What was once a running joke has turned into
terrifying reality for Russian soldiers- Russia has officially sent 75 year old T-54s
and T-55s to Ukraine. What in the world is going on with the Russian military,
where did all its modern tanks go, and why can't one of the largest countries
in the world simply build new ones? The T-55 was a monster of a tank when
it made its debut three quarters of a century ago. Entering service immediately
after the end of the second world war, the T-55 would go on to become one of
the most produced tanks in history, with an estimated 100,000 built. The tank has
played a role in ever major, and most minor, conflicts of the Cold War, and its introduction
scared the NATO allies so bad that Britain hurried to develop a brand new tank gun and
the US rushed the M60 tank into production. In its day, the T-54/T-55
was a formidable monster, with 205 mm of frontal turret armor and 120mm
slanted hull armor. The tank was so tough, that in trials it proved it could survive a
nuclear explosion up to 15 kilotons in yield at a range of just over 300 meters- though its
crew needed a range of 700 meters to be protected from the pressure wave. Its 100 mm gun could
penetrate about 300mm of rolled steel armor, making it a significant threat to anything in
NATO inventories. Its crew enjoyed the benefit of some of the first thermal sights, giving
the tank the ability to operate at night. But that was in the 1950s. Today,
the T-55 is a sign of desperation for an embattled Russia. So what
in the world happened to its tanks? Russia's initial offensive into Ukraine was a
compendium of tactical blunders and poor doctrine. Tanks are the fiercest weapon on any battlefield-
jets and bombers can deliver more destruction, but they can't take and hold ground like
a tank can. Their main cannons can level most small buildings- in fact, some tanks have
specialized rounds to do just that. Their modern, advanced composite armor utilizes a variety of
materials working together to defeat even the most powerful projectiles. And anything a tank
can blast apart, it can simply run over and crush under its massive treads- with most modern
main battle tanks weighing in at around 60 tons. But all of that means very little if tanks
aren't properly supported, as Russia has failed to learn in three major conflicts now.
Because as impressive as tanks are, they have some glaring vulnerabilities which Russia's
enemies have exploited to astonishing effect. During the first Chechen war, Russia
mobilized its massive arsenal of tanks and armored vehicles with a plan to
literally crush the Chechen resistance underfoot. Up against a force a fraction
their size, with no tanks of their own, the war was a foregone conclusion- until
suddenly it wasn't. Because while the Chechen rebels didn't have tanks, they did have
RPGs, anti-tank missiles, and even IEDs and tank mines- as well as an incredibly good doctrine
that exploited Russia's biggest vulnerability. Russia warfighting doctrine states that tanks
lead the way, with infantry fighting vehicles providing close support. However, the infantry
inside the infantry fighting vehicles can't do their job if they're not dismounted- and
it's awfully hard to provide much support when you're looking at the world and scanning
for threats through a very narrow armored slit. During the invasion of Chechnya, the Russians had
a problem- mainly that the Chechen rebels refused to play ball and come out of the cities for a
nice clean fight that Russia would absolutely dominate. Instead, the rebels hid inside the
cities and put up a stiff urban resistance, utilizing dense urban terrain and verticality
to their great advantage. Assaulting into the city meant a rebel could be in any window,
ready to fire down at a moment's notice. The Russians thus decided that the best
way to protect their infantry was to keep it inside their armored vehicles.
