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The Marines Got Rid of Their Tanks. Is Ukraine Making Them Look Smart, or Too Smart for Their Own Good?
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By Ben Connable March 28, 2022
Anyone watching video footage of the war in Ukraine has seen Ukrainian light infantry destroying lots of Russian tanks. In one video, a British NLAW—a cheap, single-shot, shoulder-launched rocket—darts out over the top of a tank, blasts a hole in its thin top armor, and sets it on fire. In another video, a Ukrainian drone follows a hapless Russian tank down a street before it, too, is destroyed by rockets, setting it on fire and sending a lone surviving crewman scrambling for cover. Video after video, photo after photo, shows almost every variant of Russian tank lying tracked and crippled on a highway, smoldering in a field of burnt grass, or decapitated, cast metal gun turret lying uselessly in the mud a few feet from its body.
Poor tank performance in Ukraine does not bode well for the armor-dependent Russians. It also may not bode well for the future of the tank as a tool of modern warfare. Marine Commandant David H. Berger sees the Ukraine war as vindication of his Force Design 2030. Last year, the Marine Corps got rid of the last of its active duty tank units and most of its traditional tube artillery as part of FD2030. This was Berger’s plan to reshape the Marine Corps primarily to fight a prospective long-range, high-tech, over-water war with China. Berger has taken—and is taking—plenty of barbs from within the senior ranks of the Marine Corps and from external critics for his new direction. Given what has happened to tanks in Ukraine, was Berger prescient?
Maybe. He published his force design plan in March 2020. In it, he wrote on the divestiture of tanks, “We have sufficient evidence to conclude that this capability, despite its long and honorable history in the wars of the past, is operationally unsuitable for our highest-priority challenges in the future.” Two important points leap out from FD2030, particularly from this quoted paragraph.
First, Berger is betting big on the China fight because he believes he has to. Defense officials told the Marines to focus on China as a pacing threat, a threat that should guide the service’s man, train, and equip mission. If the Marine Corps has to man, train, and equip to fight China, then tanks, cannons, and infantry may have less value. Even a glance at the map of the vast expanse of the Western Pacific Ocean lends weight to the argument that tanks have no place in the counter-China fight. War in the South China Sea is envisioned as a long-range battle fought between networks of sensors and missiles mounted on warships, fifth-generation combat aircraft, and satellites. Tanks deployed to remote islands might be little more than fuel-sucking targets for Chinese missiles.
Second, contrary to the suggestions of his critics, in FD2030, Berger did not explicitly argue that tanks are valueless in modern warfare. Instead, he appeared to be arguing that because tanks are useless in the Western Pacific theater, the Corps had to divest its armor and invest in technology appropriate for the “highest-priority” China fight. He made clear the U.S. Army would continue to provide “heavy ground armor capability” for what he insinuates are lower-priority fights in places like the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and Europe (that insinuation requires a separate article).
Within the narrow scope of Berger’s argument, he appears to be right. Tanks probably are useless in the counter-China fight in the Western Pacific theater. But Berger’s apparently dogmatic pursuit of the pacing threat raises some valid critiques. Have Department of Defense officials really forced the Marine Corps to focus so intensively on a single prospective enemy in one imagined battle in one geographic area, or is Berger embracing these directions more fervently than is required? Is Berger betting on the hope that Marines will never again have to help the Army fight a conventional ground war as they did in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq invasion? Is he cutting tanks and artillery and some infantry with an explicit intent to keep the Marines out of conventional wars?
It seems more likely he’s making an even bigger bet: That the redesign for the China fight will create a fungible lightweight, high-tech capability allowing the Marines to help the joint force in any operation. In this view, war itself has changed. Precision missiles, drones, cyber capabilities, and fast, light vehicles are the right fit for China, and also Iran, North Korea, Russia, the Islamic State, and any other prospective adversary.
In that case, FD2030 may not just be a redesign for the China fight, it may be the 1990s Revolution in Military Affairs reborn. Going forward, Berger may see Marines serving as (in the language of the RMA) high-tech gears in a global, joint, network-centric, effects-based sensor-shooter network that will be able to see and kill anything of military value, anywhere. Tanks have no place in this vision. Therefore, as Berger let on in his recent remarks on events in Ukraine, he may indeed believe that tanks are universally impractical even beyond the China fight.
