot elevate the main gun like artillery (unless we're talking about mobile artillery). When infantry kills tanks (not using air or fire support) usually requires near line of sight for targeting (TOW, Javelin). If you shoot and scoot you're still within the max effective range of the main gun (but hopefully outside max effective range for the coaxial). Therefore, if the APS gives the TC (tank commander) a POO (point of origin) he's going to swing the main gun around and blast them, as there's little cover you can find that will protect you from a tank round. These TOW jockeys in Syria get such good kills on video because they're near max effective range for the TOW, in daylight (everything in the desert has roughly the same surface temp) challenging the sensors, shooting at old ass tanks. Count the flight time of the TOWs you see in those videos. Look where they're shooting from. Look what they're shooting at!
dimitar 7y ago
Looks like the Syrian Army was caught with its pants down, the vehicles staying still in the open. They didn't expect the Turks at all. And they were right next to the border. It is possible to minimise such damage by moving often and using cover and camouflage. Unlike planes, tanks can work just fine in the dark or in bad weather. Smoke screens can be deployed to conceal movement. Artillery and planes need good spotting too, which means that targeting a moving and unpredictable target is hard. During the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia the Serbs effectively hid most of their armour in forests and churches, so it is possible even to hide from even the most high-tech adversary.
- LgWoodenBadger 7y ago
  planes may not have worked well in the dark during WW2 (excluding night fighters), but that hasn't been true in decades thanks to thermal imaging and night-vision advances.
- sudosysgen 7y ago
  I think the entire Turkey vs Syria situation is a misunderstanding of the tactical situation. Shooting down the drones would have been fairly easy, but Syria wasn't able to sortie its fighters because Turkey had F-16s on their side of the border that would fire off an AMRAAM as soon as a Syrian jet took off. The obvious counter would be anti air, but the issue is that Russia was unwilling to engage Turkish jets on Turkish territory on behalf of Syria (for obvious reasons). The real reason that Syria's tanks were destroyed is because Syria was unable to counter Turkish F-16s, not because of drones.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
A lot of wars these days are asymmetric. It's very rare to have fully equipped armies+navies+airforce on both sides. Usually people do the math upfront and one side concludes it probably is better to not get destroyed completely. In most wars in recent history you have one side with lots of relatively high tech weaponry going against guerrilla forces fighting with relatively unsophisticated stuff but hiding among civilians, thus making the use of all that high tech weaponry a bit controversial. E.g. Syria is a good example of that. WW II was probably the last conflict where all sides basically removed the gloves and fought with everything they had where everything on both sides included some very scary options. I live in what got rebuilt after WW II destroyed Berlin. There wasn't much left here. Other cities got it worse. Tanks still have a role because in most conflicts, the other side would lack the means to defend against them. But they'd be relatively useless against someone with rockets & an airforce. But they are awesome for dominating a chaotic battlefield without that. Basically, in the Gulf wars, the US took out the iraqi airforce in no time and after that basically tanks rolled in pretty much without opposition. I don't think any US tanks were lost at all. Much of the conventional troops ended up surrendering.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zipwitch 7y ago