The Chechens were counting on this. Rebel forces used the verticality of the urban
terrain to get up above the tanks, providing them with two distinct advantages. The first was that
from above the tank, they could use weapons that would normally have little to no effect against
the thick front armor, or even the slightly less thick side and rear armor of the tanks. Because
tanks can't be well protected from every angle, or else no engine on earth could move them,
they have to make sacrifices- this is why the front armor is the strongest, in most fights
this is where the fire is going to be coming from. Side and rear armor is robust, but thinner
to save weight. But the roof of the tank has very thin armor, often just a dozen or two dozen
millimeters thick. The Abrams for instance has about an inch of roof armor, mainly to
protect the crew from artillery shell fragments. This thin roof armor was especially vulnerable
to regular rocket propelled grenades, which the Chechens had in abundance. Ironically, a lot
of their RPGs came from Russian soldiers who sold equipment to villagers in exchange for food,
alcohol, or cigarettes- those same villagers sold the RPGs right back to the rebels, or sometimes
were outright working with them. With so many of these simple and cheap weapons laying around,
and the Chechens using the verticality of urban terrain to get above the tanks, Russian armor
soon became a critically endangered species. But it wasn't just thin roof armor, the second
weakness exploited by the Chechens was the lack of elevation on Russian tank's main guns. An M1
Abrams has an elevation of +20 to -10 degrees on its gun, allowing it significant vertical
reach. A T-72 meanwhile has an elevation of only +14 to -6 degrees. A T-80 is slightly
better, with a range of +18 to -4 degrees. Such a poor range on Russian tanks meant that
they were physically unable to respond to enemy action in the windows and roofs above their heads,
frustrating Russian tankers as they watched their friends get destroyed from above. BMPs with
supporting infantry would fare much better, with a gun elevation of 74 degrees for the
BMP 2. This vehicle was designed to take out, or at least scare off, enemy attack
helicopters with its main gun, giving it much greater vertical reach. The
problem though was that a gunner would have to try to identify threats and neutralize
them by peering through a small armored slit- a incredibly difficult task while fighting
in a close quarters, chaotic, urban environment. The Chechens also exploited a tank's thin
floor armor by utilizing IEDs and anti-tank mines. Often, they would hide in holes in the
ground or sewers that tanks would roll over, only to pop up and attach mines that resembled
limpet anti-ship mines, or simply toss out an IED and duck for cover. The thin floor armor would
provide little if any protection to the crew, so not only would these IEDs knock the vehicle out of
commission, but would also likely kill its crew. To counter all of these threats, most modern
militaries utilize infantry. In a modern, combined arms military, the infantry is often
playing the role of babysitter for friendly armor, but western powers dismount their infantry to
do so. While this makes them more vulnerable, it also allows them to better use their senses to
detect and neutralize threats, while the Russians force them to remain inside their protected
armor vehicles looking out a thin slit. When it came time to invade Ukraine,
the world assumed that Russia had paid attention to its two humiliating lessons from
both Chechen wars. The world would be wrong. As Russian armor poured into Ukraine,
a peculiar sight began to appear across the country side. Groups of Russian
tanks all operating on their own, with no other armored vehicles or dismounted
infantry to be seen anywhere. The Ukrainians saw much the same thing, and immediately leapt
to exploit their enemy's grave mistake. Mighty Russian armor was being absolutely decimated in
a series of ambushes utilizing soldiers armed with Stugna and western anti-tank weapons. In
many cases, Russian armor famously panicked, prompting even more losses. The entire time,
Russian infantry was nowhere to be seen. Russian doctrine hadn't changed since Chechnya,
and its troops were equally poorly trained. In multiple instances where infantry was present,
it failed to do its job of screening the flanks for armor forces, and instead chaos caused by
ambushes led to a visible breakdown of command and discipline. Every vehicle was out for itself,
and infantry being ambushed by machine gun teams rushed to find cover next to or behind armored
vehicles. More than a few grisly instances of Russians being crushed to death by their
own vehicles have come to light since then. Russian troops were obviously not trained to
properly screen the flanks, but they also lacked training to respond to ambushes. Responding to an
ambush is one of the most basic lessons taught by any western infantry school, with soldiers
rallied in order to push through the ambush and get out of the kill zone asap. This
throws the enemy's plans into confusion and denies them the advantage of carefully
planned overlapping fields of fire as well as other nasty surprises they may be waiting to
unleash on forces stuck inside the kill zone. One year after its invasion of Ukraine,
Russia had lost an estimated 1600 of the 2500 tanks it had rolled into Ukraine
with. It's recovered and repaired, or built brand new, an estimated 850 of those
lost tanks. But that was back in February, and by May Russia had lost the biggest tank battle
of the war, with 120 armored vehicle losses, which compounded with the rest of the casualties
all along the eastern front. Only Russia knows how many tanks it's truly lost of the estimated 2500
it began with, but its losses are bad enough to prompt it to move literal antiques out of storage
and even museums and send them to the front lines. Every month, Russia fields increasingly less
capable tanks- a problem for Ukraine as well, but one offset by the growing movement to send
ever larger numbers of western tanks to Ukraine. Russia's real problem though is that
it can't hope to replenish its losses, while Ukraine can count on its
western allies for support. No one, except maybe a few individuals in the
Russian government, truly knows how many tanks Russia can produce each year. According to
Russian sources, one of its largest armor plants can produce 20 tanks a month, but other
sources say that it also refurbishes 8 tanks a month. This makes it unclear if the plant produces
20 total tanks, or 12 new tanks and 8 refurbished ones from its deep storage. Similar reports from
other plants place their total at around 17 tanks a month. With two new tank plants being hurried
through construction, an estimated 90 tanks could be hitting the battlefield a month- but nobody
knows how many of those will be new T-80s or T-90s, or simply refurbished T-62s and the like.
