Tag Archives: procurement

The K2 Black Panther: A South Korean MBT

The Leopard 2 is a really solid tank. So far, it’s gone into a battle royale with the Leclerc, Challenger 2, and M1A2 Abrams, and come out the winner. It’s also bested the famous Merkava Mark IV. It also has tremendous export success. But, seeing as I love tanks, I can’t resist examining more in detail. Maybe today’s opponent will be able to unseat the reigning champ, the Leopard 2E.¹

The K2 Black Panther is South Korea’s second indigenously produced tank. The first, the K1, is basically a licensed M1 Abrams variant. You’d be hard pressed to tell the K1A1 from an M1A1 at a distance. Interestingly, the K2 bears a strong resemblance to the Leclerc in terms of overall design. I don’t know if that’s happenstance, or deliberate reverse engineering, or if Hyundai had some quiet deals with GIAT.

The K2 weights about 55 tonnes, and has a conventional layout, with driver forward, a two-man turret in the middle, and an engine in the back. Like the Leclerc, the hull is relatively short, thanks to a compact engine. It’s a conventional diesel though, the 1,500 hp MTU 883 (or a locally made equivalent engine) rather than the hyperbar V8 on the Leclerc. Leclerc might get better acceleration, but the 883 is more fuel efficient and likely more reliable. Also cheaper. Everyone’s going diesel these days. The Russians are pretty much all-diesel, and the Leopard 2 has a diesel, and that’s our super-popular benchmark. I’m not sure whether the K2 or the Leclerc has better acceleration, but they can both probably get going faster than a Leopard 2E because of the superior power/weight ratio on the K2.

The K2 also uses an autoloader. It’s a bustle-mounted, conveyor-type autoloader, just like the one on the Leclerc. Interestingly, though the Leclerc’s autoloader holds 22 rounds, the one on the K2 only holds 16 rounds. This is comparable to the Leopard 2 (15 ready rounds) and the M1 (17 ready rounds), but notably lower. I’m not sure what the reasoning is here, or if there’s some issue with sources. There aren’t many that talk about the K2, and fewer still in English. It’s curious either way. Perhaps a retrofit later. 16 ready rounds is good, but we’d love to sacrifice some extra turret stowage compartments or something for 22 ready rounds. Plus, that would give an overall capacity of 46 rounds rather than 40 in the K2.

The K2’s gun is a 120mm L55, licensed from Rheinmetall. The best tank gun in the world. The Leclerc has a 120mm L52 model, which is good, but not quite as good. Same gun as the Leopard 2E. So this is a tie overall. However, the Koreans have developed a top-attack munition for their tanks, which follows a ballistic trajectory to attack the roof armor with a 120mm HEAT round. This is going to do awful things to even those tanks that have plenty of roof armor. I don’t know of a reason that the Leopard 2E couldn’t mount this, but it currently doesn’t. Both are able to mount the Israeli LAHAT gun-launched ATGM. When the South Koreans designed the K2, they were strongly considering the 140mm gun. While it was not selected, it can be installed without significant modification to the turret.

The K2 has a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun with 12,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammo stored and a roof-mounted 12.7mm HMG for the commander with 3,200 rounds stored. I do not know how many of these are ready rounds, though I suspect they use standard 200-round boxes for the HMG. The Leopard 2E has a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun and a second 7.62mm machine gun mounted on the roof. Interestingly, the Germans mount that by the loader’s hatch, not the commander’s. The Leopard 2 carries 4,750 rounds of 7.62mm to be split between both machine guns. Again, I don’t know the ready capacity of the coax gun. The K2 seems to be showing some American design influence in the quantity of machine gun ammo carried. I approve. Neither tank mounts these weapons in a remote weapons station, though this is changed in the Leopard 2A7 variant. Not a big deal though, it’s an easy enough thing to change for either.

Armorwise, the K2 is at a disadvantage by virtue of being newer, since I don’t have as much discussion on it. The 2E is a known commodity, with very thick frontal armor, substantial roof armor, and optional side armor kits for the turret and skirts. In terms of frontal armor, the 2E is very good against KE, being comparable to the M1A2 against KE threats and much better against HEAT. Neither is as well armored as the Challenger 2 on the turret face.

The K2 has more modern composite armor construction, and has a “stepped turret” with reduced-height turret faces, and then a higher middle portion to accommodate the gun’s desired depression angle. So we’d expect a thick and tough face. Looking at it and doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations tells us that it’s no worse than the Leopard 2E or M1A2, and likely better. It’s probably going to end up being comparable to the front armor of the Challenger 2, or possibly a trifle less good. It’s a very modern armor array, with not a lot of frontal area and plenty of thickness to work with. It’d be easy to play with lots of modern metallurgy and composites to get something really good here.

Side armor is rather less thick. It does include ERA, as does the roof over the crew compartment. The turret hatches also have ERA modules. I don’t know much about this ERA, but it indicates some likely good resistance to HEAT rounds or RPGs on the side. Improved side skirts and possibly additional turret side armor might be warranted in urban combat scenarios, but the Black Panther is well-suited to conventional warfare as-is.

The Black Panther also includes a ‘soft kill’ active protection system right from the factory. It has a radar-driven missile approach warning system, and can automatically fire visual/infrared screening smoke grenades in the direction of the threat. This will also make it easier and cheaper to add a ‘hard kill’ system, since we only need to add the effectors. No additional sensors are needed.

Both the K2 and the Leopard 2E have modern thermal sights for the crew. Fire control on the K2 is significantly better, with automatic target tracking capability and integration of the radar system. It can also hold fire momentarily if the gun is jostled by a large bump. The Leclerc has a similar system, but as far as I can tell, the Leopard 2E does not. The K2 has a battle management system, one is available for the Leopard 2E, but it’s not fitted standard.² The K2 also has a datalink system for sharing targeting data, but the Leopard 2E does not.

Due to the rough mountainous terrain on the Korean Peninsula, the K2 has a hydropneumatic suspension system that is adjustable for ride height or to tilt the tank, like on a low rider. It’s cool and useful, since it deals with harsh terrain or lets you make best use of available cover, and no other current tank has it. That said, it’s overkill in the plains of Central and Eastern Europe.

So how does it shake out? Is the K2 better?

Yes. The K2 is a more advanced tank than the Leopard 2E, and crucially, it has more growth room. Remember, early versions of the Leopard 2 weighed 55 tonnes, and armor augmentations have driven that up, putting extra strain on the suspension and powertrain and reducing acceleration performance. The K2 is the best western tank on the market today.

And now, the other question you’re wondering: would we buy them? That depends strongly on price and politics. The K2 has a reputation as the most expensive tank in the world, but quoted figures aren’t awful. They’re actually quite competitive with those of the Abrams, which is a decent apples-to-apples comparison. The Leopard 2E includes native production licensing and spares. So we’ll see. As for politics, Germany is closer and a NATO member. But South Korea actually spends money on defense these days and doesn’t have ideas in its head for an EU army of stupid. So we shall see. But given the cost of the 2E package and the 2A7 offered to Saudi Arabia, the K2 looks like a good buy.

What about the T-14 Armata I reviewed last week? Now it gets interesting. Both are very new, very advanced tanks for about the same price. Again, we’ll set aside politics for you to keep this technical, where you want it, lest the K2 score an easy win. Both tanks are very new. Neither tank has a ton of information available about it. The T-14 has better survivability from complete crew/ammo isolation. The K2 has the better electrics, with lots more features being confirmed, including the important battle management system and third gen infrared sights, and South Korea has a much better track record of good electronic systems. Both have excellent guns. The K2 can be easily upgraded to a 140mm if desired. The T-14 is rumored to be upgradeable to a 152mm gun, but no such gun exists yet³. The T-14 has a smaller engine, but the K2’s engine is more proven. Both should have plenty of room for future upgrades. The T-14 comes with a hard-kill active protection system, but we might be able to find a better one if we shop around.

In the end, the greater survivability of the T-14 outweighs any disadvantages from the unmanned turret and the Russian electronics. The better base platform is the one to choose, and that’s Armata. Electronics are easy to upgrade, engines and transmissions are easy to change out, and there’s a long tradition of export buyers putting French electronic systems in Russian vehicles, but ammunition stowage and crew safety is relatively permanent. So the Armata is our overall champion, with the K2 a close second best.

1.) I’m choosing the 2E because it’s a known commodity, and I actually have successful sale prices (to Spain, and it’s similar to the one sold to Greece). The 2A7 adds a lot of modifications for urban combat, which isn’t really my bag. Plus, it hasn’t been sold yet, and the prices on offer to the Saudis were really high, though support and spares is likely increasing it.
2.) It’s another thing included in the 2A7 upgrade kit. This is totally my bag.
3.) I would actually expect something in the 130-140mm range here, but that might just be projecting. I don’t know what supergun the Russians have under development.

Parvusimperator reviews the T-14 Armata MBT

Posted by parvusimperator

By popular demand, I am reviewing Russia’s latest Tank Of Doom, the T-14 Armata. While I usually wargame with the Russians as the opposition, as per Cold War tradition, we have more in common than you might think. We both love realpolitik, nuclear weapons, and tanks. Lots of love for tanks. We both adore tanks, expect and demand that they be the heavy hitters in combat, and scoff at the idiots who think their time is through. So let us look at the latest design from a fellow tank lover.

In many ways, the T-14 Armata is a recognition that something has to give. The Russians saw in the first Gulf War what happens when their T-72s got overmatched and had their armor penetrated: the reserve ammo cooked off, immolating the crew and sending the turret flying into the air like a jack-in-the-box. No problem, they said. This was a mere “monkey model”¹ T-72. They had big, scary T-72BU,² with the high-end Kontakt 5 ERA, that was effective at reducing the penetrating ability of APFSDS rounds and could also stop HEAT rounds without a dramatic increase in weight. Keeping the tanks relatively light was very important to the Russians, because the bridge infrastructure in Russia and the former Soviet Union was not very good, and just can’t take the weight of a fully kitted out Leopard 2A7. Plus it’s a lot easier to move bridging equipment when it has less weight to support.

But then came Chechnya, where veterans knew to shoot multiple rockets at the ERA modules, since they don’t do multihit capability. And then the West developed rounds that could get through Kontakt 5 without issue. Better modules and more base armor was needed. The cycle was to begin again, but those bridges weren’t going to get stronger on their own. Faced with strict weight requirements, the Russians decided to take the crew out of the turret. Putting them all in the hull meant less frontal armored area, which meant less armor weight. This was something confronting Western designers too–designs for the next tank made in the late 80s in the US and West Germany had a similar layout. But the Russians hit the wall first. Plus, the Russians have always been willing to try new things in their tanks.

