Is This a Tank?
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
Number one, wheels. The ancient war chariot is a prime early example of how the adage that you should not reinvent the wheel is poor advice. Chariot builders had to reinvent (so to speak) and hone and advance the wheel greatly for use in chariots, because the wheels needed to be robust and light to an extent that wheels had never been before.
And why did the wheels need to be so light? That brings us to the second interesting thing that the author didn’t mention, which is the fact that horses of the time were smaller, not having yet been bred up to the size needed for rideability in battle. Therefore, instead, horses were used to pull chariots. And the chariots had to be light to make them nimble, and because the horses (and mules in some cases, sure, but that is neither here nor there) were not the huge steeds that we have today.
We can tell when the harness was invented because horse drawn carts suddenly double in size. It's amazing how much more work a horse can do when it can breathe!
I'd imagine that "reinventing the wheel" is much better advice 5000 years ago.
Wheels might be completely out of disruptive potential but I doubt it.
But to say that is to miss the point that even “inventing the same thing without looking at it” is often advised against, when that is actually atrocious advice.
Driving a 30kg chariot must have been a frightening fast experience, even on a small pony.
The lack of bearing, brakes, suspension, … on wooden wheels.
Not to mention stirrups [1], which were not widespread until much later.
This is just wrong as can be seen in carvings from the time. The horses pulling the chariots are clearly big enough to ride.
Chariots were a thing because a workable saddle & stirrups hadn't been invented. Once they were it was the end of the chariot.
https://www.fellponymuseum.org.uk/fells/rom_dark/size.htm suggests that horses really WERE shorter. But so were people. And even so, riders were drawn a lot bigger relative to their horses than they are today. Which bones back up.
It is not clear to me how the two trade off back in the days of chariots.
* tanks - vehicles that have a direct fire role on the battlefield (the crew designate their own targets)
* self-propelled guns - they may look like tanks, but provide indirect fire (they fire, like artillery, at coordinates they are given by someone else)
* armoured personnel carriers - essentially busses which delivery infantry (the dismounts) to the battlefield.
Using UK examples, tanks include Challenger 2 (a classic Main Battle Tank), Ajax and Scimitar (a light tank that conducts close reconnaissance). Self propelled guns include the AS90 and APCs include Warrior.
The definition most people would come up with would best describe an Armored Fighting Vehicle (AFV). Tanks are a type of AFV but not all AFVs are tanks.
Pun intended??
The differentiator there is you wouldn’t expect to engage another MBT. That’s the same thing that makes recce cars not tanks, even though they have a direct fire weapon system.
1. The heaviest armored vehicle on land in any given army.
2. Fires APFSDS munitions.
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I think we will run into a lot of semantics here. You can no longer say that "an IFV is not expected to engage a tank", as Bradleys have killed tanks with TOWs, likewise BMP-3s can fire Kornet ATGMs. These are viable tank killers and bring the MBT role into question.
The argument I was going to go with is "MBTs don't carry troops, other than crew", which also has technical problems such as "well, the Merkava does".
Furthermore, there is talk of moving tanks to 152mm guns, at which point there is talk of giving them enough elevation to serve as indirect fire pieces.
At this point, I would argue that the separator for tanks is the ability to fire APFSDS munitions, which provide the ability to reliably penetrate another MBT without relying on a guided munition, (aka TOW, Kornet). Why is this important? Because it's fast (ability to evade return fire, less chance for enemy to evade), counter-measures don't exist (ERA is insufficient against fin-stabilized kinetic sabots, APS is too slow), etc. Note that APFSDS can only be fired from a gun that is too heavy to carry on anything OTHER than an MBT. Bradleys, Strykers, BTRs, BMPs, etc just can't take the weight/recoil. The second argument is "the heaviest armored vehicle" possible - and this is universally true for MBTs today.
P.S. This is a pretty technical rant, if you have questions, I will answer them, but it would take too long to caveat everything I just said in this post, so I didn't even try.
