Western battle tanks set to escalate conflict

Abhijit Bhattacharyya

Author and Columnist

WITH the German Leopard main battle tank (MBT) set to arrive on the Ukraine front, the world should fear a fiery escalation of the Moscow-Kyiv conflict. However, the fears of the Russians, built up over more than 20 years, too, need to be remembered.

Today, Thucydides’ words in The Peloponnesian War are relevant: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” It won’t be far-fetched to suggest that what made the Russia-Ukraine war inevitable was the rise, growth and reckless territorial expansion of the US-led NATO and the European Union towards a battered and broken Russia’s fragile frontier.

Moscow-Kyiv tensions turned into an international armed conflict, which sounded the bugle for another full-fledged European bloodbath in the tradition of World War II.

The lethal weapons of belligerents get an excellent (experimental) practice/test ground in the crowded land of the West. It’s, however, not unexpected because if multinational corporations of military hardware take the plunge to make money, no sane political leader’s voice can have any effect.

One today, therefore, pities German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. With the best of efforts to not be seen as a war instigator and escalator, the incumbent government head must be regretting his fate to be branded (by critics) as a worthy successor of Hitler. What’s Panzer to dictator Hitler in 1943 is Leopard to democrat Scholz in 2023 — both firing to kill on their way to, and against, Moscow.

A vast majority of Germans, however, maintain: “War scares us stiff.” The guilt of Armageddon rankles and haunts them. “After World War II, Germany had two reference points for its security: never again war as a perpetrator, and never alone, only acting in an alliance,” writes military historian Soenke Neitzel. Yet, the German Leopard MBT induction has all ingredients of a bitter fight-to-the-finish scenario for the Russians, the fallout of which is bound to badly bruise Europe.

What is, surprising, however, is that, can the MBT alone decide the outcome of the ongoing Moscow-Kyiv conflict? Is it possible for a few US Abrams and Berlin Leopard MBTs to keep Russians at bay, like what Hitler’s three military musketeers — Leeb, Bock and Rundstedt — tried doing their way against Moscow on June 22, 1941?

Indeed, if the West thinks that Russia can be brought around only through tank warfare, it would be stretching one’s imagination of war to its limits. Gone are the days of the pioneer 1917 tank battle of Ypres, or General O’Connor’s British-manufactured Matilda tank’s role against German General Rommel’s Panzer Division in the deserts of North Africa in 1940-43, or German-made Tiger-I and Panzer-VI Tiger tank battles in Kharkov (January-March 1943) and the battle for Kursk (July 1943). In fact, the Kursk salient saw one of the bloodiest and highest-casualty tank battles between Soviets (13,00,000 men, 3,600 MBTs) and Germany (8,00,000 troops, 2,700 tanks).

Seventy-eight years have passed since World War II, but nothing like those spectacular, long-drawn-out, mass-formation tank battles have ever been fought. Yet, tanks are produced and procured by most armies, and now come the German Leopard, US Abrams, British Challenger-2 and the French ‘offer’ of Leclerc MBT to fight the Russians. Is this the new arms race between western military merchants?

Fifteen years ago, one asked: “Has the tank a future?” owing to the receding possibility of an all-out tank war across the globe. Post World War II, only a few theatres have had major tank battles. And all these theatres saw fights between unequals. Thus, in the Soviet war of Afghanistan (1979-89); US invasions of Korea, 1950; Kuwait, 1991; and Iraq, 2003; and in the 20-year US-Afghan war, there was no intensive tank-vs-tank fight between comparable combatants.

In the Indian context, there are two major examples: the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars. The other India-Pakistan wars of 1947-48 (Kashmir) and 1999 (Kargil) had a comparatively low-profile tank movement and firing.

In this background, the sudden Ukrainian demand and the US-NATO-EU push for western MBTs as prime arms to defeat Russia merit close scrutiny. Do the West and Ukraine sincerely believe that MBTs alone will turn the tide of the conflict, despite the vulnerability of this armoured vehicle? Can the MBTs make it without air cover to face the enemy’s concentrated fire from surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles?

The MBT’s role has been changing with increasingly unorthodox and unconventional warfare. Thus, whereas in the past, the main MBT carried out offensive/defensive ops in the midst of brutal kinetics, the recent experience of British and US tank regiments and Marine Corps in Iraq clearly demonstrated that the MBT continues to be effective in urban ops in direct-fire support role of dismounted infantry. Contextually, the best example is the Israeli deployment of heavy Merkava MBT against Palestinians in urban areas of Gaza and Ramallah.

Indeed, the observation in C Foss’s book Jane’s Armour and Artillery is valid when it says that “while MBT was originally developed for high-intensity military operations, the experiences in Afghanistan have once again demonstrated that the MBT has a vital role to play in all aspects of military operations.” The present problem, however, is troop survivability in the war zone having a diverse range of threats.

Thus, the Afghan war was an acid test for future MBTs as the experience led to the ‘safety first’ design thereof. “Provide occupants with high level of protection against some types of threat weapons”, especially those which are likely to be used by guerrillas in uneven terrain. Understandably, therefore, for the Americans, it was the 3,200 MRAP (mine-resistant ambush protection) armoured vehicles which became the essential and standard mobile platform to counter high-intensity counter-insurgency operators in Afghan ‘badlands’.

Nevertheless, Ukraine isn’t Afghanistan as the tank will continue to be vulnerable and easier to be hit by (un)conventional enemy fire than ever before. It can be immobilised by a landmine, improvised explosive device or a determined combatant. It will also face an assault from helicopter gunship and missiles of all types.

Hence, anyone pinning hopes solely on the Leopard or western MBTs may be in for a surprise in the brutal conventional land warfare in Ukraine. More combatant casualties and MBT destruction is guaranteed.

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