In many ways the Armata is a profoundly Western-style tank, though it still is very light at under 50 tonnes. It has a properly strong front hull armor of what appears to be composites and steel, and it’s rated for protection right up there with its Western rivals. It is, however, not considerably better than them as far as frontal armor estimates go. There’s an all new 125mm gun, the long-barrel 2A82-1M, which has a 32 round autoloader, an all-new APFSDS round with a longer penetrator, and an all-new gun launched ATGM round. There’s a 1,500 hp diesel, though it’s in a goofy and questionable X-configuration. And there’s modern looking thermal sights for the commander and the gunner. Of the seven sets road wheels, the first two pairs and the last pair have adjustable suspension. And, straight from the factory, it has a missile approach warning radar, and hard and soft kill active protection systems³. The sides of the hull appear to have ERA skirts, though they might just be composite modules. The roof is well armored, but I’m uncertain if this contains ERA or not.

That said, the tank is brand new, so many questions remain. How good are the Russian thermal viewers: are they second-generation or third-generation? How good is the fire control computer? Can it do automatic target tracking? IFF? Can the radar be used for finding ground targets? How reliable is the new engine/transmission⁴ setup? How much armor is on the turret? The outer shell is clearly not tough, but there must be armor behind it or else it would be super easy to achieve a mission-kill. But you don’t need much of an armor profile internally to protect the gun, so maybe the outer shell is just for the radar and APS. And how well will the unmanned turret design work in war (or at least in exercises)? They’re gambling heavily that technology can overcome the loss of situational awareness, though to be fair, so are the Germans with the Puma IFV. Of course, there are some classified things I’d love to know too, like just how good is the main gun compared to a Rheinmetall 120mm L55, and just how good is that armor.

There is one other thing that bothers me presently, and that is how many will the Russians actually buy? They have an awful lot of new weapons programs, and while labor costs are certainly cheaper in Russia, this is a lot of new technology. It won’t be substantially cheaper than a Western tank program of similar vintage with good management, e.g. K2 Black Panther.⁵

But let’s get to business, and the three million ruble⁶ question. Would we buy one? On the one hand, politics and NATO might intervene. On the other hand, Russia will sell to anyone, and deferring to politics would be the ultimate cop out. So, let’s set that aside. Would we buy?!

In terms of raw capability, it is similar to Leopard 2A7. A worthy competitor, but not massively better than either, at least on paper and without knowing classified information all around. In terms of cost, it is similar to Leopard 2A7, high but manageable. But ammo is stored entirely separate from the crew, so it is more survivable than either. And hard kill APS are built right in. Electrics should be good, and if not, there’s a long history of adding French and/or Israeli electronics to Russian stuff. The only question might be production, but maybe we could make like India and become a partner in production with a big order to see that it actually gets done.

So would we buy one? Сделка?!

Oh yeah. We’d be all over it.

Uralvagonzavod? Сделка.

1.) i.e. a watered-down export version. The crap you sell to dodgy “friends” like Saddam Hussein, not the good stuff you keep for yourself.
2.) Better known as the T-90.
3.) So, automatically triggered visual/infrared screening smoke to hide the tank, and some kind of mini grenade to destroy missiles.
4.) It’s a twelve-speed transmission, which seems needlessly complicated to me. Also, the previous Russian diesels are all descended from the same V-12 engine family.
5.) While a simple currency conversion of the quoted price doesn’t bear this out, the ruble has lost a lot of value against the dollar recently. If we convert to an intermediate, fixed value commodity in both places (e.g. gold or big macs) as an intermediate step, we get a price that is near as makes no difference to that of the K2 Black Panther.
6.) The top prize on Сделка?!, the Russian Deal or No Deal game show.

On the Merkava Mark IV

Posted by parvusimperator

I’ve already mentioned my fondness for the Namer. But let’s look at the other famous piece of Israeli heavy armor, the Merkava. Once again, Israeli experiences, especially in the wars of 1967 and 1973 featured heavily in designing a tank for their needs.

Despite being some of the staunchest devotees of Orthodox Maneuver Warfare, the Israelis have historically favored British tanks, which emphasize protection first, firepower second, and mobility third. The Israelis collaborated with the British on the design of the Chieftain, but after the Six Day War, the British refused to sell them to the Israelis, since the Israelis had struck first.¹ The Israelis were incensed, and set about developing their own tank, the latest version of which is the Merkava Mark IV.

The Merkava has many unique features, most obviously a front-mounted engine. I’m not entirely sold on this idea, but the Israelis didn’t have access to composite armor technology when they first developed the Merkava, so they put the engine forward to maximize protection. The engine will stop a HEAT round, at the expense of dying. But a mobility-killed tank is a lot easier to replace than a tank crew, and the front mounted engine allows for a rear hatch, plus space at the back that can be used for plenty of ammo or the emergency transport of troops. A rear hatch makes it easy for the crew to safely escape a knocked-out tank, or to resupply the tank with ammo. Perfect for a defensive struggle with hordes of Syrian tanks as they surge across the Golan heights. This has stuck around, and the Merkava IV has a 1,500 hp engine up front, and a door at the back. I like the ammo capacity, but I think I’d prefer a more traditional layout and to load up with composite armor at the front.

The 1,500 horsepower engine is the MTU 883, probably the best diesel tank engine in the world today. It’s powerful, reliable, cheap, and relatively fuel efficient. And the Mark IV needs every one of those horsepowers. Wikipedia says the Mark IV weighs 65 tonnes, which is heavy. Heavier than an M1A2, heavier than a Leopard 2E, heavier than a standard Challenger 2, all of which come in around 63 tonnes. And yet, I call bullshit. The IDF is very secretive, even about the weight of their tanks. You could get fewer lies about weight if you asked Hillary Clinton how much she weighs. I have a much better source from an expert on the Merkava, who served in the IDF armored units, and he lists the weight of a Mark IV at “more than 70,000 kg”. That’s a good bit heavier. That’s heavier than the Leopard 2A7 with all the supplemental armor kits.

I might suggest the tank is heavier still. Photos of the turret with some of the armor modules removed shows that they’re mostly solid armor. I don’t know the competition, but that indicates a lot of weight, especially considering how big the Merkava is. And the 1,200 horsepower engine of the Merkava Mark III wasn’t enough. If that weighed about 63-65 tonnes, we could go from 78 to 81 tonnes without too much trouble as far as power/weight is concerned. That’s beastly. Remember, the British have been perfectly happy to add 12 tonnes of armor to the Challenger 2, and that only has a 1,200 horsepower engine. The Israelis have always thought like the British as far as tank design goes.

But enough rampant speculation. It is a big, heavy, very well-armored tank, that much is clear. I really like the turret design; the armor is very thick, even on traditionally less protected areas. There’s plenty of side armor, and more roof armor than on the turret of any other tank. And that’s in addition to a very thick looking turret face. Excellent! Hull armor is reasonably good too, with armored sponsons and plenty of armor on the hull front. The latest versions of the Mark IV even add a Trophy active protection system. More hull front armor might be nice, but the engine is there. The turret is a good shape. Protection of the hull sides, especially where the ammo is stored, leave something to be desired, since a hit in this area can cook off the stowed ammo.

I don’t have a ton of information on armor composition. Not that I’d believe it, given how much I question even the weight figures. Early marks used lots of spaced steel armor, trading weight for cost and protection. More recent marks probably use some kind of composite, something that works well in a highly sloped arrangement. It’s also used in multiple layers with air gaps in between in the turret. But given the published cost numbers, it’s probably not anything particularly exotic. It’s also not explosive reactive armor, despite extensive Israeli work on that. The Israelis are probably still trading thickness and weight for cheapish protection. However, I’m a little concerned about the armor design. Usually, composite modules are contained between inner and outer steel plates, to contain the modules. The Merkava doesn’t have the outer containing plates, so weapon hits tend to cause significant structural damage to the area around the impact point. Structural compromise beyond the area hit directly by the shaped charge jet indicates a limited ability to withstand multiple hits in the same armor module. Other designs are much better at not coming apart in the area around an impact.

I should take a moment to point out that most of the armor on the Mark IV is modular, and is easy to remove and replace for repair or upgrade, as long as a convenient crane is handy.

On to the firepower. The Merkava Mark IV has a 120mm gun, designed for high pressure rounds with an improved recoil system and stronger chamber over the 120mm gun on the Mark III. There’s also a coaxial 7.62mm machine gun, provision to mount an external coaxial 12.7mm machine gun, and another 7.62mm machine gun on the roof for the commander. There’s no machine gun for the loader though. Instead, his duties include loading a breach-loading 60mm mortar. This mortar comes from the lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and was also retrofitted to the other, foreign-built tanks in the Israeli inventory. It was used to launch starshells in the days before night vision. It’s also useful for engaging anti-tank teams in defilade, since it’s an indirect fire weapon. I really like this feature. I’m not sure about the external 12.7mm extra coax. I’d probably prefer a 12.7mm machine gun for the commander, though the Germans also seem to favor a GPMG for the roof.

Now, let’s talk survivability and ammo stowage, since those two go together. The Merkava’s large size is a big help to reducing how many crew are going to get injured in the event the armor is penetrated. About 8,000 rounds of machine gun ammo is carried, plus 40 rounds for the 60mm mortar. But that’s less of a big deal. Let’s look at main gun ammo. That’s what you’re here for. The Mark IV carries ten ready rounds in the bustle, in a pair of automatic five-round drums. The loader can select ammo type, and the drums will rotate and push it out a small hatch so he can grab it. Blow-out panels are provided over the ammo, of course. The smaller hatch makes the crew that much safer from ammo cook-off, and the automated system for selecting rounds is pretty sweet. But, 10 ready rounds is not a lot, the Leopard 2 has 15 and the Abrams has 17. I’d prefer it if there was more ready ammo.

The Mark IV carries 38 other rounds, six in the floor under the turret basket, and 32 in individual containers, 16 per side in the rear of the tank. These rounds can be removed to create space to evacuate tank crews or move infantry around, but aside from the protective containers, there’s not a lot of internal separation for these rounds. I’m not the biggest fan of this arrangement. It does predate heavily armored APCs like the Namer, and I’d prefer more isolation of ammo from crew, even at the expense of being stuck with the arrangements. Hull blow-out panels would be great here, or at least some isolation so you could get a halon extinguisher in each reserve magazine. On the other hand, the Israeli arrangement does make reloading easier, and tanks being shot at from behind are never going to fare well.

In terms of electronics, the Mark IV is right up there with the best of the West, with thermal sights and laser rangefinders for the commander and gunner, a battle management computer system, and a modern fire control computer complete with automatic target tracking. The Israelis also are the only Western country to produce the LAHAT, a gun-launched ATGM with semi-active laser homing guidance, providing extended range for the main gun. Currently, they’re fitting Trophy active protection systems to the Mark IV, because it’s not yet hard enough to kill.