There may be talk of tanks going to 152mm, but that's not a talk for NATO. NATO doesn't use 152mm anyways, and the predicted next iteration is 140mm. Heavy ERA is possibly sufficient against Sabot, and APS is looking at being able to intercept sabot is well (mostly in the form of knocking the penetrator down.
There's nothing technically stopping an IFV from carrying a MBT grade gun (Styrker MGS carried gun equivalent to the original M1). Similarly, there remains interest in use of hyper velocity missiles for anti-tank use (which gets up to APFSDS speed, but doesn't need the gun to do so. See KEM/CKEM. And many of the IFVs use APFSDS ammo (Rheinmetal makes it).
What about the M1128 Stryker variant? Wikipedia tells me it's being retired, but as far as I can tell it mounts a full sized tank cannon (same as the original M1) and is not being retired due to problems with the gun per se. I certainly wouldn't call it a tank.
I'm a decade out of the Army and I only know anything about Strykers because I saw them around post. I never served in a Stryker unit. That said, it seems like the M1128 is a direct contradiction to this fairly central premise in your post.
Lol thanks for the offer - I'm a Royal Armoured Corps squadron leader.
With that said, do you agree with the combination of APFSDS and heaviest armor defining an MBT today?
Fair enough.
(I'm still waiting for someone to take issue with me describing WR as a bus)
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[1]: At least three including this, but I have a feeling I may be forgetting at least one more.
If you like a challenge, there's also Void Bastards with the same narrator and a similar vibe, but it's a first-person rogue-lite in space.
I almost shut it off at the 1,5 hour mark but I pushed through and found enough content to entertain myself for 4,5 hours. I don't think I'll play it again, but based on googling I probably could have explored for a couple of hours more.
It was a fun week on Twitter when everyone all the sudden became fascinated with "Is this an APC, a Tank, or something else" as images of Russian losses piled up.
"This is CLEARLY self-propelled artillery" ... "No, this is CLEARLY a light tank" ... [retired 2-star chimes in] "Guys, that's a truck"
But I wonder if chariots are superior in some way to cavalry, i.e. if it was worth to invest more in chariots than in cavalry as an army leader.
As for advantages of chariots, I think there are 2 to consider: - As a platform for archers, chariots allow bigger bows and more ammunition, and even space for somebody to hold a shield in front of you. As steppe peoples (such as the Iranians) started to field real mounted archers, chariots became obsolete for this purpose, I suppose primarily due to the limited mobility over terrain. - As shock cavalry, chariots had more mass and allowed the crew to be more heavily armored than the earliest forms of mounted cavalry. That would allow them to smash into ranks of their contemporary infantry in ways light cavalry could not. Still, they were relatively inefficient against well disciplined heavy infantry, such as Greek hoplites, macedonian phalanxes and Roman legions.
I suppose that may explain why chariots seemed to go out of fashion wherever Greek/Macedonian or Roman armies were precent.
Btw, various chariot-like "war wagons" reappeared at different times through history. Often with 4 wheels instead of 2, and more armor, these could carry several men, and in some cases, light artillery guns. That place would place them about halfway between a chariot and a tank, I suppose:
The Fine Blog is a great place to read all about that in fact, because he's very much not taken with the romance of historical social structures, while being honest about the fact that elites in those structures were quite a bit more capable of killing people than the peasants they dominated.
The peasants frequently did not have direct access to steel weapons and armor (which were SUPER expensive) not training (which was also expensive, not only in terms of actual cost, but time to go through it).
It's not like the nobles were innately better, though I guess some where, getting literally killer genes for generations has to help with that at some point...
The serfs would raise the pigs and the nobles would get to eat them more than a few times a year.
We saw in the 20th century what adequate protein can do for a population, many times. Nobles were often genetically distinct from the people they ruled as well, conquest being what it was, but that part isn't necessary, the surplus of protein is sufficient to explain it.