If Berger is making this big revolutionary bet, then he’s under even more pressure to be right. Innovation like the kind he is trying to enact requires forecasting the character of war in the near future. Forecasting requires imagining the future and also describing the present as a rational, evidence-driven point of departure. Recently, Berger asked for more critique of his forecast and plan. Here’s mine: If he wants the Marines and his critics to embrace his divestiture of tanks (and most cannon artillery) then he needs to do a better job anchoring his imaginative vision in evidence from recent, demonstrated performance.
There is plenty of evidence to examine. Conventional warfare is commonplace around the world. Just in the past fifteen years, tanks, artillery, infantry, drones, and precision munitions have been used, or are still used routinely in Syria, Libya, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Ethiopia-Tigray, Afghanistan, Yemen, Chad, Pakistan, Gaza, Mali, Georgia, Lebanon, and Ukraine. Some trends and caveats appear in a cursory examination.
In many cases, tanks appear to be particularly vulnerable to drones synchronized with precision munitions. Drones can loiter overhead, pinpoint their targets, and either launch their own precision munitions onto the tanks’ soft top armor or guide in other munitions. Ukrainians have used this drone-missile combination with deadly effect. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Chinese Wing Loong II drones have been particularly successful against tanks in Ukraine and in Armenia and Ethiopia. Tigrayan officers report a sense of helplessness as perhaps ten drones overflew their positions, killing tanks, troops, and other vehicles at will.
On the ground in most of these conflicts, light infantry, and even novice militiamen have used antitank missiles and direct-fire, short-range antitank rockets to wreak havoc on tanks and on their accompanying lighter armored vehicles. Ukraine has been a showcase for the U.S.-made Javelin antitank missile, a fire-and-forget top attack weapon used to great effect by Marines against Taliban positions in Afghanistan. In a March 16th interview, Berger stated that “it was pretty clear that top-down sort of missile attacks on the top side of heavy armor, makes it pretty vulnerable.” Even direct-fire antitank rockets manufactured by the Americans, Germans, and others, have been used to knock out hundreds of tanks. It seems that tanks—the original purveyors of shock and awe on the battlefield—are now prey.
However, there are some other commonalities to these battles that might undermine the conclusion that tanks have been made anachronistic. Both technical and tactical factors contributed to these outcomes. First, it is important to note that the top-down missile attack capability Berger cites as evidence for the obsolescence of tanks is at least forty years old. Sweden’s Bofors Infantry, Light and Lethal (BILL) missile was designed in the late 1970s and adopted by the Swedes in 1988, three years before Operation Desert Storm. It is true that top-attack missiles and rockets did not widely proliferate until the last two decades, but they are nothing new.
In all of the most recent cases of conventional warfare—Armenia, Tigray, Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine—the tanks being destroyed are almost entirely older model Russian tanks like the T-62, T-72, and T-80. Some have been upgraded with bolt-on anti-rocket side armor but not with extensive top armor. Few appear to have been fitted with functioning active protection, anti-warhead kits like the U.S. Army’s Trophy system. Some passive protection kits on even the leading Russian tank units in Ukraine appear to have been in disrepair, leaving tanks vulnerable to light shoulder-fired rockets. Russia’s new Armata T-14 tank with its Trophy-like active defense system has not yet made a public appearance in Ukraine, so it is not possible to tell if it would change the battlefield calculus.
Drones have played a key role in most of these conflicts. Anywhere drones fly, missiles, rockets, or artillery shells often follow. Tanks commonly are victims. Some drone attacks are elegant in their simplicity. For example, in this video, a drone is used to help a Ukrainian infantryman with a direct-fire rocket take out a Russian truck.
But drones are also lumbering, loud, and usually highly visible even to the naked eye. Bayraktars may be wreaking havoc in Ukraine, but they reportedly are being decimated by Russian air defense systems in Libya and Syria. Smaller commercial drones have also been effective, but these, too, are vulnerable to anti-drone fires. Azerbaijani and Ethiopian successes with drones may not tell a convincing story. The Azeris effectively stripped away Armenian air defenses to give its drones free rein, bringing into question the value of drones in relation to a basic propeller-driven aircraft that might carry five to ten times as many munitions. The Tigrayans had few and mostly antiquated air defenses, so once these were stripped away they, too, were vulnerable to all types of air attack. In Ukraine, the Russians are failing to protect their Pantsir S1 missile and gun systems that would normally be used to kill drones. None of these cases undermine the extant planning assumption that good short-range air defenses kill drones, attack aircraft, helicopters, giving tanks, artillery, and infantry more survivability and freedom of movement.