So, when all is said and done, would we buy, if they were available? Would we prefer them to our chosen Leopard 2E?

No.

The Leopard 2E is better suited for conventional warfare, with massive frontal protection² and the best production tank gun in the world. The Leopard 2E’s 120mm L55 gun is rated for more pressure than even the enhanced, Israeli-made 120mm L44 on the Mark IV. The Leopard 2E’s armor is properly encapsulated, so it won’t come apart around a hit area. It’s not difficult to add active protection
to the Leopard 2E, or the Abrams, or any other new tank. And the Leopard 2E even comes with improved roof armor and supplemental armor kits for the turret sides, hull skirts, and underbelly. So it can become almost as good at urban warfare. It’s just a better tank all-around, not being excessively optimized for incursions into Beirut.

1.) Apparently, striking first isn’t cool anymore, even if your enemy is preparing to strike you. Lame.
2.) As it should be.

Attack Helicopters for the Modern Army

Posted by parvusimperator

Yes, I’m finally getting around to replying to some of Fishbreath’s stuff. You’re probably wondering what attack helicopter we in Borgundy like. The Boeing AH-64E Apache Guardian, with the Longbow fire control radar setup. Duh. Best in-class. Next question.

Why do we like the AH-64E? Mostly on account of being the baddest tank killing thing with rotary wings, and that’s due to the phenomenal Hellfire missiles. It’s got the fancy millimeter-wave fire control setup so that it just has to poke the radar over a hill, or have a fellow helicopter do so, and it can literally rain hellfire on its enemies. Way cool.

This is hardly fair though. The AH-64E has gotten a lot of development money, and the alternatives have stagnated. And the single-seat Ka-50 is basically stillborn.¹ The Ka-52, which hasn’t done well at exports, is a two-seater. Well, life and procurement games are hardly fair. But this is shaping up to be a dreadfully short piece, and simply adding tactics will make it boring, so let’s make it interesting (and also add tactics).

What helicopter would we choose if it was 1990? The Ka-50 has just entered production, and the Soviet union hasn’t collapsed yet. We’d still go with the Apache (then, it was the AH-64A, and it was made by McDonnell Douglas, who hadn’t been bought buy Boeing yet). A good chunk of that is political; we’re firmly in the West’s camp. But that’s the cop-out reason. Straight up, the AH-64A/Hellfire combo is still best at what we want it to do: kill tanks. Being semi-active laser homing, the Hellfire can be fired somewhat indirectly, as long as there’s some laser emitter to illuminate the target, the helicopter needn’t be exposed. Hellfire missiles can also be salvoed faster, since the laser only needs to be on target for guidance, not at launch. A ground launch option is available. Oh, and the tandem-HEAT warhead on the Hellfire is really big. So it’s probably going to kill what it hits.

Now we get to the tactics. What are attack helicopters for? Well, we see them as a much more successful manifestation of the ‘tank destroyer’ concept. Helicopters can move much faster than ground vehicles, so they’re perfect for rapidly moving to provide support or counterattack a breakthrough. I don’t have a cute metaphor for this, other than maybe to call them ‘plumbers’.² They’re to kill tanks first, other vehicles second. So, the powerful, accurate Hellfire missile that can be fired rapidly is just what we need.

I should probably take a moment to point out that deep strikes with attack helicopters are a bad idea. They don’t fare well when lots of things can shoot them, as evidenced by losing one to a flak trap in Operation Iraqi Freedom. They’re not very good at dealing with SAMs, so they need to use terrain to avoid them. Since they fly low, they’re also vulnerable to AAA fire. Again, it’s about speed and using cover and concealment effectively. They’re not well suited to forcing the SAM to dodge, since they’re not very fast.

That aside, we’ve mostly been talking about missiles, not about helicopters themselves. Let’s look more at the Apache and the two-man layout. A two-man crew is perhaps the most intuitive solution. There are two things that need doing: weapons employment and flying the helicopter. Since flying the helicopter is *hard*, and semi-active laser homing weapons like the Hellfire still require quite a bit of operator input for target discrimination and selection, we might naturally choose to have a crew of two, like the engineers at Hughes/McDonnell Douglas did. Or those at Bell, or those at EuroCopter, or those at Mil.

I generally like a crew of two in combat aircraft. In the fighter realm, the statistics show that for comparable types, the two-seat fighters tend to do better, since they have two pairs of eyes available. This is even more helpful for the attack helicopter, since spotting ground targets is notoriously difficult. Also, two sets of eyes to spot return fire is very helpful, since it’s easy for the gunner to get ‘tunnel vision’ when prosecuting targets. The pilot can maintain overwatch for tracers or missile launches, or keep the helicopter moving. These tactics of attack on the move have been heavily used by Soviet pilots in Afghanistan after Stinger missiles were introduced to the conflict, by American pilots in Vietnam, and more recently by Russian pilots in the Syrian intervention. Movement is good. Movement is life.

Hovering is not a good idea from a long-term survivability perspective. In addition to dedicated anti-aircraft assets, most modern IFVs and some modern MBTs have targeting systems capable of nailing attack helicopters if they hover for a while. Fishbreath and I can also testify that even an old-school T-55 can bag you if you sit pretty and hover for a while. If you’re gonna hover, you have to pop up from some kind of cover, engage, and drop back down (and relocate). Again, that second crewmember allows for a rapid transition to movement to avoid incoming fire, and he can keep his eyes up while the gunner is engaging targets. Or just be looking around and planning where to pop up from next. He can route plan while the gunner hunts targets.

One nifty feature of the Apache in particular is that the pilot has his own independent thermal viewer to let him see at night or in foul weather. The pilot’s thermal camera is slaved to his helmet. Night fighting and operations in harsh weather conditions are also better with the split workload, and the Apache has the vision tech to facilitate this. The Ka-50N might have rectified this a bit, but that was just a prototype, and we don’t know how well it would have done at night.

So there you have it. While you could operate an attack helicopter with a single man crew and appropriate automation, they’re better with a two-man crew. More combat effective. None of this precludes operating attack helicopters in groups; more helicopters are better. And yes, you’ll pay a bit more for the American-made Apache, and you’ll pay more for two crew. But you get more. This is the helicopter that armies want. This is the helicopter foreign designers wish they made. This is the most effective attack helicopter available. The choice is clear.

Geronimo would approve.

1.) Don’t worry, Fishbreath. I’ll be sure to say something pithy at its funeral. And then drink a bunch of good vodka and gloat.
2.) Because they stop leaks, get it? A trifle Nixonian though.

Luchtburg Responds: an IFV for the rest of us

Posted by Fishbreath

Parvusimperator is fond of a certain sort of infantry fighting vehicle: it should be big, heavy, share parts commonality with his tank, and transport a whole platoon of infantry. It may come as a surprise to you that this is not the only sort of IFV¹.

The Hoplon, parvusimperator’s design, fits certain scenarios very well: your Golan Heights, your Fallujah, perhaps your Fulda Gap. Those sorts of scenarios are important, but in exchange for its superb performance there, the Hoplon gives up some other capabilities that other IFVs offer, and other IFVs can be nearly as good as the Hoplon in the Hoplon’s preferred field of play.

I’ve always been a BMP-3 fanboy, so we’ll talk about the Hoplon and Namer relative to the BMP-3. We’ll kick things off with the biggest difference…

Mobility
Otherwise known as the dreaded M word. The BMP-3 is the obvious winner here. Its advantages stem from its weight: fully kitted out, it tips the scales at less than 20 tonnes.

This means that it need not bother with complicated, failure-prone fording mechanisms. It can simply swim its way across a river. That’s right: it’s fully amphibious, which is an important quality for an infantry-carrying vehicle. Mechanizing infantry usually improves their speed of tactical movement while reducing their ability to cross or occupy rough terrain. An amphibious IFV actually adds some terrain-crossing ability: infantry can’t really cross or occupy a river on their own. More generally, a lighter IFV leads to enhanced tactical mobility overall: lower ground pressure means lighter vehicles can move across a wider variety of terrain, in which another vehicle might bog down².

Enough about tactical mobility, though. There’s another kind of mobility where the heavy IFV concept falls down: the capital-M sort, Strategic Mobility. How many Namers or Hoplons can you fit into your C-130? Zero. How many BMP-3s? One! How many Namers or Hoplons can you fit into your C-5? One! How many BMP-3s can you fit into your comparable An-124? … six.

Now, airlift is not the be-all, end-all of strategic mobility, but, being the hardest part, it’s a good place to start. Certainly, airlift is the way you want to move your stuff when it absolutely, positively has to be there tomorrow. Being able to fit your IFVs into your smaller air transports, freeing up your big transports to move tanks, is a significant win for putting a mechanized force somewhere fast. You can get by with rail and road transport if you’re a purely continental power, but I would suggest that the world is too complicated a place for anyone to call themselves a truly, exclusively continental power.

A lighter vehicle is also somewhat easier to transport by rail: it doesn’t call for specialized rolling stock, whereas your standard flatbed rail car would be hard-pressed to stand up to a Namer-sized vehicle. Road transit is also easier, because of reduced road wear, and again, a lesser need for overspecialized vehicles.

Ship-based transport is a wash, but you can put just about anything on a boat. Hoplon or Namer don’t get any points for being easily transportable that way.

Armament
We should start by talking about what an IFV needs to do. Infantry are versatile, able to do almost anything on the battlefield; their vehicles ought to be too. This is why most IFVs have an autocannon armament. The autocannon can engage fellow light vehicles, enemy infantry, aircraft, and to some degree, dug-in positions. You’ll note, however, that tanks are not on the list. Although infantry armed with proper missiles represent a serious threat to tanks, IFVs, generally, do not: they don’t hide as well as infantry, and unlike infantry, they can’t spread out for protection against deadly point fire. IFVs equipped to defeat tanks are therefore so equipped for purely defensive purposes: anti-tank missilery is not a headline capability on an IFV. Ideally, your IFV won’t be in evidence when the tanks come a-knocking; that’s why you have infantry antitank teams.

On to the BMP-3, then. It does indeed have an autocannon: the 30×165 2A72, a variant of the 2A42 you might know from past Ka-50 posts. The 30×165 cartridge, while a little lighter than the NATO-standard 30×173, is nevertheless quite punchy, by IFV standards; the BMP-3 carries 500 rounds split between high-explosive and armor-piercing types. Little needs to be said about the autocannon. It’s an autocannon. Every ex-Soviet state and Russian arms buyer in the world uses this one. It works as advertised.

