2nd Best Army in Ukraine? | Evolution of Tank Tactics in Ukraine

as we've just passed the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I thought it'd be interesting to see how this and it is the first major armored conflict in Europe since 1945 has developed and how the kit and the tactics used have evolved [Music] in common with a lot of other people when the Russian special military operation started I didn't think what was thought of as the second best army in the world would have much difficulty rolling over the Defense Forces of a much smaller country how come then the the second best army in the world seems to have started to resemble the second best Army in Ukraine we need to look at three things the strategy and tactics used by both sides and particularly how those used by the Russian army have evolved from World War II through the Cold War up to the present day we need to look at the equipment and as we're the tank Museum specifically the armor that has been deployed and how its use has changed and finally the command structure of the Russian army starting with the Tactical side it's pretty obvious that the tactics employed by the Russian army have changed several times during the course of the campaign the first phase could almost be described as Blitzkrieg and it's an assault by combined Airborne amphibious and ground forces on a number of fronts right from Kiev and kharkiv in the north round to the Black Sea Coast it's preceded by a heavy missile barrage and this is designed to disrupt Ukrainian air defense and command and control it almost succeeds and in fact swathes of land are lost down towards black sea and over in the donbass but it fails spectacularly in the north and that is where the Ukrainian defense is tougher and better prepared car keys the Second City held on by a whisker and nikiv an attempt by airborne troops to take Hospital Air Base failed with huge casualties the armored columns trying to break through were fought to a standstill the Russian Victory Parade in Kiev would have to be postponed in April and May the Russian forces are resorting to almost of classic Soviet Warfare techniques massed artillery barrage followed by assault by what we call btgs Battalion tactical groups we will talk about them a little bit later on but essentially they are a motor rifle Battalion with artillery uh armor and logistical support the tactics they're using here are very similar to those used by the Soviet Army in World War II but the thing is these days the battlefield is a rather different place I star intelligence surveillance Target acquisition and reconnaissance is a real game changer on the modern Battlefield large targets like armored columns can be tracked by drone or satellite surveillance targeted and destroyed the last operation of this phase was a large-scale attempt to cross the sivertski donets river by pontoon Bridge this was disastrous and it led to the loss of up to a hundred afvs and perhaps 500 men in the third phase which runs from June Russian attacks Russian offensive action is scaled down and they're mostly uh relatively light probing attacks trying to find weaknesses in the Ukrainian lines these do achieve a bit of success in lahansk and Donetsk but they're also failures at places like pavlitica and they're also very wasteful of elite forces like Naval infantry and power troops these are the guys who are sustaining heavy casualties with the onset winter uh we move into what you could call the fourth phase and this has the Russian army resorting to what almost looked like the tactics of World War One assaults by uh infantry against prepared Ukrainian positions with heavy losses this phase has led to huge losses for really quite minimal gains I mean a recent report was suggesting 824 Russian dead and wounded per day um but the whole thing about it is these are mostly either PMC Wagner convicts or conscripts and we've got to really presume that the Russian high command regards these guys as Expendable so it's worth taking the losses to keep Ukrainian forces pinned down in position and maintain a war of attrition [Music] so where do we go from here um as the spring campaigning season opens President Putin be shown every sign and wanted to continue the war and equally the ukrainians have every intention of driving The Invader off their soil so at this juncture I think it's worth looking at our perception of the Russian army and the kit and the tactics that they have been using to start with let's look at two Soviet era Vehicles the t-72 tank and the BMP infantry fighting vehicle that is still plentiful on both sides in Ukraine this is a t-72 and this is a classic Soviet designed Cold War main battle tank it's designed for commscript Army so it's rugged reliable and relatively simple it has a low profile and a very powerful 125 millimeter gun now this is a t-72m and that's what you might call the export version so this would be supplied to client states members of the Warsaw Pact that sort of thing it lacks a bit of the Finesse of the vehicles that was actually supplied to the Russian army what you will see in Ukraine are mostly t-72 b3s now these have a few improvements they've got explosive reactive armor on the front um and on the turret and they've got an improved Fire Control System the question is why are the Russians losing so many of these tanks why are so many being destroyed to see why that happens we need to look inside as I mentioned before this tank has a very low profile now in combat that's obviously a good thing because it makes it as a Target harder to acquire harder to hit but to do that to achieve that they had to get rid of a crew member the loader now to compensate for that they fitted Auto loader and what that is is a carousel Affair underneath the