  >WW II was probably the last conflict where all sides basically removed the gloves and fought with everything they had where everything on both sides included some very scary options. I think that would actually be the Iran-Iraq War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War Tank combat, air combat involving a wide range of aircraft, bombing raids, ballistic missile strikes, naval combat, trench warfare and chemical weapon use all took place during the war from 1980 to 1988.
  - jillesvangurp 7y ago
    Yes, you are correct; I forgot about how brutal that conflict was.
  - 7y ago
donavanm 7y ago
Re: drone + artillery, do you have a link to more details? That accuracy look pretty crazy for first shot hits. I was under the impression that 10s of meters was state of the art for indirect fire. Is the drone acting as FO for very high precision artillery fire with GLONAS/GPS guidance? Or is it actively targeting (laser etc) for terminal guidance of the shells?
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  It is a combination of all: firing computers, GPS and high-res terrain maps allows artillery to shoot more accurately, drones to do corrections, there are a number of guided (and extremely expensive) artillery shells with various guidance systems.
  - paganel 7y ago
    Worth mentioning that the Russian Krasnopol does not use GLONASS (and I guess not high-res terrain maps either), which makes it less expensive compared to its NATO equivalents. From this page [1]: > A single Krasnopol shell costs around $35 000. That's significantly less that the cost of a single US GPS-guided Excalibur. Although the Excalibur has nearly twice the range and is more reliable. Couldn't quickly find the cost for a single Excalibur shell, maybe someone else can fill in the information. [1] http://www.military-today.com/artillery/krasnopol.htm http://www.military-today.com/artillery/krasnopol.htm
- paganel 7y ago
  > Or is it actively targeting (laser etc) for terminal guidance of the shells? Seems like that is the case, yes, at least from what I could read on the wiki page I linked in a comment above [1] > drone + artillery, do you have a link to more details? Not necessarily what you asked for but this targeted Google search [2] (which is in fact a /r/syriancivilwar search) can give you an idea of what the Russian implementation of this technology can do (I didn't catch the name of the Turkish/NATO implementation of it on the other side). Looking at this tweet [3] from 2 days ago it seems that the technology has evolved quite rapidly, that poster is linking to a tweet from late 2017 when the Russians were still in the early test phase of it all. [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) [2] https://www.google.com/search?ei=DcV4XoXYLrGhmwXRoZ_oBg&q=Krasnopol+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fsyriancivilwar%2F&oq=Krasnopol+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fsyriancivilwar%2F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...4107.4107..4650...0.0..0.151.341.1j2......0....1..gws-wiz.cgC3sViemYg&ved=0ahUKEwjFkrXm5LDoAhWx0KYKHdHQB20Q4dUDCAs&uact=5 https://www.google.com/search?ei=DcV4XoXYLrGhmwXRoZ_oBg&q=Kr... [3] https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1241088031974662149 https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1241088031974662149 [4] https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/931856689309110272 https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/931856689309110272
anovikov 7y ago
Artillery must be guided to do that correct?
ryanmarsh 7y ago
The future of infantry/tank warfare is here it's just not distributed evenly. Abu Tow (nom de guerre) is racking up kills in Syria, and from the videos I've seen none of those tanks are sporting APS.