Logistics, will to fight, and tactics also shape the efficacy of tanks in combat. Tanks are tools. When they are properly cared for and applied for their intended uses, they are generally more effective than when they are neglected or overused. At least in Ukraine, bad Russian logistics, willpower, tactics, and battlefield practices appear to have sharply exacerbated their tanks’ vulnerabilities. Russian tankers are abandoning some tanks because they have no fuel. This is a failure of supply, not of the tank. Some Russians appear to be abandoning their tanks out of fear. Based on public videos, interviews, and reports, it appears the Russians are repeatedly driving their tanks buttoned up (with crew peering through narrow vision slits or scopes) on main roads in broad daylight without flanking air reconnaissance, anti-air defenses, or dismounted infantry support. Some tanks have been recorded fighting solo in dense urban terrain. Russians appear to have no interest in using camouflage, smoke, dispersal, radio discipline, or any of the other basic practices necessary for battlefield survival. To experienced warfighters, the Russians appear to be bizarrely pursuing self-destruction. It is not yet clear if Ukraine is more a case of poor tank performance or poor Russian performance.
From an analytic standpoint, I am most concerned with the lack of evidentiary balance coming in from the Ukraine war. It is possible to access reams of evidence showing tanks’ vulnerabilities, and very hard to find any evidence that tanks have done anything useful beyond shelling apartment buildings. Is that it? Have no Russian tanks blown up any Ukrainian military vehicles from maximum range, or killed Ukrainian infantry with their mounted machineguns? Ukrainian video evidence is also generally bereft of their own tank actions. There is another side to this story.
So when it comes to the tank argument, the evidence has to be described as inconclusive. One could examine these few cases and find plenty of evidence to support the FD2030 vision, and plenty to tear it apart. The cannon artillery argument might be even more complex.
On the surface of these cases, and others, missiles and rockets appear to be the dominant form of fires in modern warfare. But old-school tube artillery is far more prolific in all conflicts, including in Ukraine. It has played an important but relatively unsung role even in the counter-Islamic State fight in Syria and Iraq, where advanced precision munitions have garnered the most attention. For example, one Marine artillery battalion alone fired 35,000 artillery rounds in and around Raqqa, Syria, over five months of fighting, outstripping the total number of rounds fired during the entire invasion of Iraq in 2003. During the invasion of southern Lebanon in 2006, Israeli cannoneers reportedly fired 170,000 artillery rounds, nearly three times as many as were fired in all of Operations Desert Shield and Storm. Clearly, cannon artillery is still in prolific use. But there does not appear to be a strong, detailed, transparent, evidence-driven argument that it is or is not both useful and necessary.
It is also possible that the tank and artillery debates are obscuring an even more relevant issue for the future of the Marine Corps. The Corps has always been an infantry-centric organization. Berger cut some infantry units and reshaped others to make them lighter and more high-tech. Is he on the right track? In Ukraine, we are seeing infantry ambush and kill tanks, conduct battalion-level combined-arms assaults, defend urban areas, and execute squad- and platoon-sized raids. Light Ukrainian infantry appear to be excelling, while heavy Russian infantry are having mixed success. One could argue that basic infantry are dominating the fight in Ukraine, or that traditional infantry formations have been ineffective, or some combination thereof. So, what does Ukraine, and all of these cases of modern conventional war tell us about the value of basic infantry, the kind that suffered modest cuts in FD2030? This question, too, remains unanswered.
For now, it is not clear if the Marine Corps is going in an objectively better direction than it was before Berger took office. Neither the Commandant nor his critics have done a good enough job laying out all of the evidence and analyses in support of their arguments. Berger’s critics should work diligently to ensure they are not relying too heavily upon their dated personal experiences and well-entrenched opinions. But the real burden falls on Berger. This is not his Marine Corps. It belongs to all Americans, and this is our collective national security he is betting with. The tanks and most of the artillery are gone, but they can be brought back. Rebuilding infantry battalions is trickier. Berger should make a stronger, more transparent argument to help the next commandant guide the Corps’ future.