turret floor down there um and then a lift that actually picks The Round Up put to the breach and then eject the spent case through the hatch up here so far so good but it also makes the turret space as you can see here very cramped indeed and of course the ammunition storage is underneath the turret itself now the t72 as a tank was designed for conventional tank on tank warfare so we're expecting incoming rounds to impact on the front of the vehicle and that's where you have the thickest armor that's where the era explosive reactive armor is fitted the problem is that modern anti-tank weapons uh things like end law and Javelin have a top attack capability what that means is they'll locate the Target and then hit either the back or the top of the turret and that's where the armor is thinnest what that does in a lot of cases is to set off the rounds stored underneath the turret that's why you see so many t-72s with the turret blown off and completely destroyed we've recently seen some t-72s in Ukraine fitted with what's colloquially been called cope cages that's extra armor on top of the turret on top of the back of the tank now this is designed to protect against aerial bombs dropped by drones or to some extent it may provide some protection from Top attack anti-tank weapons the next vehicle I would like to talk about is this one this is the bmp-1 and you'll be familiar with that from television footage I'm sure um now bmp1 is 1960s design and when it comes out it's quite revolutionary BMP means Boulevard Machinery infantry fighting vehicle and that is quite a revolutionary concept NATO forces have got apc's armored personnel carriers things like the American m113 British fe-432 but they do exactly what it says on the tin they are armored personnel carriers they're battle taxes now the idea of having a vehicle that can not only carry a squad of eight infantrymen across a battlefield the same speed as a tank but also has the ability to mix it with other afvs that's actually quite a revolutionary one now the BMP bit of an antique these days in all honesty um they're a lot more bmp2s bmp3s in Ukraine but there are still a substantial number of BMP ones around bmp1 has a fairly simple two-piece welded hole and a stubby turret mounting a 73 millimeter Grom smoothbore low velocity gun and a sagger anti-tank missile wire guided missile the idea here is that the Grom will engage targets out to about 700 meters The Saga will do the same job from about 500 up to 3000 meters provided very good anti-tank capability but it's not so good against other targets and particularly they're finding this in places like Afghanistan so in later marks in the bmp2 bmp3 the Grom is replaced with a 30 millimeter Auto Cannon now this vehicle has had what I call an eventful life it was used by also packed armies it may in fact have seen service in Afghanistan looking at some of the battle damage which has been overpainted in water packed green paint but it was then passed on to the Iraqi Army and it was captured by the British Army in the first Iraq War inside it's really in quite a part of State I mean you stick it your head in there and it actually smells like a captured vehicle here in the back of the vehicle you've got space for eight infantrymen and then up at the front the three crew members the commander the driver and the turret Gunner um it's pretty cramped in here um the Infantry each have a periscope and rather strangely they each have a firing point now I don't know but if I put the muzzle the weapon in there I can't imagine these were much use because the arcs are really distinctly limited it would just be targets of opportunity one of the problems encanted in Afghanistan is that a mine strike under the left hand track would kill or incapacitate both the driver and the commander because they're sat both quite close together and of course if that happens it's you know it's game over the vehicle the thing that a lot of people do remark on the fact these big back doors are actually fuel tanks that's not such a problem because they are auxiliary fuel tanks and they're just there to increase road range ideally by the time you get into combat these are empty but probably a bigger problem than that is the fact that the main fuel tank is here between the two rows of seats in the back now if the vehicle's hit and that is set on fire the results are for anybody sitting inside are going to be quite horrific because of its overall shape and its construction the BMP range is actually quite difficult to up armor although some later models mainly BMP twos and threes have been retrofitted with era and that's explosive reactive armor moving away from kit to tactics the Russian army and before that the Soviet Army the command system was always regarded as very inflexible and monolithic and there's no concept of mission command below divisional or possibly regimental level in fact I remember being told by one of our instructors that nobody in the then Soviet Army below the rank of major was allowed a map because it wasn't thought necessary that soldiers needed to know where they were in order to fight as long as they followed orders and of course this also applied to different arms different formations so artillery infantry armor Logistics didn't exercise together didn't get the opportunity to get that vital practice in we'd begun to think that things have begun to change from the 1980s onwards although perhaps there's a lesson here on how we think about this Russian army The Secret of success on the battlefield ever since World War one has been the use of combined arms infantry armor artillery engineers and Logistics in World War II the Soviet Army did this but on a massive and often rigid and inflexible scale this succeeded by sheer brute force