(The British Army placed its hopes on the Ajax fighting vehicle, which turned out to suffer some serious design flaws.) The U.S. Military commentators have also cited the devastating destruction of armored vehicles by Azerbaijani drones in the second Nagorno-Karabakh conflict of 2020.Įven before the Russians’ humiliating defeat ahead of reaching Kyiv, some NATO armies were already planning a switch from main battle tanks to lighter armored fighting vehicles. Now, it is certainly true that modern antitank missiles - such as the NLAWs and Javelins that proved so effective against Putin’s Cold War-era T-72 tanks - have given infantry formidable new defenses against tanks. They clearly don’t think tanks are obsolete - and they’re right. After long hesitation, 12 Western countries, known as the “tank coalition”, have responded with promises of Leopards, Abrams and Challengers - amounting to more than 200 of them, almost an entire armored division.īut the Ukrainians want even more. Ukraine’s pleas for heavy armor have finally been answered. Over the past few months, we’ve seen what amounts to a remarkable revival of the role of the main battle tank - and by the very same people who seemed to be accelerating its demise last spring. This extraordinary debacle prompted many military commentators in the West to conclude that the era of the tank was finally over. Those hunters took to their task with enthusiasm, shredding Russia’s armored columns and sending Putin’s forces reeling back toward the border. Instead, it raised the profile of their vehicles and attracted the attention of Ukrainian groups hunting them on foot with shoulder-borne missile launchers. Many of the crews adopted the idea of their World War II predecessors and attached iron bedsteads to the exterior of their armor, hoping that they would detonate any antitank missiles prematurely. Vladimir Putin, obsessed with the Red Army’s capture of Berlin in 1945, clearly thought that his columns of tanks advancing on Kyiv from Belarus almost a year ago would bring rapid victory. A Danish Leopard 2A7 battle tank fires its main gun during a live-fire exercise in Estonia on Wednesday.
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