Op-Ed: Why the Main Battle Tank is Dead

Jay Ramesh

American author Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” And even though the Russian invasion of Ukraine comes over 80 years after the main battle tank (MBT) was able to establish its dominance in the fields of modern warfare, the rain of the MBT is slowly coming to an end.

Since the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has lost at least 331 tanks and 548 Armored Combat Vehicles (ACVs) against an opponent that was supposed to surrender within 4 days. Almost a month and a half later, the Russian army has had to redefine its war objectives, pulling back from the small pieces of territory it fought so desperately to control. Ukraine’s flat plains are the perfect environment for large-scale armored warfare, but Russia’s advantage in its huge tank forces and combined arms brigades has been neutralized as its armies have been decimated and forced to withdraw.

Much of Ukraine’s success in holding their ground against the Russian juggernaut was due to their ability to disrupt Russian supplies and armored vehicles, largely thanks to the FGM-148 Javelin missile system credited with destroying at least 280 armored vehicles. The Javelin is a shoulder-mounted delivery system that can lock-on to armored targets and fire an anti-tank missile at them. It has a direct-fire mode and a top-attack mode in which the missile soars high above the target, descends, and strikes the target from the less-heavily armored top. 

Though it was first commissioned back in 1996, the Javelin and other missile platforms like it are revolutionizing warfare, and as these anti-tank weapons become more common, it seems likely that they will bring the era of the MBT to an end.

Let’s first take a look at the costs.

The Javelin costs $178,000, including the launcher and a missile, and each additional missile costs $78,000 to manufacture. While that may seem expensive on the surface, it pales in comparison to the costs of the targets it destroys. A single Soviet-era T-72 tank costs anywhere between $1-2 million to produce (depending on the variant), and Russia’s more modern T-90 tank costs $5-7 million. These figures don’t even include the costs of training and equipping the three-man crews required to operate both tanks. A single Javelin missile can take out a T-72 with one hit, and though the T-90 has a few countermeasures against anti-tank weapons, the Javelin can still easily penetrate its armor and destroy it.

It only costs $78,000 to take out a $5 million tank, and as the Javelin is a fire-and-forget weapon, the missile operators can easily find cover and protect themselves as soon as the weapon is fired. Installing effective Javelin countermeasures and thicker armor costs millions of more dollars, creating a tank that is so costly to produce that it’s almost too costly to reduce. Just as stinger missiles took out tens of helicopters during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Javelin missiles can take out hundreds of tanks and neutralize huge, heavily-armored tank brigades,

We’ve run into this problem in history several times before, most recently with the demise of the battleship. During the late 19th century, naval warfare theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote that the only way for countries to secure their global interests and protect their empires, trade, and navies was to build huge Battleships that were capable of taking out the enemy’s smaller ships. Decisive naval battles between battleships would therefore be titanic engagements in which one party would lose their entire navy and their command of the seas. 

Europeans built tens of battleships, but ironically, the first decisive engagement of battleships, the Battle of Tsushima, was also the last. Countries around the world realized that risking the loss of battleships in a decisive battle would mean risking the loss of their entire navy, and as battleships were immensely expensive to produce, they became too valuable to lose, rendering them strategically ineffective in naval warfare. And once countries figured out that they could use cheap airplanes to destroy navies whilst their navies were hundreds of miles away, the era of the battleship came to an anti-climatic end. 

It’s only a matter of time before the MBT goes the way of the battleship. As anti-tank technology gets more sophisticated, the costs of building a tank capable of resisting anti-tank munitions like the javelin will skyrocket to the point where tanks themselves become inefficient and obsolete. And if guerillas and insurgents can get their hands on javelin missiles, two untrained fighters will have the capability of taking out a multi-million dollar MBT.

The obsolescence of the MBT would not be without precedent. Throughout much of medieval Western Europe, armored knights and heavy cavalry made up the bulk of states’ armies, acting as “tanks” charging at enemy heavy cavalry and mass, untrained peasant levies. Because medieval lords saw their peasants as stupid, ignorant, and incapable of putting up a fight, they were given less priority over the training and equipping of heavy cavalry, which made peasant levies even more vulnerable to cavalry in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, as technology progressed, heavy cavalry slowly grew more and more obsolete. A low-morale peasant equipped with a spear might not be able to stop the charge of heavily armored cavalry, but a single man trained to use a crossbow or a musket can easily stop a cavalryman in his tracks. As it became cheaper to train and equip peasants with muskets, crossbows, and pikes easily capable of decimating heavy cavalry, the age of the armored knight also came to an end. 

Think of MBTs as the heavily armored cavalry of modern Europe. They’re huge behemoths capable of withstanding small arms fire and delivering a massive amount of firepower onto enemy positions and other tanks. But as it becomes cheaper and easier to take them out, they will slowly become obsolete as it becomes less and less feasible to protect them from anti-tank munitions.

It’s unclear exactly what will replace the MBT in modern warfare doctrine, but drones or lightly-armored, multi-role ACVs, such as the American-made Stryker or the Russian-made BMD-4, seem to be viable options. If a tank and an ACV can both be taken out by a Javelin, why not build a lighter, faster, cheaper ACV that can perform more tasks than an MBT?