Tank Destroyers – Disappointing?

[Whirlwind]

I was idly reading through this when I came across this quote:

“Judgment-based military decision-making works best when it has a strong basis in experience. Almost by definition, there can be no strong basis in real-world experience if the question at hand regards major innovation. Today’s standard military equipment was yesterday’s innovation, and last week’s hare-brained scheme. The tank, the airplane, the radio, and the machinegun were each, in their infancy, decried as useless, and yet today they are deemed essential. The rigid airship, the battlecruiser, and the tank destroyer were supposed to be great ideas, and yet they are now remembered for their disappointing results.”

Are tank destroyers now remembered for their disappointing results?  For that matter, are battlecruisers?

 

 

[Mr. Average]

Battlecruisers are remembered for being misused in combat, I think.  They were sent up against Dreadnoughts and got blasted because line tactics didn’t allow them to make proper use of speed, which was their main defensive advantage.

If by tank destroyers he means assault guns or other tracked guns like the S-Tank, then yes, I’d call them disappointing in the long run, as they could be easily outmaneuvered by newer generations of faster, better armored turreted tanks.  Taken for what they were, though – cheap ways of getting armored firepower into combat on a short schedule – I think they did okay in their own brief time.  They were rapidly rendered obsolete by guided missiles, though.

[Mike Proudlock]

Battle cruisers were definitely missed in combat because they looked like battleships, but they were never intended to face off against battleships – the concept was to be able to outgun anything smaller, and run away from battleships, which is where their superior speed was supposed to give them “protectionl”. Unfortunately with the introduction of faster battleships (e.g. the Queen Elizabeth class) they effectively lost their speed advantage.

[Prince Rhys]

Like Mr. Average says, tank destroyers were easier and cheaper to manufacture and were excellent ambush weapons. Think of them as mechanised anti-tank guns at a time when anti-tank guns were a common feature of armies, able to support rather than lead rapid advances and fighting rearguards during retreats from ambush positions.

[Norm S]

Tank destroyers were not part of an initial army order-of-battle i.e. they were not a design of choice. They came about because;

1 – it was necessary to supplement the MBT’s cheaply as losses would have been unsustainable otherwise and the number of gun tubes in the field too low.

2 – it was a way to mate a powerful gun with a small or out of date or captured chassis.

3 – Germany was suffering from availability of resources, so the Jagd / assault vehicle eased the pressure on resources and cost.

4 – German Assault guns were initially intended as mobile supporting artillery platforms and belonged to the artillery arm – circumstances caused them to become re-purposed into more of the tank / anti-tank role.

we are in that position again, modern armies have full Orders-of-Battle for their peace time roles that include MBT, missile platforms and auto-cannon, but at £4 Million pounds a tank, after the first weeks / months of war, who knows what contraptions will be thought up to plug the gaps of diminished orders-of-battle.

[James Manto]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>Modern tank destroyers are atgm armed IFVs.</p>
<p style=”text-align: left;”>Still use stealth and ambush to attack enemy MBTs.</p>

[MartinR]

As Tim says, if there is any disappointment, it was about US Tank Destroyer doctrine, largely as they were misused as tanks. Everybody else’s tank destroyers got on with destroying tanks. The doctrine is still in use today, albeit implemented by attack helicopters.

Same with battle cruisers, heavy cruisers misused as battleships. When used in their intended role (Armoured cruiser killers) as at The Falklands, they worked very well.

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Russell Phillips]

MartinR wrote:

As Tim says, if there is any disappointment, it was about US Tank Destroyer doctrine, largely as they were misused as tanks. Everybody else’s tank destroyers got on with destroying tanks. The doctrine is still in use today, albeit implemented by attack helicopters.

Same with battle cruisers, heavy cruisers misused as battleships. When used in their intended role (Armoured cruiser killers) as at The Falklands, they worked very well.

That was my understanding, although I was slightly confused for a moment as I couldn’t remember any battle cruisers being present at the Falklands in 1982 🙂 (It’s early, and I haven’t finished my first coffee yet).

Mike Proudlock wrote:

the concept was to be able to outgun anything smaller, and run away from battleships

I seem to recall the German WWII pocket battleships had the same basic concept. They do say there is nothing new under the sun.

Military history author
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[MartinR]

Perhaps I should have said The Battle of the Falklands, as opposed to the Falklands War

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see the Belgrano described as a ‘battle cruiser’ though.