Next, though, the BMP-3 goes a little bit off-script. Mounted coaxially with the autocannon is a 100mm rifled medium-velocity gun. “But why?” you ask. “That’s way too small to shoot at a tank, and the autocannon is good enough, right?” Not altogether! You may recall the infantry tank from the Second World War: a bad idea, but one based on a germ of truth. Infantry don’t have a good way to deal with a really stout dug-in position. Launchers can help, but tend to be short-ranged and inaccurate. Mortars are nice, but they’re an area weapon. What the infantryman really needs is a good-sized, say, 100mm HE-chucker, able to keep up with him as far as terrain crossing, and able to bear rapidly on any intractable enemy defensive position. So, stick one on the IFV. The BMP-3’s 100mm gun is an infantry support gun, which is important tactically, but also logistically: it doesn’t have much in the way of anti-tank use, so what ammunition it carries is all for, y’know, supporting the infantry.

Which isn’t to say it has zero anti-armor use. It carries eight gun-launched missiles; although they won’t do much against a modern tank, they provide an extra-long-range punch against lighter enemy vehicles.

Three 7.62mm machine guns—one coaxial in the turret, and two bow guns, each with 2000 rounds of ammunition—round out the weapons fit.

What it comes down to is that the BMP’s armament is hyper-focused on its role as an infantry fighting vehicle. It doesn’t faff about with anti-tank weapons it should never have reason to use, if deployed correctly. It simply gets on with the business of employing every piece of hardware it possesses to defeat the sorts of enemies the infantry it carries is most likely to be facing.

Protection
We come now to a category where the BMP falls down a little compared to its HIFV competition, but really, of course it does. They’re literally tanks, with the tanky bits taken out and seats put in. It isn’t like I was somehow going to miss this one. I just don’t care, and here’s why you shouldn’t, either: doctrine. I gave three scenarios where the Hoplon-Namer school of IFV design excels: the Golan Heights, the Fulda Gap, and Fallujah. Let’s look at each one.

The Golan Heights, as parvusimperator mentioned, is probably one of the most featureless regions on the planet which is nevertheless worth fighting over. It’s flat, and there’s nowhere to hide. If the enemy can see you, the enemy can peg you with a missile. Now, if you’re advancing in proper combined-arms fashion, with your tanks and IFVs working in concert, what happens? They shoot at your IFV and it shrugs off the hit, or they shoot at your IFV and it dies, but either way, they aren’t shooting your tanks. The tanks are your true breakthrough weapon: IFVs are just there to deliver your infantry to hold the ground you’ve just captured with your tanks, and to provide some extra punch when they get there. Losing a few doesn’t matter; tanks are the bigger, juicier target, and a combined-arms advance against an ATGM-equipped position should rightly see most of the missiles headed for the tanks anyway.

The Fulda Gap presents different challenges. You (presuming you’re a Western power) are on defense. You’ll be facing tanks and IFVs pouring through the West German forests, but you have the edge: you get to dig in, which nullifies a lot of the survivability edge. Missiles mounted on the IFV are less of an advantage in this scenario, because your men can simply dismount and use their own ATGMs.

In Fallujah, the Hoplon’s edge is slightly more pronounced: it can eat an RPG shot from the front, and that helps when you’re turning a corner or going down a long street. That said, you’ve taken your armored fighting vehicle into an urban area. That is not a low-risk proposition. You’ll want a TUSK-style kit however heavy your IFV is: if Big Army and the United States Marines found that the Abrams needed specific upgrade kit to be safe and effective in cities, your IFV is going to need the same³. The single most important upgrade out of your TUSK kit is slat armor, which is lightweight compared to real armor, and will do a number on that most common urban threat, the RPG.

Beyond that, an autocannon and coaxial machine gun alone are insufficient armament for city fighting. Much better to have a 100mm HE-thrower, so you can bring down the front of a building in response to an RPG shot, and some independent machine guns, so you can hose down multiple targets at once.

Ergonomics
We come to the BMP’s weakest point: its ergonomics. Tank-based IFVs and APCs have cavernous internal spaces and proper rear exits. For some reason, the BMP-3 puts the engine where that rear exit ought to go, robbing the troops inside of both convenience and survivability⁴. Getting out of a BMP involves at least a little bit of climbing.

In this picture, you can see the troop compartment: once you go over the engine (the raised section beneath the opened top doors), you drop into the troop compartment, which is behind the turret. (The turret’s fighting positions are enclosed by the two white pillars.) Three seats are placed with their backs to the engine compartment, and two are placed on either side of the turret base. Two more jumpseats can be folded down between the three seats in front of the engine, but five is a good capacity estimate for troops carrying any real amount of gear.

To get in or out, you have to do one of two things: open the top doors and jump up onto the engine, or leave the top doors closed, and crawl out the back. Neither one is as fast as a traditional rear door, and the safest way—crawling—is much slower. If you’re willing to further handicap your exit speed, you can probably stash some gear on one of the crawlways, which might be handy if you’re carrying an ATGM team, say.

Really, though, the BMP’s design follows its ergonomics. It’s almost purely an infantry support vehicle, which can incidentally carry five infantrymen. I don’t know what the prevailing Russian doctrine is, but the BMP is not a good battle taxi. Its job, as far as carrying infantry goes, is to get them close to the battlefield, not reliably serve to move them around thereupon. Once the infantry has disembarked, preferably somewhere out of direct enemy fire, they can advance with the BMP in support. It can serve in the battle taxi role—it’s quick, has decent terrain-crossing ability, and can fit an admittedly small number of infantry—but that is not its natural home.

Luchtbourgish Advantages
The BMP requires some doctrinal modifications relative to your HIFV or HAPC: namely, in situations where it is likely to encounter tanks, it must be used in close concert with tanks, and in combat generally, the infantry should be disembarked earlier and fight their way to their stopping point, with the BMP providing fire support. Urban survivability requires specific urban survivability upgrades⁵.

These modifications may not be for you. I don’t think they’re for parvusimperator or Borgundy. Survivability in a limited area of operations is too important for his purposes. Luchtburg, however, is a different story.

The mobility of lighter IFVs, and the BMP particularly, meets a Luchtbourgish need. The country is mountainous, swampy, and filled with rivers. An IFV which can swim has a huge mobility edge over one which doesn’t: it can easily penetrate the Luchtbourgish interior where a heavier vehicle or a tank might get bogged down.

The armament fit is perfect, too: busting up a cartel camp in the jungle is tricky with infantry or lighter vehicles, because the drug lords have moderately heavy weapons; an IFV which can take hits from machine guns and grenades while dealing out heavy punishment in return is ideal for Luchtburg’s aggressive enforcement of anti-cartel laws.

Finally, air mobility is of critical importance. Luchtburg is an expeditionary power with global interests. The BMP-3 is easy to ship rapidly, which lets Luchtbourgish forces enter the fight faster, which helps protect Luchtbourgish interests worldwide.

You’ll recall that parvusimperator also recently wrote on the Namer, Israel’s ‘IFV’, but that’s more properly a heavy APC, its own class. It’s designed to transport infantry in safety exclusively, not to provide added firepower on the battlefield.
Heavy APCs and heavy IFVs (Namer and Hoplon) have tank-like ground pressures of 12-15 psi, ordinarily. Standard IFVs (the range from the BMP-3 up to, say, the unupgraded Puma) tend to be in the 6-8 psi range, which is approximately the range of a standing human.
Unless you’ve bought Namer, but Namer is basically frontal-strength armor all around.
Don’t get me wrong, putting the engine in front of the troops is bad for the engine if you take a hit, but it’s better to lose an IFV alone than it is to lose an IFV and everyone inside it.
Surprisingly, I don’t think the Russians have any. I can only find one or two pictures of real BMPs equipped with slat armor. (ERA and active anti-missile systems are obviously out for a vehicle intended to operate closely with infantry.) The rest are kitbashes. Parvusimperator says the Russians were mostly concerned with plunging fire from tall Chechnyan buildings and mines, so they didn’t bother. Frontal and side-on shots are still plenty likely in lots of the world, though, so I stand by this recommendation. Or just slap ERA on and establish a minimum safe distance, though even the Russians aren’t quite that cynical. (The Americans have done this on Bradleys with good results in Iraq. -Ed.)

This Old Flanker

Posted by parvusimperator

Hi, I’m Bob Villa, and welcome to This Old Fighter. Today, we’ll be looking at a classic late cold war fighter that always impresses on the airshow circuit: the Sukhoi Su-27. NATO reporting name: Flanker.

The Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker is a very interesting fighter. It’s somewhat analogous to an F-15, but since the Soviet Air Force wasn’t big on midair refueling, they designed it to be very large so it could carry enormous quantities of fuel internally. It’s got some phenomenal aerobatic capabilities, but suffers from a general lack of payload for its size and some less than stellar reliability numbers. That said, it’s also cheap, and Russia is an infinitely more loyal and useful friend than America these days. Supposing one were to buy some Zhuravliki¹, what would we get in them?

Let’s talk engines first. We’re looking for power in an afterburning turbofan. Best in production is the 142 kN AL-31F1S from Saturn Lyulka. Stretching things a little, the AL-31FM2, currently in testing, can put out 145 kN of thrust with afterburner. We’ll also want 3-D thrust vectoring here, with nozzles that can move in both pitch and yaw directions. Thrust vectoring requires some extra training however, as it can cause the aircraft to bleed energy too quickly. Still, it’s a nice extra edge pioneered on some Flanker models in the 90s.

Now, sensors. The Flanker doesn’t have AESA available just yet, we’re stuck with PESA. But, Rafale also has PESA, and Eurofighter still uses mechanically-scanned arrays. However, the Flanker has a really big nose radome for a large, powerful array. The best radar available is the N0035E Irbis-E, which is mechanically steerable to increase the maximum deflection angle of the beam. It’s got a 20 kW peak power, 5 kW average power, can track 30 targets at ranges of up to 400 km, and can engage 8 simultaneously. Way cool. Even the original Su-27s came with IRST and helmet mounted sights, so no special add-ons are needed here. One of the more interesting features of some late model Flanker prototypes, which we’ll put to use, is the N012 radar in the tail boom between the engines. This has a range of about 60 km for fighter sized targets, and is primarily designed to help warn of approaching rear threats. It’s also used to cue the defensive systems. There’s an improved version available, the Pharaon, which gets about 15 km more range for the “fighter size test target”. We’ll call for the Pharaon aft.

In terms of hardpoints, more is better. More specifically, we’ll go for the extra underwing hardpoints introduced in the 90s. The Russians wanted to facilitate the use of wingtip jamming pods like the Knirti SAP-518. But, those lose the wingtip rails, so Sukhoi added an extra pair of underwing hardpoints to take the short-range AAMs that would normally go on the wingtips. So, our Flankers will have a total of fourteen hardpoints: two wingtip, four under each wing, and four under the fuselage. Two of the underwing hardpoints will be plumbed to permit the installation of drop tanks, for an extra 4,000 L of fuel. We’ll get a pair of SAP-518s with each Flanker courtesy of Rosoboronexport. Why the Knirti pods? Well, since they’re also Russian, we can probably get a deal on the whole package. Plus, they’re some pretty powerful jamming pods, capable of jamming in the 5-18 GHz range. They’re modern, digital radio frequency memory jammers, so they’re better at emulating complex waveforms. Plus, with two pods widely spaced out (wingspan is 14.698 m), we can use crosseye jamming techniques to spoof incoming active-radar guided missiles. While we’re talking self-protection here, we’ll want to include a missile approach warning system (integrated with that snazzy Pharaon), the usual chaff and flare dispensers, and a Kedr² towed decoy.