and it's been said that on the Eastern Front the vermacht was better tactically able to react to circumstances and change tactics accordingly but the Soviet Army was better operational the positioning and use of massive crushing Force what seems to have changed since the 1980s is increased flexibility and better combined arms training and it's really about bringing Mission command down to a low level down to the Battalion tactical group The btg is a combined arms grouping around about 800 strong now composition does vary but typically it is a motor rifle Battalion that is infantry mounted in ifvs with a tank company artillery and anti-aircraft units combat engineers and Logistics support now these can operate either singly or in combination so that should give you the opportunity to mount a good cohesive all arms operation this is not happening why not this has really got to do with the command structure the training and the morale of the Russian army command arms operations are complex and fast moving and they require c-perb command and control and superb training amongst the individual units and that applies to everybody from the colonel commanding of Battalion down to a Corporal who is a squad leader if you're not able to do this if the soldier himself is not well trained and if his officers and ncos don't know what they're doing then the whole thing falls apart at the most basic level every grunt debossing out of the back of this ifv has got to be superbly well trained motivated and he's got to have faith that his commanders actually know what they're doing training motivation and Leadership good chain of command are absolutely everything earlier in the war we get quite a few Russian one and two star generals being killed in combat now they're going to really be one reason for that the chain of commands break them down and Senior officers are having to go forward to get things moving again even the basics seem to have been forgotten infantry tank cooperation Marshall churikov who was the defender of Stalingrad in World War II said that whenever we could separate German infantry and tanks both suffered this lesson first learned on the Eastern front in World War II and reinforced in places like grozny and in Afghanistan seems to have gone by the board somebody is out there stalking your armored column with javelin or end-law get your infantry out on the ground to sort them out of course if your btg is under strength and you're perhaps short of Dismounts as quite a few seem to be that's going to be easier said than done but there's no doubt about the fact that tanks are vulnerable without Infantry and vice versa the other vital ingredient for Battlefield success is of course istar intelligence surveillance Target acquisition and reconnaissance now there seems to be a major failure in the Russian high command to realize that the battlefield is a very different place these days in the first few months of the war there was um a lot of coverage of Ukrainian forces achieving considerable success with new generation anti-tank weapons like end law and javelin and there's no doubt about the fact that they were practicing a very effective form of small unit asymmetrical Warfare but as the war has gone on the major successes against Russian armor have been from artillery and the reason for this is istar the battlefield these days there's no way you can screen an armored column from drone and satellite intelligence gathering and tanks are taken out by artillery tanks and other afvs have always been difficult to hide noise bulk and massive exhaust plumes and infrared signatures make them pretty obvious now with drone reconnaissance all pervasive the first two skins of the survivability onion don't be seen and don't be targeted are startling is difficult to achieve Ukrainian artillery has achieved massive success in terms of knocking out Russian assets and breaking up attacking forces so where do we go now down in the donbass are the spring Thor the rasputitsa is well underway and mud will be clogging up the works but as the new campaigning season opens I think we have to assume the Russian high command will be reflecting on performance so far and they will be looking at their strategy their tactics and also their shambolic Logistics conscription or recruiting will presumably make up most the losses so far and of course there's one asset that hasn't really come into play much and that is the Russian Air Force on the Ukrainian side things are going to depend on increasing supplies of lethal Aid and obviously the debate about tanks and fighter aircraft continues if they do go onto the offensive they're going to find that is considerably more difficult than their current defensive posture when this all began somebody with a considerably more Authority than me said there are two reasons for going to war one is right on my side two can I win now from the Ukrainian perspective I think we know the answer to the first the second is still far too hard to call do hope you've enjoyed this and if you did please subscribe and if you can please support us on patreon foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Tank Museum

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Keywords: Bovington, Dorset, Tanks, Tankfest, tanks, tiger, chieftain, tank museum, second world war, world war two, top five tanks, tank chats, david fletcher, british army, tiger 131, royal armoured corps, tank regiment, RAC, tank museum bovington, tanklife, bovingtontank museum, military history, ww2, ww1, armoured car, tankchats, army, veteran, wwii history, world war 1, world war ii, war history, royal navy, ww2 history, royal air force, wwii museum, wwi, ww2 tanks, ww2 weapons

Id: DR4rNAYAdIk

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023