Ah! Bingo:

http://en.mercopress.com/2015/03/17/falklands-hms-conqueror-which-sank-belgrano-to-be-exhibited-at-uk-memorial-centre

 

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Whirlwind]

Do you think that the basic Tank-Destroyer concept i.e. an unarmoured or lightly armoured vehicle (whether that is a jeep with an ATGM mounted or an attack helicopter) is still valid today?

[Mr. Average]

More so than ever, but it doesn’t take the same form as it used to. Helicopter Gunships in your example are one type, or drones with ATG antitank missiles. You could consider man-portable ATGMs a form of tank-destroyer, or, say, TOW missiles on an IFV or LAV. Actual anti-tank guns or assault guns are not likely to see combat again, though, as cheap missiles have largely rendered them obsolete. But it’s hard to say what might revive them – miniaturized battlefield railguns for example? Like the ones the US Navy is looking to mount in its upgraded destroyers? Those Pack a major one hit punch with hypervelocity shells and getting one on land against tanks could be a game changer for the antitank gun.

[MartinR]

I guess it depends more what you mean by ‘tank destroyer concept’. The US TD concept was a very specific doctrine of search and destroy, everyone else used them as self propelled anti-tank guns (or misused them as ersatz assault guns or tanks). The technology was to a large extent irrelevant, although a Jagdpanther was marginally more survivable than a Jagdpanzer 1:) The US TD doctrine is more applicable to modern attack helicopters (Bryan Peretts thesis in ‘A Brief History of Blitzkreig, one of his better books).

Dedicated AT weapons will _always_ be more effective tank killers than tanks, despite what the tank generals and arms manufacturers say. Operations Research conducted in the 1980s demonstrated that dedicated AT weapons (even those identical to tank mounts) are at least twice as effective as tank mounted weapons in destroying enemy armour. Yet NATO was sold the myth that the most effective AT weapon was another tank, even when Hans von Luck was conducting tours of the Goodwood battlefeld for NATO officers where his anti-tank guns tore gigantic holes in  massed allied armour formations. See Rowlands and Speight ‘The Stress of Battle’, some of their research was republished in ‘Brains and Bullets’ as the original can be hard to find. Similarly, look at the combat effectiveness modifiers applied to AT weapons in Dupuy’s ‘Numbers, Predictions and War’, they are twice as effective against armour.

So yes, TD doctrine still holds strong, even if half a dozen blokes with MILAN aren’t as sexy as a new Chieftan.

 

 

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Russell Phillips]

MartinR wrote:

Operations Research conducted in the 1980s demonstrated that dedicated AT weapons (even those identical to tank mounts) are at least twice as effective as tank mounted weapons in destroying enemy armour. Yet NATO was sold the myth that the most effective AT weapon was another tank,

I may be wrong, but I always thought the “best anti-tank weapon is another tank” thing was based on a more holistic view, rather than just the simple effectiveness against armour. A MILAN firing post might be more effective at killing T-64s than a Chieftain, but the Chieftain has other advantages: it’s more mobile, gives arguably better protection (I say arguably because it’s harder to hide a Chieftain 😉 ), and is generally useful, whereas the MILAN is only useful against armour.

Military history author
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[John D Salt]

“The tank, the airplane, the radio, and the machinegun were each, in their infancy, decried as useless, and yet today they are deemed essential. The rigid airship, the battlecruiser, and the tank destroyer were supposed to be great ideas, and yet they are now remembered for their disappointing results.”

That strikes me as a very weird couple of sentences. It is apparently a narrative necessity that any innovation be accompanied by a tale of “they said it couldn’t be done” and the triumph of a small band of talented mavericks against the oldthink and inertia of the stick-in-the-mud establishment, but I think it relfects reality much less often than storytellers would like us to believe. I cannot recall anyone, even in cartoonified accounts of military history, ever decrying the radio as useless. Such stories about tanks (“vulnerable to artillery of all calibres” — which was true), aircraft (“only useful for frightening the horses”) and MGs (“take the MGs off to a flank and hide them” — perfectly sensible tactics) are decidely over-egged, and don’t really help us to understand how these technologies were adopted by pretty much everyone’s military establishments in a remarkably short time (especially when compared to the decades-long procurement cycles we suffer from today).