Young male Spaniards apparently have an average height of about 179cm but Spain has a super high life expectancy so the older generations are around for a really long time (ergo lower average) :-)
In the past there were a ton of jokes about Southern Europeans being short. Guess what, they were just malnourished, it seems.
I've seen the same thing in Romania. After the fall of communism in 1989, the average height went up (I don't know the exact numbers) and at least in developed parts of the country the average male height seems to be going towards 180cm or even taller... (rural areas tend to have shorter people, still, again, because of nutrition issues).
In fairness, I guess those guys probably had chariots.
Here is a quote from Ceasar from his invasion of Britain : "Thus they display in battle the speed of horse, [together with] the firmness of infantry; ...."
(Taken from the wiki artikle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot#:~:text=A%20chariot%20....)
"the firmness of infantry" part meant that the chariots would have an advantage over contemporary infantry in a shock role, to break up enemy formations, even from the front, similar to how cataphracts and medieval knights would do later (and even modern armor, when used as armored spearheads).
But I suppose the Romans were disciplined enough to remain cohesion even when attacked by chariots, meaning that chariots could not be the force multiplier against them that they may have been against other celtic tribes.
They laid siege to a Gaul settlement, by building a wall around their settlement. During the siege a larger Gaulish relief force surrounded them, so they just built an exterior wall to protect themselves against the exterior force, and waited for the inner settlement to starve and sortie.
They were outnumbered but they managed to beat both the defenders in the interior settlement AND the surrounding force.
We're talking about the same legions that would create a mini-camp like you'd see in Game of Thrones with the Lannisters just to camp for the night (ditches, wooden ramparts, rows of tents, night guards, the works) and a literal mini-town for longer stays, those mini-towns/mini-forts being called castrum and becoming many modern day cities. Large wooden walls, actual buildings inside the walls, their castrums were probably better looking and organized than many actual barbarian towns at the time.
I don't know what drove them to all of that, but imagine how impressive everything about that was to the average peasant in the 2nd century BCE or the 3rd century CE, to pick some random time intervals.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2015/07/16/roman-marching-...
While ethymologically becoming "castle", I think.
In Britain, Ceaser did not do quite as well. He was kicked out twice (in 55BC and 54BC).
It wasn't until about 100 years later that Claudius' legions returned to Britain.
These days they just name a warship or similar after you, you aren’t expected to ride around in it.
Dictators sometimes are military generals though, and if you squint they can be called kings/queens, though it isn't clear if they will leave leadership duties to their children.
When horses were larger and riders had saddle and stirrup, chariots stopped being useful.
It definitely seems to have been the latter, but that doesn't rule out the former.
The chariot as described in that article is more along the lines of mobile artillery.
nonsensical question to start with if you have ever read any story of roman battles involving chariots. A tank has an asymmetry on the battlefield: it's very powerful and very well protected. None of this is true for chariots.
The mobile ballista was more like a primitive field gun or crew-served mortar. Add black powder and a strong metal barrel and it served the same role through the 19th century.
An actual tank cannot exist without a powerful engine. They were literally designed as the battleships or destroyer of the land. They used big engines and small naval-inspired guns. The most successful have always mounted those guns on turrets just like a naval ship. The reason no primitive tank can be found is that nothing did serve quite the same role.
To be fair, at the time tanks were created and (not quite immediately, but rather soon) adopted the rotating turret for their main gun, that turret wasn't all that age-old a tradition at sea, either. Wasn't Ericsson's Civil War-era Monitor the first with that? (If not the very first, then among the first to deploy it in combat, I'm fairly sure.)
But yeah, their greatest proponent in WW1 Britain being the Admiralty is of course an amusing connection. (But I suppose if Churchill had been, say, Minister of Agriculture, then their greatest proponent would have been the Department of Agriculture.)
edit: meant this other article by the same author: https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not...
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not...