Now, let’s talk about aircraft structure. Our Flankers will have canards, to maximize agility. Also, because canards are cool. Some Flankers have opted against canards to reduce weight and radar signature. Our response is that it’s a Flanker. It has an elephantine radar signature and the addition of more control surfaces isn’t going to change that much. We will replace old soviet era hydraulic controls with shiny new quadruplex digital fly-by-wire controls. Since we have a digital flight control system, we can delete the dorsal airbrake to save a little weight, and get the same airbrake effect with differential deflection of the rudders.³ We’ll also reinforce the frame and the landing gear to deal with the increased weight. Our landing gear will be the dual nosewheel type, instead of the single nosewheel of the base model Su-27. Internally, we’re going to use all that space for 11,500 kg of internal fuel. And, of course, we’re going to opt for the midair refueling boom. How could we not?

In the cockpit, we’ll go with the center-stick version of the HOTAS control set. We will also use the conventional throttles; I’m not a big fan of pressure-based controls. The tactile feedback of actually being able to move the controls is nice. Avionicswise, we’re going non-Russian. More specifically, Franco-Israeli. The HUD comes from Israel: the Elbit Su 967, with it’s holographic displays. We’ll use a pair of Thales 12″x9″ (WxH) LCDs to display flight information. We’re not opting for touchscreens here. We prefer the traditional array of buttons around each displays. We don’t think touchscreens are robust enough yet, and prefer the tactile feedback and muscle memory that we can get with physical buttons. The Russian Zvezda zero-zero ejection seats are fine, and we won’t bother to replace them.

That’s it. One awesome Flanker. Since we also have an ego that’s almost as big as Russia, and we like to confuse defense analysts, rather than name this something sensible like Su-35MKB, we’ll insist that it be called Su-37⁴. We might even recycle the old ad copy and call it the Su-37 Terminator.

1.) “Baby Cranes”. Because flankers are cute and adorable and above all small.
2.) Roughly analogous to an ALE-50.
3.) The Super Hornet uses a similar method.
4.) There’s already a Su-37, but that designation was applied to a pair of experimental demonstrator aircraft around the early 2000s. They did not go into production. This one will.

The Namer

Posted by parvusimperator

I’m usually the conservative one when it comes to military technology. I like my two-seat attack helicopters, my F-16s, my tanks that have a four-man crew. But, as Fishbreath will point out, even I have my quirky favorites.

Enter the Namer.

I adore the Namer, and would seriously consider buying them en masse instead of any sort of IFV, which is decidedly unconventional thinking. Let’s review a bit of IFV history, and then how the Israelis came up with something entirely different.

The first IFV was the BMP-1. The Soviets expected the Modern Battlefield (TM) to be loaded with radiation from tactical nuclear weapons, with snazzy new chemical weapons like VX in addition to old favorites like Lewisite, and maybe even some biological threats for good measure. So they conceived of a vehicle that could hold a squad’s worth of men and transport them in NBC-protected style. The BMP-1 had a crew of three plus eight dismounts. The dismounts could fire out the sides through firing ports. Protection was relatively light, but was rated against heavy machine guns (i.e. .50 BMG) from the front. The BMP-1 was easily moved and amphibious. It’s armament was a 73mm gun-missile hybrid unit that was relatively short ranged, with a coaxial 7.62x54R machine gun. It was designed to provide the equivalent of the squad support weapons, a PKM and an RPG-7 in the turret.

Of course, when the Soviets bought lots of BMP-1s, NATO reckoned that Something Must Be Done, and here we get things like the Marder 1 IFV. The primary armament of this first generation of vehicles was a 20mm autocannon. This gave some amount of HE infantry support, but more importantly, it could penetrate the armor of the BMP-1. And it outranged the 73mm gun on the BMP-1. The Soviets countered with the BMP-2, which had a little more armor, fewer dismounts, and a 30mm cannon to give it the ability to punch through the armor on the heavily armored NATO IFVs.

Here we can note that we’ve moved away from the raison d’etre of the original BMP. We’ve actually gotten worse at supporting the infantry, because 20mm and 30mm autocannons hold a lot less HE than the 73mm rounds. 73mm rounds are capable of demolishing some field fortifications, but the autocannons are not. From a historical perspective, .30 and .50 caliber machine guns were considered perfectly adequate direct-fire infantry support weapons in World War II as far as antipersonnel work was considered, and a 75mm short barreled tank gun was an excellent round for attacking bunkers and fortifications. Even though the 20mm autocannon was well-developed (see the excellent 20mm Oerlikon), nobody ever moved to use this to support infantry. It doesn’t add much to the mission of supporting infantry mission, which we’ll revisit more later.

Of course, as the IFV continued to evolve, more changes happened. Amphibiousness and firing ports went away. More armor was wanted to protect against increasingly powerful enemy weapons, and firing ports get in the way of that. Plus, the firing ports weren’t all that useful. It was very difficult for soldiers to hit anything firing out of them in testing, so they were deleted in the Bradley and never put into the Warrior. Increasing autocannon sizes led to fewer troops per vehicle, with most now only capable of holding six or seven men. And that’s the listed, ‘on paper’ capacity. Once you factor in body armor and all the other stuff that makes up full battle rattle, IFVs often max out well below what their designers said they could hold.

That’s more or less where we are today. There’s an arms/armor race, complicated by the fact that you have to put a few troops somewhere in the vehicle, so we get very small ready loads of ammunition. The CV9035 has two feeds of thirty five rounds a piece. These are big 35x228mm rounds, but they’re still shot in bursts to maximize hit probability, so combat persistence is pretty lousy. Troops can’t fight from inside the IFV, and the IFVs aren’t amphibious.

Let’s look at the Israeli case instead. The Israelis have more recent experience in a proper, full-scale conventional war than NATO in 1973. So they have faced enemies who have modern, man-portable ATGMs. These are reasonably easy to use and relatively cheap. They weren’t a factor in the original BMP-1 calculus, but they were in October 1973 in the Yom Kippur War. ATGMs did not make tanks obsolete. The IDF tank corps racked up a large number of kills, and both the Israelis and Arabs used infantry screens to help cover their armor. After the war, the Israelis increased the armor on their tanks and bought more tanks. So clearly they were not seen as obsolete. What the Israelis did discover was that more lightly armored combat vehicles like their M-113 APCs were extremely vulnerable to ATGMs. So they proceeded to create a series of tank-conversion APCs that eventually culminated in the Namer, which although based on the Merkava, is actually a new design.

It will be helpful to take a brief interlude to look at the operating environment of the IDF, specifically the the Golan Heights, a plateau on the Israeli-Syrian border that was the site of fierce armored fighting. The Golan is rocky, barely developed, and lacks trees. Here, the sightlines are long and unobstructed. It is an ideal environment for the employment of ATGMs. Smoke, suppressive fires, and heavy armor are the order of the day; there is nowhere to hide and no cover to be found. If they can see you, they can hit you. To counter the threat, both the Israelis and the Syrians made heavy use of infantry screens and smoke. APCs were used to leapfrog infantry to cover armored advances.

The Namer is the heaviest APC in the world, weighing in at 60 metric tons. Or possibly more; I don’t entirely trust IDF-reported numbers to be completely accurate. It is loaded with armor, and even without active protection systems has been proven to be able to withstand the latest Russian ATGMs in the Lebanon campaigns. It has three crew and is rated for eight or nine dismounts, depending on seat configuration. Looking at the interior, for once I think a manufacturer is understating capacity. Or accounting for gear. By Soviet standards, the Namer could hold a motor rifle platoon.

The Namer is armed with a heavy machine gun (the Ma Deuce) and a GPMG, like an M-113. The Israelis never really thought that their APCs were underarmed. And they did encounter Syran BMP-1s on the Golan, so they saw the firepower of the BMP-1. But they never felt the need to increase the firepower of their APCs, either to kill BMPs or to lob HE rounds. The Israelis felt that their tanks were better at killing vehicles than an IFV like the BMP-1 could ever be, and APCs worked better at the primary job of actually carrying infantry. This worked just fine for them on the Golan.

And this brings up an interesting point. In a world where new IFVs are starting around 33 tonnes, and top out around 42 tonnes (the Puma), what sort of circumstances are we expecting that would mean that these IFVs are going out alone and have to confront vehicles of their weight class and below? Is there some vehicle MMA where things are broken out by weight? Because if IFVs encounter MBTs alone, they’re in trouble. Well, unless the tank crews are poorly trained idiots. And a non-amphibious vehicle in the 33-43 tonne weight class isn’t substantively easier to deploy than an MBT. You still need at least a C-17 for air deployment, and those are expensive and in short supply. So deploying an actual force is going to require rails or ships. It will be slow. And if you’re already going to suffer through a slow cargo ship deployment, might as well bring the tanks too.

We’ve already talked about the problems with autocannons. Increasing size for increasingly marginal ability to kill a small subset of threats. They still can’t kill an MBT from the front, they’re increasingly unlikely to kill an IFV from the front, and they’re overkill for everything lesser. Don’t think the Bradley is exempt because it has ATGMs. The TOW on the Bradley basically requires it to stop moving while it’s guiding, so the wire doesn’t get snapped accidentally. Which means that unless the tank crew is unaware or massively stupid,¹ the tank is going to hit the Bradley if the Bradley takes the shot. At longer ranges, the TOW has a flight time of about thirty seconds, which isn’t short enough to score a mutual kill, even if we assume the TOW is good enough to penetrate the tank’s armor.

Let’s take a moment to think about infantry support. We need three things to support the infantry: direct fire with a suppression component,
indirect fire HE to hit dug-in enemies, and direct fire HE to smash fortifications. Of course, autocannons have a direct fire HE capability. It is, however, a very small HE capability. It is not sufficient to reliably punch holes in adobe-type structures, let alone the reinforced concrete ones that you would find in a modern city. The fundamentals of direct fire HE support haven’t changed much since World War 2, when the minimum acceptable caliber for supporting infantry with explosives was 75mm. Smaller guns, like 40 and 50mm were tried and found wanting. So what voodoo makes you think you can do more with the smaller 30mm?