The rigid airship I think is most remembered these days for the spectacular accidents that occurred between the wars (Akron, Macon, Hindeburg, R-101) by which time the technology was obviously losing out to multi-engined heavier-than-air machines for speed and payload over distance. I haven’t seen a comparative study, but I don’t know that aerostats were any more hazardous in their early days than heavier-than-air aircraft, or pioneering spaceflight. Certainly the Germans seem to have derived some military benefit from their airships in WW1, and the British took considerable time and effort to counter the Zeppelin menace. The battlecruiser, as has been pointed out, is most famous in Britain for being misused by being made to stand in the line of battle; Norman Friedman’s “Network Centric Warfare” re-evaluates Fisher’s concept as an early exercise in picture-based (a better term than the oxymoronic “network-centric”) warfare, when the ships are used in the context of a centralised plotting room, rapid and reliable long-range commuications, and a world-wide guerre de course.

Now, tank destroyers. I think people who have pointed out that light vehicles mounting powerful ATk weapons have enduring value are quite right. However Mr. Picky would like to point out that “Tank Destroyer”, as defined by the US military in WW2, does not necessarily mean a Gun Motor Carriage, it also includes towed guns. Likewise, the German term “Panzerjäger” applied to organisations (typically an infantry regiment’s 14th Kompanie) that used towed, as well as self-propelled, anti-tank guns. As we might remember from a previous discussion on the Russian orbat at Kotluban’, the Red Army used the “Tank Destroyer” designation (Istrebitelniy) to describe units the majority of which consisted only of towed guns. The British also mixed towed and self-propelled anti-tank guns in the same organisations, and if they were unusual in not using such warry-sounding terms as the Americans and Germans, the Australians preferred “Tank Attack” to “Anti-Tank” in their designations (incidentally turning the PIAT into the PITA, a strangely apposite abbreviation).

I believe that the idea that the US Army’s tank destroyer doctrine (as distinct from the technology) was “disappointing” can largely be traced to a book entitled “Hard Pounding: The Tactics and Technique of Antitank Warfare”, written by a British gunner liaison officer in the United States called Geoffrey Court, and published by the US Field Artilery Association in 1946. More recently I understand that Harry Yiede’s “The Tank Killers” (2006) has shown that the US Army’s Tank Destroyer branch did a much better job than popular accounts credit it with, although I have yet to read the book myself. The fact that the Tank Destroyer branch did not last after WW2 should not be taken as indicating that their doctrine was a bad one — in the British Army the Machine Gun Corps disappeared after WW1, and the Recce Corps after WW2, but nobody would I think try to deny the extreme usefulness of both MGs and reconnaissance.

All the best,

John.

[Not Connard Sage]

MartinR wrote:

As Tim says, if there is any disappointment, it was about US Tank Destroyer doctrine, largely as they were misused as tanks. Everybody else’s tank destroyers got on with destroying tanks. The doctrine is still in use today, albeit implemented by attack helicopters. Same with battle cruisers, heavy cruisers misused as battleships. When used in their intended role (Armoured cruiser killers) as at The Falklands, they worked very well.

 

I suppose if you put a rotating turret on a tank destroyer – Hellcat/M10/M36,  then it’s going to get used as an ersatz tank. Which I also suppose goes hand in hand with US doctrine of using real tanks for infantry support.

 

 

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Whirlwind]

MartinR wrote:

As Tim says, if there is any disappointment, it was about US Tank Destroyer doctrine, largely as they were misused as tanks. Everybody else’s tank destroyers got on with destroying tanks. The doctrine is still in use today, albeit implemented by attack helicopters. Same with battle cruisers, heavy cruisers misused as battleships. When used in their intended role (Armoured cruiser killers) as at The Falklands, they worked very well.

Not Connard Sage wrote:

I suppose if you put a rotating turret on a tank destroyer – Hellcat/M10/M36, then it’s going to get used as an ersatz tank. Which I also suppose goes hand in hand with US doctrine of using real tanks for infantry support.

If so, does that mean there is a specific advantage in designing some types of military kit so it can’t be mistaken for a different type of weapon?

 

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

I think people who have pointed out that light vehicles mounting powerful ATk weapons have enduring value are quite right.

Is the relative emphasis in recent years (decades) upon the MBT as the ideal tank-killer over AT / ATGM / TD:

a Over-selling by tank manufacturers?

b. A preference for a more useful all-round capability at the expense of cheaper but more limited tank killers?

c. Tanks being more resistant to artillery, so thought in a cold war gone hot context to be overall less effective?

d. Tanks actually being the best AT weapon in circumstances when your tank has better armour and firepower than the opposition (Normandy, Gulf Wars I & II)?

e.  Something else entirely?

 

[John D Salt]

Whirlwind wrote:

If so, does that mean there is a specific advantage in designing some types of military kit so it can’t be mistaken for a different type of weapon?

Well, yes and no.

