Turning A Tactical Incident Into a Strategic Crisis...

 The news that a British Challenger 2 tank (CR2) has been reportedly knocked out in Ukraine has been met with global headlines, with attitudes varying from shock to joy. This would mark the first time that the CR2 has been taken out of action by enemy fire (one was lost in Iraq as a result of ‘friendly fire’). Is this something to be concerned about or a simple reality of war?

Since 1991 the West has become used to conducting military operations in environments where there is relatively limited threat to major armoured fighting vehicles. Operations like Desert Storm, Allied Force and TELIC saw the deployment of main battle tanks without loss from hostile fire. As TELIC morphed into a counter insurgency operation the threat changed from tanks and anti-tank guided weapons into that of IEDs and RPGs, but still without loss of MBTs. This has perhaps given rise to a perception in some quarters that the MBT is more invulnerable than it actually is.

The war in Ukraine has marked a return to more normal operations, seeing soviet designed tanks being destroyed in significant numbers. The outstanding open source website ‘Oryx’ has independently documented over 2290 Russian tank losses as of 06 Sep 2023. This represents a significant proportion of available Russian Army armoured capability lost, most likely in many cases along with their crews. There is no doubt that Russia has reserves available, but these are older vehicles (such as the T55) which are in many cases 60-70 years old and little threat

Ukraine has received a variety of modern Western tanks from NATO members including Challenger and Leopard 2, with the M1 Abram on the way. This will help shift Ukrainian forces away from Soviet era equipment designed to be cheap and expendable to more complex, but survivable tanks that reflect NATO design philosophies of the 80s and 90s. Despite this, it does not mean that all tanks are inherently survivable under any circumstances.  Inevitably tanks will be lost in combat, particularly in the highly intense fighting seen in Ukraine. This does not mean that these tanks are obsolete, or that they have no future on the battlefield.

In the West we have perhaps gotten too comfortable with the idea that military operations don’t involve casualties and that Western technology is so good it overmatches anything that it is sent up against. This is understandable but also means that a mentality shift is needed to recognise that this is only the case when you’re not fighting peer level conflict. In those circumstances attrition is an inevitable part of war. It is against this backdrop that we need to accept that no tank is invulnerable and that losses can, and will, happen. This does not mean that these tanks are useless or that the war is lost.

The loss of a CR2 is, of course, an operational irritant and will reduce availability, but we must not lose sight of the fact that in war, losses occur. We need to understand that war fighting is bloody, complex and involves loss. Not everyone going to war is going to return, and many vehicles will be destroyed. Sometimes progress will be slow, sometimes things will not go according to the plans of armchair generals. That does not mean that the loss of a vehicle is of strategic importance, which is what you’d think is the case judging by some of the media coverage around this.

There is a mild level of media hysteria around this incident, with commentators talking about the loss in grave terms in a way that would imply all is lost. In fact it is an utterly tactical incident – the tank has been abandoned, the crew are safe and it is possible that it may yet be recovered and returned to service – in marked contrast to so many Soviet era vehicles that have a track record of being beyond repair when their turrets separate from the hull as ammunition explodes.

What we should not do is either panic or assume that the CR2 is somehow useless and doomed. It is a mark of the importance of the deployment that Russian media is trying to make the most of it on social media channels – when you’re crowing about the destruction of 1 enemy tank, at a point when you’ve lost well over 2000 of your own, you’re hardly arguing from a position of strength. It is though a sign of the Russian ability to mobilise social media as a weapon that we’re seeing them make as much of this as possible – for they have precious little else to celebrate.

We should also focus on other key issues- firstly the fact that the crew are safe. This is a war of demographics; Russian losses are vast and their military age males are taking huge casualties. The loss of their tank crews not only removes trained soldiers but also has a long-term impact on Russian demographics that will further accelerate the decline of population numbers. By contrast that the Ukrainian crew walked away means that they are ready to fight another day with one of the many tanks now swelling Ukraine’s armoury.

The loss of one tank is a tactical irritant but we should remember that there are plenty more where it came from. There are still other CR2s in use, while Leopard 2 continues to have a major impact, and the M1 Abrams will also have a major effect. Unlike Russia, which is being increasingly forced to rely on ever more ancient reserves (some reports indicate that they are pulling the T10 into the front line, a tank designed in the 1940s), Ukraine is benefitting from ever more modern and capable fighting vehicles being sent from the West.

Finally we should remember the lesson that all wars involve attrition. For 30 years the West has effectively bet on investing in highly capable advanced weaponry that can overmatch and destroy opposition. This investment in capability has come at the cost of quantity, and the hope that less will in fact be better than more. This has worked well for most operations where the West has fought against non-peer rivals who have Soviet era equipment and lack advanced weaponry. Now that the risk of peer level conflict is increasing, is it time to reassess whether we can still make the same assumption?

There is a lack of ‘war maintenance reserve’ equipment to draw on as a last ditch source of spare parts and supplies. Until the 1990s the British Army had, literally, thousands of tanks to draw on (Challenger, Chieftain and even some Centurions). Today it has withdrawn its legacy fleets and has only a very limited number of spare hulls to donate or deploy. Again has the time come to reassess attrition and ask more generally if previous assumptions still hold good, or if more widely the lessons from Ukraine point to the fact that a peer level conflict will be bloody, violent and involve losses on a scale not planned for in decades?

The most important thing to do here is maintain a sense of perspective. The sad reality of reporting wars fought with social media is that what feels like a big deal locally (e.g. video footage of a destroyed vehicle) is in fact not that big a deal operationally or strategically. Yes a CR2 has been disabled and yes a lot of advertising and websites making claims that “its never been defeated in combat” will need to be rewritten but beyond this, very little has changed. This is an utterly tactical level incident which has been breathlessly rewritten into getting coverage at a near strategic level – something that it simply does not warrant.