Some of you might be thinking about those specialized rounds that claim to be able to penetrate wall and kill what’s on the other side. There are several issues with these. Assumptions about knowing the locations of hostiles, getting them to stay there, and the composition of the wall may not hold in actual combat zones. Wall construction techniques vary, and the high velocity of the autocannon rounds tend to make placing timed explosions difficult. These specialized rounds still can’t actually demolish things or create an improvised entry point.² Plus, an autocannon is not like a howitzer or tank cannon that has a loader you can order to “Load Exotic Goofy Shit”. Autocannons have two belt feeds, and given the size of the belts and how cramped³ the turrets are, swapping belts is an enormous pain. And, as we’ll see, there are a few kinds of exotic rounds that you might want, plus regular HE-Frag and APFSDS-T. So what are you going to load? And what will you do when neither belt contains the right boutique round for the target in front of you? You’d call for support like a smart person. Or die.

If you, or that support you called for, had a big ol’ HE-thrower, you could blast the daylights out of that wall with no trouble at all. Once again, if we look at the Combined Arms Team, we might notice that once again there’s an obvious choice here. You guessed it, the MBT. Bigger HE is better HE, and it’s easy to throw a couple of speculative 120mm HE rounds into the ammo rack of an MBT without compromising its primary, vehicle-slaying mission.

Clearly, the IFV and the Namer lack proper indirect fire capability. No, 40mm underbarrel grenade launchers issued to the squad aren’t a solution. And no, airburst autocannon rounds aren’t a replacement either. For one, timing the airburst for effect over a known-range target is made really difficult by the high velocity of an autocannon round. Plus, we really aren’t starting with a lot of explosive in a 30 or 35mm round, and we need the frag pattern to work from a variety of angles, since it still needs to work with more traditional contact fuzing. Again, most armies in World War 2 found the 50 and 60mm mortars inadequate for high-angle support, and preferred systems with a caliber of at least 80mm. Again, airburst is expensive, unproven, and eats into the already tiny ammo load. For indirect support, stick to dedicated systems like mortar carriers. With the range on modern 81mm or 120mm mortars, there’s no reason for such systems to be at the front line anyway, and not having to have the magazine and troops share space is excellent. So don’t think about putting such a system into an IFV.

Let’s now examine the direct fire mission. For supporting infantry, an autocannon doesn’t get you a ton of things. Machine guns allow for larger ammo loadouts, and the small HE rounds of the autocannon don’t really kill people any deader. More ammo means more time suppressing. The belts are less awkward to handle, and provide a significantly lower secondary explosion hazard in the event the armor is penetrated. Plus, not having a massive turret and basket means there’s more room for infantry and their stuff. Going MG-only is a tradeoff of some shock effect for more combat persistence and vehicle survivability.

No big autocannon also means we can forgo the big turret and fancy optics and targeting systems. For modern tanks, this is a significant cost driver. And since IFVs increasingly have optics that are every bit as fancy as what’s on an MBT, and often fancier targeting systems, we’ve eliminated a large source of cost growth. Which is good. A standard problem for armies is what do do when you’ve got a seven to ten million dollar IFV platform, and can’t afford to put all your soldiers in them. So you buy some other APC for second line duties. And you write some horseshit whitepapers on ‘information warfare’ and the ‘way of the future,’ and you ‘prove’ your conclusions in a bunch of rigged exercises until you run into some dudes with RPG-7s that blow holes in your pretty theories and your cheap APCs, and there’s egg all over everyone’s face on CNN. Those insurgents probably just didn’t get the memo about rolling over and dying in the face of your ‘fourth generation warfare’. Did you use the new coversheet when you emailed it to them?

Infantry are the primary purpose of this vehicle. The infantry. The gun should be secondary at most, so it’s best if it’s not eating large amounts of internal volume. If you want an autocannon-carrier, build one. With the Namer, we’re trading vehicle capability for superior infantry carrying capability and effectiveness. It’s a trade I’m happy to make. And regardless of what a bunch of eggheads will tell you, there’s no substitute for armor when you want survivability. Ask the IDF how many computers it takes to stop a Kornet.

Overall, the Namer takes the crown for Most Survivable armored vehicle, with an obscene amount of armor, active protection systems, and basically nothing inside to cook off and cause secondary explosions in the case of a penetration. Which also makes it a winner in that fourth dimension of all things procurement: politics. A vote to buy the Namer is a vote to bring someone’s little boy home safe. Are you going to be able to look those mothers in the eye and tell them that their boys burned to death in some crappy thin-skinned vehicle? Do you want to testify at that hearing?

Yeah, that’s what I thought. SOLD.

1.) See the Battle of 73 Easting in 1991. An ideal case for the attackers, because the Iraqis couldn’t find their own ass with two hands and a map.
2.) Also known as a man-sized hole in the wall.
3.) Yes, Virginia, even western IFVs have cramped turrets. The monster CV90, which is roughly as big as a PzKpfW VI Tiger I tank, has a turret which has been described as “a tighter fit than a T-72.”

Procurement successes

Posted by parvusimperator

I gripe a lot about the sorry state of American defense procurement, and sometimes about the even sorrier state of Western European defense procurement. But there have been successes. In thinking about a few of the recent ones, namely the Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, the M1 Abrams tank, and the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, I noticed something: all had followed a gross failure.

First let’s define terms. The obvious: failure. A program is a failure when it is cancelled while the need remains. If an army decided it needed no more tanks and cancelled its latest tank design program, that would make sense. At least from a logical standpoint. It follows. If you don’t need a thing, you shouldn’t be buying a thing. But sometimes a program is such a massive overbudget clusterfuck of mismanagement, it gets cancelled even though the service still needs it. And that usually forces some ranking officers to be “forced into retirement” and a lot of soul searching. We’ll see that this is important later.

Next, let’s talk success. I’m going to be mean and set the bar high. A successful program delivers a quality product at a reasonable price. On time. On budget. But it must also be a product that compares well to its peers, regardless of how much gold-plated nonsense is baked into them. Each of our aforementioned projects fulfills both criteria. They are seen as good by both the bean-counters and the warriors. All designs are compromises, and these appear to have made the right ones. Why?

Almost certainly, because the need was great, and the service in question had already tried an “everything and the kitchen sink” gold plated design that failed. Each predecessor was super expensive. Two of the three were cancelled outright. The third just barely made it out of the gate before being terminated unceremoniously. Let’s look at these failed programs.

The Abrams was preceded by the MBT-70, a case study in multinational mismanagement. It was a joint German-American tank project, but the Germans and Americans couldn’t agree on anything. Rather than actually make hard decisions, the project team let each country do its own thing. Since work was duplicated and the project had to work with both, costs skyrocketed. The Germans wanted a 120mm smoothbore gun. The Americans wanted a 152mm short-barrel gun/missile system. So they compromised. Both were developed and integrated. The Americans wanted a gas turbine. The Germans wanted a diesel. So they compromised. American versions had a gas turbine; German versions had a diesel. The design teams couldn’t even agree on whether to use metric or SAE measurements on bolts and nuts. You guessed it, both were used. Plus, they wanted to integrate an autoloader, which had never been done in the West. They also wanted an active hydropneumatic suspension that could “lean” and “kneel”, another novelty. Costs spiraled out of control, and eventually, Congress and the Bundestag agreed on something: the MBT-70 had to go.

The Super Hornet had an ill-fated predecessor in the A-12 Avenger II. The Navy wanted to replace the A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair II attack aircraft with a cool new stealth attack aircraft. Stealth was cool. The USAF had the awesome F-117A and B-2A. Stealth meant you could go anywhere, and the pesky Soviet air defense systems could do nothing to stop you. But stealth was expensive. Very expensive. And the A-12 program was probably the worst-managed aircraft program in history. Composites were new, and screwups led to the plane coming in overweight, and the weight growth never stopped. The multifunction radar had development problems as well and started to rapidly consume the navy’s budget. Delays in the prototype design pushed back early flights, and added to the cost. Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney cancelled the program in 1990.

Finally we come to the Seawolf class, the predecessor of the Virginias. At first, you might object. Seawolfs were commissioned! And yes, they were. But only three of them ever put to sea. THREE. They were supposed to replace the Los Angeles class attack submarines. But how can they do this when there are more than twenty times as many of the Los Angeles class boats? Yes, it failed. Get over it. Loaded with everything from a fancy new sonar with battle management system and newer hull construction techniques, and even new steels, it came in overbudget and at the wrong time. Even though they’re really great boats, there’s only so much you can do with three hulls instead of sixty two.

After failure, each service went back to the drawing board. They thought long and hard about compromising to get the price down. What did they really need now, what could they add later, and what could they do without. They relearned that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and a piece of hardware that you have is infinitely better than a cancelled project. It’s a pity this lesson is so very hard to remember. The results are excellent vehicles that have received a large number of upgrades.

Armata Response 2: Hoplon IFV

Posted by parvusimperator

Okay, so we’ve got our new MBT to meet the T-14 Armata anytime, anywhere. What about the IFV? Well, last year’s Victory Day parade showcased both the T-15 Heavy IFV and the Kurganets regular IFV. Which leaves us with a lot of questions. I’ve already vetoed the family nonsense, and talked a little bit about heavy IFVs, but now is a good time to elaborate on that as we look to design our new IFV, the Hoplon.

We can see that regular IFVs have been steadily increasing in weight. BMP-1, BMP-2, and early models of Bradley were all at least sort of amphibious, and under 25 tonnes. Bradley has grown into the 33-35 tonne range, which is about where CV9035 is. And the big Puma gets all the way up to 42 tonnes once you kit it out. How heavy should our IFV be? In Syria and Lebanon, the Israelis discovered that if your enemy has modern ATGMs, like Hezbollah does, then you really need heavy armor on your vehicles for them to be survivable. Before fighting all of these ATGMs, the Israelis thought the relatively lightweight M113 was more than enough for infantry transport purposes. Afterwards, they sought tank-level protection and got it in a number of conversions of old tanks, finally culminating in the purpose-built Namer HAPC.

The Russians reached a similar conclusion after their experiences in Chechnya. BMPs are all under 20 tonnes, all amphibious, and all lightly protected. In Chechnya, they were found to be extremely vulnerable to the Soviet-era weapons used by the separatists. These separatists had often served in the Soviet Army, and they tended to target the known weaknesses in the BMPs: the sides and roof, inflicting heavy casualties. The Russians came to the same conclusion as the Israelis, and the T-15 Armata IFV is big, heavy, and well armored.

What about the experiences of the Bradley in the Iraq wars? Well, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Bradleys were seldom used in cities. The primary threat was IEDs, and even the M2A3 Bradley didn’t have much protection against IEDs. They were roughly equivalent to an up-armored humvee in terms of IED resistance. Instead, coalition forces in Iraq used MRAPs, which were much more protected against IEDs than either humvees or Bradleys. Also, the GCV, which was intended to replace the Bradley was very heavily protected. Interestingly, and possibly due to asinine rules of engagement, the absence of the 25mm cannon on the Bradley was not felt much on the streets of Iraq.