willvarfar 7y ago

The systems tanks use for identifying and defending against incoming shells are also able to identify the origin of those shells. Artillery is more vulnerable to counter battery fire than ever? There are systems like Archer that fire and move long before the shell lands, but its still ratcheting up?

paganel 7y ago
By reading the technical details of the Krasnopol on its wiki page it looks like "moving before the shell lands" will do little when it comes to avoiding the incoming shell. At least that's what I can understand from this fragment on that page: > The system functions as follows. The observer determines the target location (e.g. map coordinates or bearing and distance from their own position), ensures that their laser target designator can 'mark' the target and requests or orders a fire mission against the target using Krasnopol. A gun is then aimed at the target location and a guided shell is fired. The firing unit uses their 1A35K command device to send a signal via a communications link confirming the firing of the projectile to the 1A35I observation post device with the observer. The laser target designator is then used to illuminate the target and the in-flight projectile detects the radiant laser energy reflected by the target and the navigation system steers the shell towards the point of greatest incident energy—the designated target with top attack pattern. The iris of the optical seeker head is protected by a cap which is ejected by a mechanical timer upon firing. Low visibility conditions are of course a deterrent against this type of attack. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system)
- iguy 7y ago
  I think GP's "fire and move long before the shell lands" meant the gun moves, to avoid counter-battery fire (based on the shell's trajectory). Which is an orthogonal problem to the target moving.
  - paganel 7y ago
    Yeah, I got it that the gun moves, but this part: > The laser target designator is then used to illuminate the target and the in-flight projectile detects the radiant laser energy reflected by the target and the navigation system steers the shell towards the point of greatest incident energy—the designated target with top attack pattern I think means that the shell basically hits where the drone-laser points at any one moment, not where the drone-laser was pointing when the shell was first fired. Which means that if the target moves then the laser can still remain focused on it for the shell to hit said target, even if the target is moving.
    - nl 7y ago
      No you have still missed the point. The counter-battery fire uses radar to calculate where incoming shells are fired from and shoots at that point. But now the original artillery tries to move away from that point before the counter fire hits it. That counter fire isn't laser guided.
      - wernercd 7y ago
        Then... presumably... the counter fire is tracked and counter-counter-fire is fired based on calculations about where the counter-fire is coming from. Is the counter-fire mobile as well? Has it moved from its original point of counter-fire? If not, there's only a couple rounds of this before counter-fire ends.
        logfromblammo 7y ago
        Unless the counter-fire has longer range, because it's a missile, rather than an artillery round. Or the counter-fire is protected by a C-RAM system like Phalanx, Iron Dome, MANTIS, or Porcupine/DRACO. Every counter has a counter. It's turtles all the way down.
jvanderbot 7y ago
"The systems", would be highly unlikely to work at longer range. Small peturbations to down-ward arc trajectories are what make artillery pinpoint accurate (essentially GPS-guided shells or even better). You can't "Back project" a long-range guided munition, and even if you could, how would you map it to topology? A defense system in nullification phase needs to know really one thing: Bearing. Once it knows the direction to the incoming munitions, it fills the air along that direction with metal as quickly as possible. Some distance information is important for timing and relative velocity is important for acquisition of targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS Now, I speak from relative ignorance of a whole bunch of possible technologies that actually could back-project and actively sense shooters. I'd welcome an education on that. I base my assumptions on the "payload" model that most military aquistions take, in which you can't necessarily do the integrated sensing, computation, and real-time display that would be required to back-project an incoming shell or rocket onto local topology to provide an actionable estimate of the firer's location. I'm less skeptical of close-in / nonballistic, especially given TFA's claims, and very skeptical of longer-range / ballistic attacks. On this, I'm fascinated by the smart-munitions arms race described in the future pistol duels from Count to a Trillion, where a series of countermeasures, decoys, and guided munitions would be pre-loaded in an attempt to outsmart your opponent.
ryanmarsh 7y ago
counter battery fire The max effective range of a M1A2 is 3,500m. Max effective range of a Howitzer (155) is 18,000m. You don't set up artillery where you'll be overrun by tanks. People ITT talking about using the tank main gun as counter bat are confusing indirect fire with direct. Tanks cannot elevate the main gun like artillery (unless we're talking about mobile artillery). When infantry kills tanks (not using air or fire support) usually requires near line of sight for targeting (TOW, Javelin). If you shoot and scoot you're still within the max effective range of the main gun (but hopefully outside max effective range for the coaxial). Therefore, if the APS gives the TC (tank commander) a POO (point of origin) he's going to swing the main gun around and blast them, as there's little cover you can find that will protect you from a tank round. These TOW jockeys in Syria get such good kills on video because they're near max effective range for the TOW, in daylight (everything in the desert has roughly the same surface temp) challenging the sensors, shooting at old ass tanks. Count the flight time of the TOWs you see in those videos. Look where they're shooting from. Look what they're shooting at!

dimitar 7y ago

Looks like the Syrian Army was caught with its pants down, the vehicles staying still in the open. They didn't expect the Turks at all. And they were right next to the border. It is possible to minimise such damage by moving often and using cover and camouflage. Unlike planes, tanks can work just fine in the dark or in bad weather. Smoke screens can be deployed to conceal movement. Artillery and planes need good spotting too, which means that targeting a moving and unpredictable target is hard. During the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia the Serbs effectively hid most of their armour in forests and churches, so it is possible even to hide from even the most high-tech adversary.

LgWoodenBadger 7y ago
planes may not have worked well in the dark during WW2 (excluding night fighters), but that hasn't been true in decades thanks to thermal imaging and night-vision advances.
sudosysgen 7y ago
I think the entire Turkey vs Syria situation is a misunderstanding of the tactical situation. Shooting down the drones would have been fairly easy, but Syria wasn't able to sortie its fighters because Turkey had F-16s on their side of the border that would fire off an AMRAAM as soon as a Syrian jet took off. The obvious counter would be anti air, but the issue is that Russia was unwilling to engage Turkish jets on Turkish territory on behalf of Syria (for obvious reasons). The real reason that Syria's tanks were destroyed is because Syria was unable to counter Turkish F-16s, not because of drones.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