On the one hand, I believe (general excuse phrase for not having any references to hand) that it has been shown, at least in the context of multi-role capable aircraft, that units that specialise in doing only one role are better than those than train for multiple roles. Which I find very unsurprising. It is, after all, the basis for specialisation and mass production since Adam Smith’s pin factory.

On the other hand, a Zen warrior monk might tell you that the better fitted you are to one specific situation, the less well adapted you are to all other possible situations. It’s all very well having massively efficient weapons devised for narrowly specific roles, but as Murphy’s is the primary law of combat, you can bet that your specialist weapon will be at the wrong place or the wrong time to fulfil its specialist job, and will have to do the job that’s nearest. Think of most of the weapons in the 20th century that their users have really got their money’s worth out of, and I’d bet that more of them can be characterised by the description “versatile” than by “does one thing well”.

Whirlwind wrote:

Is the relative emphasis in recent years (decades) upon the MBT as the ideal tank-killer over AT / ATGM / TD:

a Over-selling by tank manufacturers?

b. A preference for a more useful all-round capability at the expense of cheaper but more limited tank killers?

c. Tanks being more resistant to artillery, so thought in a cold war gone hot context to be overall less effective?

d. Tanks actually being the best AT weapon in circumstances when your tank has better armour and firepower than the opposition (Normandy, Gulf Wars I & II)?

e. Something else entirely?

Whenever people give me the answer “all of the above”, I come over all stabby, so I shall try very hard not to say that.

I’d say that “over-selling by manufacturers” is no more likely from manufacturers of tanks than it is from manufacturers of any other item of defence-related equipment (which is to say, it happens all the time).

For the all-round capability point I would refer you to the Zen warrior monk above. Yes, it is definitely best to have weaponrah charcterised by that marvellous French word “polyvalent”.

Resistance to massed arty — especially when fighting the Russians, who know how to mass arty better than anyone except the Royal Regiment, and have them beaten all to hell on number of barrels — is certainly important, but for a suddenly-enhottened Cold War there are also the problems of surviving in NBCD conditions. It so happens that an enclosed envelope of heavy armour is pretty advantageous here. So is hiding in a deep hole, but that tends to compromise maneouvre.

Quite part from the question of armour, there is good reason to think that big high-velocity guns with advanced ammunition and fire-control systems are the best-performing vehicle killers in direct fire:

* Given a modern FC system (ballistic computer with laser rangefinder, muzzle reference system and wind and temperature sensors) ballistic dispersions are reduced to such a low order that P(hit) for a single shot is as good or better than that from an ATGW up to several kilometres, that is, all normal battle ranges for direct fire.

* A fin round goes screaming out of the muzzle so fast that its flat trajectory tends to “iron out” rangefinding errors over a klick or two, meaning that even quicker battlesight engagements will work well at those ranges. It is also much harder to devise countermeasures; “Sagger dance”, obscurants, counter-fire to throw the controller off, Beehive in the hope of bagging the missile, and several kinds of DAS or spaced or reactive armour that might be effective against ATGW are no good against fin.

* Gun rounds don’t care about high-tension power lines, or flying over water.

* Guns almost invariably have a higher rate of fire that ATGW.

* The balance of costs means that guns are firing a relatively cheap round out of a relatively expensive launcher, whereas ATGW are firing a relatively expensive round out of a relatively cheap launcher. At first view, one might think that this would balance out. But it ain’t so. Having the cheap rounds (for a gun system) means that you can use more rounds in training. The point that missiles are also generally bulkier (because they must include their own propulsion and guidance wire) means that they take up more space in the replen vehicles, and you have fewer stowed rounds. Even if the balance of SSKPs means that an ATGW vehicle has as many stowed kills as an MBT, it will work out worse for the missileers when it is discovered that half (say) the rounds fired in action are fired, not at enemy tanks, but at suspicious-looking buildings or items of farm machinery.

Big high-velocity guns with advanced ammunition are, clearly, highly desirable. But we are talking about something that would have been regarded as a medium artillery piece in WW2. You can’t put it on a jeep or a helo the way you can an ATGW, and it’s quite a cumbersome thing to get in and out of action as a towed piece. It needs to be self-propelled. All this stuff is expensive, but if you are forking out for a big gun, advanced ammo, and to do the best killing job advanced fire control computer, laser rangefinder, muzzle sensing system and thermal sights, it’s valuable enough to be worth protecting with heavy armour.

All the best,

John.

[Whirlwind]

Excellent posting, thanks very much for that.

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