So, it will be a heavy vehicle. I can hear Fishbreath groaning already. The price, Parvusimperator! Yes yes, I’m aware. And I haven’t forgotten. And a massive vehicle is going to be more expensive. Now, we’ll talk about some ways to reduce costs as we discuss the configuration. Clearly, we’re going to put the engine and transmission up front, and a ramp at the back for ingress and egress. We’ll use the same LV100-5 engine and associated transmission system that we deployed on the Myrmidon. We’re trying to reduce logistical complexity here. The LV100-5 gas turbine is our standard heavy vehicle engine, and we don’t have to worry about stocking parts for another engine.

Let’s talk armament for a bit. This might also be a place to save, since MBT-grade fire control systems and optics are rather expensive. The gun armament is for supporting infantry. Fix that firmly in your mind, and say it with me. The gun armament on an IFV is for supporting infantry. This is important because of the armor race I mentioned earlier. IFVs are getting tougher. MBTs are already super tough. This demands a bigger and bigger gun. But the IFV must also carry troops. So we end up with a partial squad and not a lot of ammo. And for what? Is a 40mm gun all that much better than a 30mm gun? You still have to run from tanks. You may or may not be able to kill other armored vehicles. And then we’re getting into the classic question of quantity of rounds or quality of rounds.

Let us consider some more combat experience. Specifically, the First Persian Gulf war. Operation Desert Storm. This is quite possibly the best argument in favor of a heavy IFV armament, where the Bradleys racked up tremendous numbers of kills with their 25mm M242 cannons and TOW missiles. Bradleys killed more tanks than the Abramses. Of course, the Iraqi tanks and other armored vehicles were used incompetently. But we should be careful about drawing too strong a conclusion here. Recall that the Bradley cannot fire missiles on the move. It also cannot guide those missiles on the move for fear of fouling the wires. So the Bradley must remain stationary for the entire flight time of the missile, which can be up to twenty seconds at longer ranges. Against a reasonably competent tank crew, their only chance is if the tank fails to spot them or the launch. It’s also good to consider what the Bradley had that made it effective, namely a stabilized gun. The sights on the earlier Bradleys are not particularly advanced, but they were good enough, and a stabilized gun made shooting on the move doable. This was considered an overly expensive luxury by just about everyone else until they saw the results of Desert Storm.

Let’s also look at the Bradley use in Operation Iraqi Freedom. There, as I’ve mentioned before, the quantity of 25mm ammunition available proved invaluable in the engagements where it was permitted. 300 rounds of autocannon fire is quite a lot, and allows the Bradley to support troops for quite some time.

So, proven uses for the autocannon include supporting an infantry assault on fortifications and shooting up lightly armored vehicles.¹ What we don’t want to do is to get caught up in an arms race with other medium armored vehicles, and certainly not the heavy armored vehicles. An excess of fancy electrics is a significant portion of what drove the Puma’s high cost. So to hell with that. We’re going to mount an autocannon in a relatively simple remote weapon station and call it a day. We’ll have night vision capability, some limited zoom, and stabilization. But we needn’t spend too much on this. It’s for supporting the infantry and striking targets of opportunity, and maybe taking potshots at attack helicopters. Elbit makes a nice autocannon turret that comes with all of the above, plus a Mk. 44 Bushmaster II 30mm chaingun and 200 rounds of ammunition.

Why 30mm? Wouldn’t 25mm be better? At least, better from a “more rounds” and “good enough” perspective? Perhaps. We can get about half again as many 25mm rounds as 30mm rounds in a given volume. On the face of it, probably. Depleted Uranium 25mm rounds are about as good at armor penetration as 30mm ones. But, the 25mm round isn’t getting any more development effort. Much as I hate it, the move is to bigger rounds with airburst capability, and 25mm is too small for this. Plus, there’s still some growth left in the 30mm round, seeing as it doesn’t have a depleted uranium APFSDS round yet. Both rounds are currently popular, but the 25mm guns are increasingly being replaced. A pity.

A few other notes on our turret. The Elbit remote turret comes with a coaxial 7.62mm machine gun mount, which is fine by us. It’s also capable of high-angle fire, which is perfect for those urban scenarios, or wandering helicopters. It isn’t well protected, and that’s okay too. This weapon system is not critical, and it keeps cost down. We’ll add a second, smaller remote weapon system that will double as the commander’s sight. Again, modest zoom, thermal camera, stabilization are all we need. This will add a second 7.62mm machine gun. More suppression and will give the commander every reason to keep his head down. Both machine guns are heavy-barreled FN MAGs.

The commander will have eight periscopes, with optional night-vision attachments, around his hatch for observation. We expect his primary observing to be either through his sight/RWS or the gunner’s sight/RWS, which he can also view on his monitor. Again, we’re trying to keep costs down, so these aren’t super fancy sights, but they should be good enough. We will have to put in some fancy electrics, specifically the fancy force tracking datalink systems mentioned in the Myrmidon write up² and the radios to get data. Radios are also fitted to allow communication with other vehicles, aircraft, and nearby troops on the various frequencies that they might use. There’s a repeater display for the troops in the back to see the force tracking information as well so they don’t all have to huddle around the commander’s station.

The gunner has five vision blocks for auxiliary observation, again, with night-viewing options. The driver, who is on the left side of the hull, has five vision blocks, as well as a forward 1x/4x thermal camera, side cameras, and a rear camera. We’re using the same displays and cameras that we used on the Myrmidon, so we can get them in (greater) bulk, and so we only need to stock one set of spares.

The crew sit at the front of the main compartment, with the driver on the left, commander in the middle, and gunner on the right. The commander’s and gunner’s stations are further back from the driver to accommodate the engine compartment. Behind the crew is the space for dismounts. There are seats for nine dismounts, plus space for a stretcher case or a lot of kit. Remember, this is a roughly tank-sized chassis. Additional storage space is available behind the seats and under the floor panels. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have explosive stuff in the passenger compartment, but then we’d have to put it out where the armor is, and the armor would get in the way of accessing the stuff. Armor is heavy. So, the stuff has to be mostly inside. There is external provision for attaching packs and earthmoving tools (picks, mattocks, spades, etc) to the outside of the vehicle.

The crew compartment is provided with a spall liner all around. It’s also NBC protected (assuming hatches are closed), and has heating and air conditioning. Provision is made for an electric kettle for boiling water and assisting in cooking meals. There are also battery rechargers to keep electrical devices going.

We’ve already mentioned that the Hoplon is one heavy beast, having tank-grade armor. It also is fitted with the Trophy active protection system, and a number of hull-mounted smoke grenade dischargers. The commander has a hatch, as does the driver. Another, larger hatch is provided to allow roof egress if needed, or access to the primary remote weapons station for reloading. Normally, the crew and use a door-ramp at the back for entry and exit. The door-ramp, as well as all roof hatches, have power-assisted opening, due to the great weight of the roof armor.

The Hoplon’s suspension system is hydropneumatic, but not adjustable like that of the Myrmidon. This will keep costs down, but also maximize common spares/tools/training. There are seven road wheels per side, and tracks are protected with heavy composite skirts. Like on the Myrmidon, the skirts of the Hoplon can be detached to facilitate transport. This is as good a time as any to talk transportability. The Hoplon is big, and has similar mobility characteristics as the Myrmidon, as far as ground-pressure and bridging requirements go. While this makes them more difficult to deploy on some damn-fool peacekeeping exercise, it also means that some idiot general is less likely to commit his IFVs alone without tank support. That’s not how this is supposed to work, so the size of the Hoplon ends up being an advantage from a doctrinal perspective.

Now, let’s do a little bit of reckoning. The Hoplon is 7.97 meters long, 3.657 meters wide without the skirts, and about 2 meters tall (to the top of the hull, not counting the RWSes). It weighs about 60 tonnes. With a good large order, we reckon we’ll have a unit cost of about $4 million.

1.) Yes, I’m including BMP-1s in the “lightly armored” category .
2.) Heavily influenced by the US Army’s FBCB2 system

Armata Response 1: Myrmidon MBT

Posted by parvusimperator

Usually, the Russians tend to make things that are rugged, ugly, and simple. See, the AK-47, the Mosin-Nagant, and the T-34. They work. But they are hardly innovative. Every so often though, they surprise everyone and come up with something new. In the 60s, it was the T-64, which introduced a production tank with composite armor and an autoloader. Last year, they did it again with the T-14 Armata, the first production¹ tank where the crew are all in the hull and the turret is unmanned.

Why would they do this? Well, we’ve got some fancy electrics now, and if we physically isolate the crew from the ammo, then we maximize safety and survivability in the event of a catastrophic penetration of the ammo compartment. It also means that we can minimize the protected volume for the turret, so we can reduce overall tank weight. Much as I hate to admit it, tank experts in West Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union all agreed that this was the way forward, even if it meant sacrificing visibility from the top of the turret with the Mark I Eyeball. Guess it’s time to suck it up and embrace the future.

So, the Russians have unveiled their fancy new Armata armored vehicle family, and it seems to be a pretty good one. We could upgrade existing hardware to match, or discuss the use of attack helicopters as tank destroyers. But the Tank Destroyer Doctine was a failure in World War II, and Fishbreath would never let me hear the end of writing up attack helicopters so darn much. Plus, it’s much more fun to write up a symmetrical counter, a new MBT of our own: the Myrmidon.

The Russians are trying to make the Armata a family of heavy combat vehicles. However, I don’t think this is a good idea. While commonality of spares is great, commonality of chassis is irrelevant and useless from a maintenance cost perspective (which is by far the bigger cost over the lifetime). Plus, it’s a false economy, since the HIFV and probably the SPH will be front-engined, but the T-14 MBT is rear engined, so that’s going to drive up design costs and force compromises. And Heavy IFVs are expensive–too expensive to buy in the desired quantity. The GCV was cancelled for cost reasons. The US Army also looked into the heavy IFV/heavy APC concept when they were designing the Bradley, but felt it was too costly. And the basically-unarmed Namer is almost as expensive as the Merkava IV. Further, giant vehicle families encourage gold plating, which leads to cost overruns, which leads to a budget kill of the project. So we’re just going to make a new tank. We’ll have other designs for IFVs and SPHs and the like forthcoming as separate designs.

