In the last post, I recounted the history of antiarmor weapons up to the development of the anti-tank guided missile (ATGM). Now I’ll look at early countermeasures, and how well they hold up now.
Tactical Countermeasures
As stated previously, ATGMs allowed standoff both for aircraft and ground troops against armored vehicles. The Israelis, facing these weapons for the first time in 1973, struggled to counter the new threat of the AT-3 Sagger ATGM. The Yom Kippur War only lasted about three weeks, so all combatants were stuck with the equipment they had at the outset with no time to develop or even purchase new weapons. With no hope of a technical solution, the IDF settled on three basic tactics: suppression, evasion, and obscuration.
The Sagger ATGM required the operator to manually steer the missile onto its target, as though operating a remote-control toy airplane. He must maintain constant concentration on the target to do so. Further, the missile had limited maneuverability. Vehicles under attack could zigzag left and right wildly, while firing at the launch position in an attempt to force the operator to take cover, or at least befuddle him. This fire did not require lethal accuracy for the desired effect. Targets could also generate smoke in various ways — including firing into the ground in between themselves and the launch site — in order to make it impossible for the operator to guide onto the target.
Smoke screen as obscuration. Again, only works if the crew is aware they are under attack.
All of these tactics depend fundamentally on the tank crew’s situational awareness — in common with air-to-air combat, most kills are made on targets unaware they are under attack. Unfortunately, maintaining all-around visual awareness is actually considerably more difficult for a tank crew than for tactical aircraft. The vehicle itself obstructs vision more seriously than a cockpit, and the environment almost always presents a great deal of clutter.
Obviously, tactics used against previous anti-armor weapons — infantry cover, artillery fire, etc — continued to be as effective as before.
Armor
Meanwhile, breakthroughs in armor materials and layout improved protection, particularly against HEAT warheads. The Soviets first produced a tank with composite armor, the T-64, in 1963 but Western nations did not until the 1980s (M1/Leopoard 2/Challenger). Additionally, Explosive Reactive Armor — charges placed against vehicles that explode when struck by incoming projectiles — increased protection as well. The Soviets (and their successors) showed a particular fondness for ERA, which Russia continues to this day.
These improvements in armor now allowed (and allows!) tanks a reasonable expectation of surviving hits against their turret fronts from any HEAT weapon. Warheads had varied from 60mm to 80mm from WW2 through the 1960s in order to penetrate the 300-400mm of steel on heavier tanks like the T-62 and M60. The resulting weapons were not substantially more unwieldy than their predecessors (the 85mm RPG-7 handles about the same as the 60mm M1 Bazooka), hence the decision by some nations to stop bothering to armor against direct hits. As novel materials and ERA spread however, the minimum size of antitank warheads increased significantly in size. The use of tandem charges — one warhead placed behind the other in the same munition — to defeat reactive armor further significantly increases the size and weight of antiarmor munitions.
PG-7VM (70mm single charge, top) and PG-7VR (105mm tandem, bottom) rockets.
Now anti-tank gunners must carry heavier weapons (and each with a lower probability of kill). In addition, munitions intended for use against the heaviest vehicles — main battle tanks — were overkill against other classes of armored vehicles, such as increasingly prolific APCs and IFVs, making it more difficult to match weapons to targets. (Tank loadouts decreased as well for the same reason. Compare the 120 main gun rounds carried by the Sherman tank with the 42 carried by the Abrams.)
Modern ATGMs
Improvements in armor technology have more or less restored tank protection to the WW2 norm — heavy tanks (which all modern tanks are by 1940s standards) are very difficult to destroy from the front unless using solid-shot cannon rounds at the appropriate range. However, standoff still poses a problem: ATGM gunners can place effective fires on their targets outside the range of effective return fire. This makes denying terrain easier, and also has the less obvious impact of increasing the opportunity for flank shots:
Flank shots enabled by extended range.
Guidance improvements also significantly increased hit probability. The Sagger and other MCLOS missiles had around a 25% hit probability against a non-maneuvering target at any range out to its maximum of 3000 meters; the TOW and other SACLOS missiles boasted closer to 50% at maximum range (generally around 4km for heavy missiles and 2km for medium missiles like the AT-5/AT-13), with significantly improved probability at closer range. (The National Training Center claims 80% at 3000 meters for the TOW). This makes both suppression and evasion less effective, yet
Wireless ATGMs also significantly increase maximum range — over 5000 meters for the ground-launched AT-14. Wireless missiles vastly increase the standoff range of helicopters, with ranges over 8km for missiles like the AT-16 and Hellfire. True fire-and-forget missiles such as the Longbow Hellfire (millimeter-wave radar) and Javelin (passive infrared) now exist, rendering suppression of launchers useless once the missile is in flight. Top-attack missiles which maneuver over their targets just before exploding not only bypass expensive and heavy tank armor, but rectify a significant disadvantage of HEAT warheads — the need to strike a target at close to a perpendicular angle for maximum penetration. A top-attack missile first appeared in the mid-1980s (RBS-56 BILL) and they are becoming increasingly common.
Javelin top-attack ATGM
Aside from an abortive program to install jammers on the Bradley IFV and a perfunctory effort at reactive armor, “more armor” sums up the American response to increasingly lethal ATGMs. As these improved weapons proliferate, however, it won’t be enough.
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