A lot of wars these days are asymmetric. It's very rare to have fully equipped armies+navies+airforce on both sides. Usually people do the math upfront and one side concludes it probably is better to not get destroyed completely. In most wars in recent history you have one side with lots of relatively high tech weaponry going against guerrilla forces fighting with relatively unsophisticated stuff but hiding among civilians, thus making the use of all that high tech weaponry a bit controversial. E.g. Syria is a good example of that. WW II was probably the last conflict where all sides basically removed the gloves and fought with everything they had where everything on both sides included some very scary options. I live in what got rebuilt after WW II destroyed Berlin. There wasn't much left here. Other cities got it worse. Tanks still have a role because in most conflicts, the other side would lack the means to defend against them. But they'd be relatively useless against someone with rockets & an airforce. But they are awesome for dominating a chaotic battlefield without that. Basically, in the Gulf wars, the US took out the iraqi airforce in no time and after that basically tanks rolled in pretty much without opposition. I don't think any US tanks were lost at all. Much of the conventional troops ended up surrendering.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zipwitch 7y ago
>WW II was probably the last conflict where all sides basically removed the gloves and fought with everything they had where everything on both sides included some very scary options. I think that would actually be the Iran-Iraq War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War Tank combat, air combat involving a wide range of aircraft, bombing raids, ballistic missile strikes, naval combat, trench warfare and chemical weapon use all took place during the war from 1980 to 1988.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  Yes, you are correct; I forgot about how brutal that conflict was.
- 7y ago

donavanm 7y ago

Re: drone + artillery, do you have a link to more details? That accuracy look pretty crazy for first shot hits. I was under the impression that 10s of meters was state of the art for indirect fire. Is the drone acting as FO for very high precision artillery fire with GLONAS/GPS guidance? Or is it actively targeting (laser etc) for terminal guidance of the shells?

AdrianB1 7y ago
It is a combination of all: firing computers, GPS and high-res terrain maps allows artillery to shoot more accurately, drones to do corrections, there are a number of guided (and extremely expensive) artillery shells with various guidance systems.
- paganel 7y ago
  Worth mentioning that the Russian Krasnopol does not use GLONASS (and I guess not high-res terrain maps either), which makes it less expensive compared to its NATO equivalents. From this page [1]: > A single Krasnopol shell costs around $35 000. That's significantly less that the cost of a single US GPS-guided Excalibur. Although the Excalibur has nearly twice the range and is more reliable. Couldn't quickly find the cost for a single Excalibur shell, maybe someone else can fill in the information. [1] http://www.military-today.com/artillery/krasnopol.htm http://www.military-today.com/artillery/krasnopol.htm
paganel 7y ago
> Or is it actively targeting (laser etc) for terminal guidance of the shells? Seems like that is the case, yes, at least from what I could read on the wiki page I linked in a comment above [1] > drone + artillery, do you have a link to more details? Not necessarily what you asked for but this targeted Google search [2] (which is in fact a /r/syriancivilwar search) can give you an idea of what the Russian implementation of this technology can do (I didn't catch the name of the Turkish/NATO implementation of it on the other side). Looking at this tweet [3] from 2 days ago it seems that the technology has evolved quite rapidly, that poster is linking to a tweet from late 2017 when the Russians were still in the early test phase of it all. [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) [2] https://www.google.com/search?ei=DcV4XoXYLrGhmwXRoZ_oBg&q=Krasnopol+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fsyriancivilwar%2F&oq=Krasnopol+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fsyriancivilwar%2F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...4107.4107..4650...0.0..0.151.341.1j2......0....1..gws-wiz.cgC3sViemYg&ved=0ahUKEwjFkrXm5LDoAhWx0KYKHdHQB20Q4dUDCAs&uact=5 https://www.google.com/search?ei=DcV4XoXYLrGhmwXRoZ_oBg&q=Kr... [3] https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1241088031974662149 https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1241088031974662149 [4] https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/931856689309110272 https://twitter.com/warsmonitoring/status/931856689309110272

anovikov 7y ago

Artillery must be guided to do that correct?

ryanmarsh 7y ago

The future of infantry/tank warfare is here it's just not distributed evenly. Abu Tow (nom de guerre) is racking up kills in Syria, and from the videos I've seen none of those tanks are sporting APS.