In terms of engine, we’re going to put it at the back like normal people, but otherwise we’re going to be a little different. This is a bit of a throwback in that we’re going to build the ultimate combat tank, not some excessively tall MRAP thing for COIN. Which means we need the best possible engine performance. We oughtn’t neglect the mobility part of the firepower/protection/mobility triad. So we’re going to take a gas turbine engine design, because nothing beats the acceleration of a turbine. Nothing. Specifically, we’re going with the Honeywell LV100-5, originally intended for the cancelled XM2001 Crusader program, and an M1 Abrams re-engine project. This little engine weighs just 1,043 kg, develops 1,500 horsepower, is 25% more fuel efficient than the Abrams’ AGT-1500 at speed, and is 50% more fuel efficient than the AGT-1500 at idle. It also has 43% fewer parts than the AGT-1500, which already has many fewer parts than a comparable diesel engine. It also requires much less cooling volume than a diesel. With the newer high-temperature ceramic turbine blades and the full authority digital engine controls, we can get the gas turbine down to diesel-ish fuel consumption levels. At least for older diesels, or diesels that care about performance. We still get unholy amounts of torque, easy cold starts, and the ability to run on just about any flammable liquid that you can run through the injectors. We could probably get an even smaller engine, but I try to keep these designs at least a bit grounded so that Fishbreath doesn’t complain too much.

I guess we’re moving from back to front on this design walkaround. We next come to the turret section, right in the middle. The turret is completely unmanned, but still has plenty of modular armor. We can’t get away from that, since we’re not stupid. An unarmored gun is vulnerable to mission kills from machine gun fire and shell splinters, plus just about anything heavier. It does no good to put the crew in perfect protection if the tank can’t do its job. So, we still have turret armor, we just have a lot less armored volume to worry about. We have the main gun, the coax gun and its ammo supply, the autoloader assembly, which is mostly behind and below the main gun, a bunch of data cables for targeting systems, and the electric motors needed to move everything. That’s it. So we can make our turret pretty freaking small. Most of its mass will be composite armor modules. The main gun is a 120 mm L/55 smoothbore, that wonderful Nato standard. A few changes from what you might see on your bog standard Leopard 2A6 though. First, there’s no bore evacuator, because the autoloader doesn’t care about fumes, and Cylon-OSHA isn’t a thing we have to deal with in Borgundy. Second, the chamber and recoil system are designed with future, higher-pressure rounds in mind, just in case upgrades to ammunition are needed. Third, we’ve got the necessary data interfaces built in to let us use smart rounds like the Israeli LAHAT gun-launched ATGM or the KSTAM top-attack round from South Korea. It has the usual muzzle reference sensor, muzzle cant sensor, crosswind sensor, and muzzle velocity sensor. It’s stabilized in two axes, with an active damping system to reduce barrel vibrations.

The autoloader is worth discussing here, since it’s a good part of how we’re keeping armored volume down. Rounds are stored in a vertical carousel, point-down. The carousel has a capacity of 60 rounds. The autoloader can load at a rate of about twelve rounds per minute, it can extract unfired shells, and it can eject duds (or spent case bases) out a rear hatch in the turret. This is also used for reloading the carousel. There’s no other access to the carousel without removing the turret. It’s a pain, but there’s nothing to be done about it. The autoloader scans a barcode on each round as it’s loaded in the carousel, so that the stores management system can keep track of how many rounds of each type are loaded and where they are in the carousel. Each round is stored in its own canister to minimize the chance of a catastrophic explosion. Finally, the carousel is designed to safely vent such an explosion away from the crew compartment.

The coaxial machine gun is the usual FN GPMG in 7.62×51 mm, with 4,500 ready rounds and a heavy barrel, since it’s not easily accessible without pulling armor modules. The magazine for the coax gun is accessible through a roof hatch for reloading.

Now, we come to the crew compartment. Here, we have the driver, tank commander and gunner, sitting at their stations. The driver is seated on the vehicle’s left, the gunner is seated in the middle, and the commander is seated on the vehicle’s right. All crewmen have their own hatch to allow for a rapid exit. Hatches are very thick, and are power-opening. The gunner has a single vision block for emergency uses; he does not have the option to operate turned out. The driver and commander have five vision blocks with associated thermal viewing units, and may perform their duties when turned out. The driver has a separate hull mounted thermal viewing unit, capable of 1x and 4x magnification for searching or resolving obstacles. He also has thermal-capable cameras to provide view to the sides and rear. He can cycle through these views on his internal monitors.

The commander can also view through the driver’s thermal cameras on his monitors. In addition, he controls an independent thermal sight mounted atop the turret. This sight is capable of 3x, 6x, 13x, 25x or 50x magnification, and is a third generation³ imaging system. The commander’s independent sight has an Nd:YAG laser rangefinder. The commander can match gun bearing to his sight bearing automatically with the push of a button, and he can fire the main gun (or the coax gun for that matter) himself if he wishes. The commander’s sight is, of course, fully stabilized. Slaved to the sight is a biaxially-stabilized remote weapons station, mounting a 12.7mm M2A1 HMG with 400 ready rounds.

The gunner’s sight is a copy of the commander’s; he has the same 3x/6x/13x/25x/50x magnification options, the same Nd:YAG laser rangefinder, and the same third generation thermal imager. His fire control computer is capable of automatically tracking targets. The gunner’s sight is biaxially stabilized like the main gun. The gunner’s computer can select round types and display remaining quantities of available ammunition by type. The gunner’s sight also integrates the laser guidance system for gun-launched ATGMs with semi-active laser homing guidance like the LAHAT. There’s a second, backup, sight mounted just below the main gun with fixed, 8x magnification and a stadiametric rangefinding reticle, and the gunner can also pull this view into his displays.

Hull armor is necessarily sturdy. Around the crew compartment and ammo stowage area, the sponsons contain only armor, and the thick glacis is sloped 82 degrees⁴ to maximize effective thickness. This is also the minimum angle for long rod penetrators to have a reasonably significant chance of ricochet, which further enhances survivability. The crew compartment has a thick bulkhead aft to divide it off from the ammo compartment. It also has a thick spall liner to minimize damage in the event of a penetration. NBC protection, plus heating and air conditioning, are provided.

In terms of electrics, the fire control system can do automatic target tracking, and can pull in information from encrypted line-of-sight, frequency-hopping, tactical radios as well as satellite tracking data if available. Information includes the vehicle’s position, positions of other friendly vehicles, information on known or suspected enemy positions, and information on terrain and obstacles. Information from ground surveillance aircraft⁵ can also be pulled into the network. For more traditional means of data gathering, there’s an external telephone provided on the hull to allow nearby infantry to talk directly to the crew.

Looking to the flanks, we come to the suspension. There are seven roadwheels per side. The suspension is a controllable hydropneumatic system, so the Myrmidon can lean and adjust ride height. Ground clearance is adjustable from 14 cm to 74 cm. I would love an actively damped suspension like the early-90s Williams F1 cars used to have, but the heaviest things those have been put on is a CV90, which, as we’ll soon see, is quite a bit lighter than the Myrmidon. We do have a dynamic track tension system though to keep the optimal tension on the tracks without requiring manual adjustment. The flanks are protected with heavy side skirts that contain composite armor. These can be supplemented with reactive armor cassettes, especially useful for operations in built-up areas.

Let’s talk active protection. Alas, it will drive the cost up, but all the cool kids have one on their tanks, so we should too. Plus, it saves us the trouble of trying to protect the sides and top of the tank from something like a Hellfire missile. The first part is seeing the missile coming, and the easiest way to do that is with small radars. Naturally, we locate these around the turret to provide an all-around view, like the systems on the Merkava Mark IV or the K2. This data will also be available for the crew so they can counterattack. If a launch is detected, the crew has the option to swing the turret towards the launch, presenting the thickest armor and simplifying return fire. The crew can also trigger smoke grenade dischargers to throw up a smoke screen that contains thermal obscurants. We will also integrate the Israeli Trophy hard-kill system. Trophy has successfully intercepted a number of high-end Russian anti-tank weapons, including the Kornet, the RPG-29, and the Konkurs. Field tested is excellent. We’ll be keenly interested in Rafael’s follow-on system.

Now let’s get down to the figures for dimensions and a cost guesstimate. The hull is 8.7 meters long, and is 3.657 meters wide with the skirts detached. We’re constrained in width by the need to fit on road and rail transporters. Fuel is stored in the aft section of the sponsons, on either side of the engine compartment, below the engine in an “inverted saddle” arrangement, and around the ammunition carousel. The fuel tanks are built with a heavy internal baffle structure to increase their protective value. 1,500 L of fuel are carried internally. A pair of 200 L fuel drums can be carried, one on either side of the turret, in quick-release brackets. Obviously, these shouldn’t be mounted in areas where heavy combat is expected. We reckon the Myrmidon would tip the scales at about 57 tonnes.

Let’s talk cost. How bad will this tank be? Well, we’ve kept it simple above. Hull construction is of welded steel; unlike on my Thunderbolt design workup, the Myrmidon uses no special techniques to reduce weight. Armor does have wonderful things like super-hard steel and depleted uranium, which is going to up the cost a bit. We’ve got plenty of nice electrics, but nothing that hasn’t been done before. Even the autoloader was done before in the late 80s as part of the M1 TTB project, and the LV100-5 engine was worked up for the Crusader artillery project. Uralvagonzavod claims that the Armata will come in at about $4 million, but we’ll see how that works out for them. Russia also claims they’ll order 2,300 T-14s. Again, color me skeptical. To be frank, I don’t believe a figure of $4 million dollars for the T-14, and some analysts reckon a rather higher figure, something more like $8 million. So, we can’t use a direct comparison. The K2 Black Panther is pretty similar to the Myrmidon in terms of complexity and electronics fit. The configuration is somewhat different in that the K2 is traditionally configured. On the other hand, the South Koreans aren’t ordering a lot, and we plan⁶ a big, Russian-sized order to equip our armored divisions. The K2 comes in at a bit over $9 million per unit. We reckon we can come in under $8 million.

1.) Well, production-ish. Like many other projects in Putin’s Russia, there’s a lot of question as to how many of these are actually going to get made. They’re not making many PAK FAs for example, and they may or may not make many T-14s. That said, the one in the Great Patriotic War Victory Parade was a pretty complete pre-production or low-rate initial production model, which is a lot farther than anyone else has gone with this.
2.) More precisely, tactical “idle”, which is actually 60% of max RPM, because throttle response on a gas turbine is terrible. The torques are outrageous though, again because turbine.
3.) i.e. it’s a dual band (MWIR and LWIR) imaging unit.
4.) From the vertical. Duh. Measuring armor angle from the vertical makes more intuitive sense to me, since a measure of 0 degrees–completely vertical–conveniently equates to a line of sight thickness multiplier of 0.
5.) e.g. JSTARS
6.) If the Russians can do it, so can we. We’re totally ordering something like 2,300 Myrmidons.

The Soapbox

Opinions may vary

Tag Archives: procurement

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Parvusimperator reviews the T-14 Armata MBT

On the Merkava Mark IV

Attack Helicopters for the Modern Army

Luchtburg Responds: an IFV for the rest of us

This Old Flanker

The Namer

Procurement successes

Armata Response 2: Hoplon IFV

Armata Response 1: Myrmidon MBT