Even at the most optimistic figure of 90 tanks hitting the battlefield, this simply doesn't
compare with the 150 tanks Russia loses a month. What we do know is that the tanks coming off
the assembly line are in no way modern. Both refurbished and new tanks are lacking modern
electronics and specialized kit like thermal visions. With all of those supplies coming
from overseas and now cut off by sanctions, modern tanks like the T-90 are even harder to
build, with Russia lacking specialized parts and tools needed for complex engineering. Less
advanced T-72s are more achievable for Russia, though the country faces a similar problem
it did during World War 2, when tanks rolled right off the production line and straight
into combat with no sights and no radios. Especially damaging to Russia's industry
is sanctions targeting optical systems, ball bearings, and machine tools. Without
western supplies of thermal and night visions, Russia is being forced to either produce
tanks without these vital components, or push old tanks into a modern battlefield
without them. Instead, Russia is putting basic gunner's sights on its tanks, reducing the range
of their cannons by an estimated 2 kilometers- and that matters a great deal as German Leopards
begin to show up on Ukrainian battlefields, joined at the end of the summer by American
Abrams. Even against modern Russian tanks, western armor had a decided range and precision
advantage- but now Russia's only real hope is to use its armor in close quarters combat
where its tanks can be more accurate. The embargo on advanced semiconductors to Russia has
also impeded its ability to develop new modern fire control computers, forcing it to cobble
together what it can from civilian appliances or smuggle low quantities at great expense
through China and other friendly nations. You probably don't think much about ball
bearings- we didn't before we wrote this script. But ball bearings are critical for the
production of modern vehicles. These shockingly simple devices are ingenuous and function off
the basic premise that things roll better than they slide. Yet it's no easy feat creating high
quality ball bearings which often have to endure high levels of heat and stress. The production
of modern ball bearings is such a technological feat that nations are ranked by their capacity
to create them. And unfortunately for Russia, it doesn't rank high on that list, with 55% of
its ball bearings before the war all coming from Europe, Canada and the US. Now the nation is
forced to rely on small domestic production and cheaper, lower quality variants it can
import from places like China or Malaysia. Russia is losing on two fronts. Not only
is it unable to produce large numbers of new tanks, or even refurbish old ones to
anything resembling a modern standard, it's being forced to pay exponentially
greater prices for supplies needed to create the small number of modern tanks it
manages to crank out. The combination of low production and skyrocketing cost is a death
blow for a cash-strapped Russian government, who blew through its projected annual defense
financing in the first few months of 2023. And new sources of revenue aren't
forthcoming. European price caps on Russian oil, inherent inefficiencies
in Russia's extraction and processing, and now even greater costs in shipping to places
like Asia, have all conspired to make Russia's oil revenues reach about break-even levels. This
is a disaster for the Russian government budget, because Russia's oil and natural gas industry
accounts for about 20% of its GDP, and about 45% of its budget just one month before invasion. Making matters worse, Russia has now began to tax
its own oil industry based on Brent crude prices, rather than its own oil prices- meaning energy
companies in Russia have to pay taxes on revenue they did not generate. As if problems weren't
bad enough, even in the best case scenario that Russian energy is at break-even revenue, this is
still a national disaster. At break-even levels, energy companies can't afford to invest in
new infrastructure or exploratory missions to expand operations. That means
no new oil fields coming online, no replacement of bad infrastructure, and
no addressing inefficiencies in Russian production that it used to rely on western
technology to overcome or at least mitigate. Russian energy is in the same death spiral that
its tank forces are, but Ukraine is in an equally- if not more immediately precarious position.
Because while it'll take years for Russian energy, and thus budget, to go bust, Ukraine is wholly
reliant on its western partners. If the west's financial or military support wavers, even
poorly equipped Russian forces could secure victory. So while Russia's tank fleets may be in
a laughable state right now as Cold War antiques are dragged out of museums, at least it still
has tanks to put on the battlefield. Ukraine is stuck with what it has, a constantly diminishing
quantity that only western support can replenish. A T-55 is a big joke on a modern battlefield, until suddenly your side has no more tanks and
no more anti-tank missiles to stop it with. Now go watch Why Ukraine proves NATO is a
failure, or click this other video instead!
