Russia has begun using its new T-14 Armata battle tanks to fire on Ukrainian positions “but they have not yet participated in direct assault operations,” the RIA state news agency reported on Tuesday, quoting a source close the matter.
RIA said that the tanks have been fitted with extra protection on their flanks and crews have undergone “combat coordination” at training grounds in Ukraine.
The T-14 tank has an unmanned turret, with crew remotely controlling the armaments from “an isolated armoured capsule located in the front of the hull.”
The tanks have a maximum speed on the highway of 80 kilometres (50 miles) per hour, RIA reported.
In January, British military intelligence reported that Russian forces in Ukraine were reluctant to accept the first tranche of the tanks due to their “poor condition.”
It also said that any deployment of the T-14 would likely be “a high-risk decision” for Russia, and one taken primarily for propaganda purposes.
“Production is probably only in the low tens, while commanders are unlikely to trust the vehicle in combat,” the British military said.
“Eleven years in development, the programme has been dogged with delays, reduction in planned fleet size, and reports of manufacturing problems.”
Here’s a brief overview video:
The T-14 has had more than its share of developmental problems, and there are plenty of articles and videos detailing its shortcomings. Lazer Pig’s “The T-14 Armata tank sucks” is a long example of the genre.
If your interest level doesn’t support viewing a full hour of Armata-bashing, here are some takeaways:
“The T14 combines all the ultimate Russian technology previously introduced onto NATO tanks 25 years ago in a way that only a country trying to inflate the share prices of Raytheon would understand.” (Raytheon makes Javelin.)
“It does away with all the unnecessary ERA systems of the T90, which cannot protect the tank against missiles that were invented in the 80s, and instead replaces them with an active protection system that can almost defend the tank against missiles that were invented in the 90s.”
“An auto loader famous for jamming that now cannot be accessed and cleared when it does jam, is somehow heavier and slower than the tank it has replaced, and comes combined together in a package so expensive the company that made it immediately went bankrupt. The country that bought it cannot afford it and it has about as much export potential as English whiskey.”
“For a while, every idiot with even the vaguest sense of military interest was banging on about this tank as if Stalin had come back to life and had personally forged the hull from his own ball sack. And that all tanks across every nation in the world had just been rendered obsolete.”
Sections on repeated post-Soviet tank design failures, like the T-95 and Black Knight, and coverage of Russian brain drain, omitted.
The weird, Tiger-2 derived engine is unreliable.
The driver’s vision sucks.
No crew access to the turret internally.
The autoloader is slower than the manual fire rates on T-80s, T-72s and Abrams.
“The qualifying time for [an Abrams] loader to pass training is seven seconds, and the best crews claim they can reload in about four to five seconds. Meaning a good Abrams can fire twice before the T-14 has reloaded.”
“Ukrainian hackers found that most of the electronic systems on board, including the digital sights, the night vision, the infrared, were all in fact western imports. Most notably, these were last generation French optics from Leclerc MBTs left over from when they were all upgraded to ICONE in 2009.”
Current Russian tank optics are actually available to the general public. “They’re not even the best that are currently available. If you’ve got a spare five grand, you can go into any high-end spy gadget store and buy a drone that will give you better night vision and IR tracking capabilities than the latest generation of modern Russian tanks.”
China reportedly found out that none of the tank’s systems actually worked. “The soft kill defense systems were simply smoke screens, and the hard kill systems designed specifically to stop the Javelin and the TOW missile could not detect if either of these systems had been fired at the tank, and relied entirely on the crew being able to notice a missile traveling at the speed of sound flying towards them.”
“To top it off, there was no evidence of the supposed electronic warfare systems that could render guided missiles and mines inert.”
“Nothing in the Armata is new.”
The idea that western tanks need to catch up to the Armata is laughable. “By the time the Armata enters service, it will already be outdated.”
“Everything the Armata is has been done before, and in many cases has been done better.”
“Russia is not an equal to the United States and NATO, it’s an equal to North Korea, both technologically backwards nations.”
Will all those problems still be present when the Armata engages enemy armor in Ukraine? Some certainly will. I doubt Armata electronics or optics can compare to those on western vehicles, and I bet that its active protection package is miles behind Trophy (which I don’t think will be on any Ukrainian tanks anyway). But I do suspect they’ve had enough time to improve the reliability of the engine, and I’m guessing the armor and autoloader improvements will improve survivability for the tank crew.
Can the Armata take out Ukraine’s legacy Soviet tanks? Almost certainly. Can it take out Challenger 2s, Leopard 2s, and M1A2 Abrams? If it’s able to close in and get off the first shot, probably. But I’m guessing it will find the opportunities to do so few and far between.
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24 Responses to “Russia Finally Sends T-14 Armata Tanks to Ukraine”
Armata is another in a long line of classic Potemkin weapons systems that the Russians can conceive of, theorize about, justify said theorizations and rationalizations ad infinitum, and somehow, never actually get into production…
Remember all those impressive war-winning airplanes and tanks that they had in the 1930s, and which the Germans rolled over and either captured or turned into scrap metal? All that wunnerful, wunnerful theorizing about “airborne”, and “deep battle”, which they never quite pulled off?
The Russians have a huge problem, in that they’re delusional about things like logistics. They buy the tanks; they hardly ever buy the tank transporters or the recovery vehicles. And, given the lack of depth in their industrial sector, they can’t make up for that stuff when the wars start. If the Soviet Union had been forced to fight the Germans by themselves, which they manifestly deserved after playing fluffer to the Wehrmacht right up until Barbarossa lit off, wellllll… In all likelihood, everything from the Urals to the Black Sea would be speaking German to this day. Which says a hell of a lot more about Soviet incompetence and corruption than it does about German superiority. Absent the massive Lend-Lease fountains they took advantage of, the Soviet Union would have gone down hard. Best they could have managed would have been a German Pyric victory, one that left the Soviet Union destroyed and the Germans too damaged to take advantage of their victory.
The T14 represents yet another occasion where the Russians vision outranged their reach, and will almost certainly prove to be a disaster for whoever has the bad luck to have the things foisted off on them. That engine, alone? WTF? It’s a totally unproven technology, an X-shaped mechanical monstrosity initially designed as an industrial motor for the oil industry. Where it failed.
It’ll show up initially in Russian, but a machine translation of the page will outline most of the problems with the engine. The rest of the project…? Oi.
There hasn’t been a single MBT yet that’s pulled off an entirely unmanned turret. I personally have my doubts about the viability of the autoloading idea across the board, and I really doubt the wisdom of the way the Soviet/Russian tanks implement it, sitting the turret on top of the ammo carousel.
My guess is that the T14 deployment will go about the same way as the US Army’s deployment of the XM-25 went: It’ll be allowed limited exposure to the enemy, fired a few times, and then they’ll announce it was a success while carefully ensuring nobody ever sees one anywhere near the battlefield. If the Ukrainians manage to capture one, it’ll be a sign that the Russians have collapsed entirely in that area, maybe even all over. The Russian officer or soldier that has anything at all to do with losing at T14 and discrediting the the whole fantasy? They’ll be deader than dead before they even finish making the report to their bosses.
When the Allies realized a Tiger could outduel 3 Shermans, they didn’t up-armour the Shermans or muck them up with all the latest whatevers, they just sent 5. That’s how Stalin won the eastern front (“The German Army in fighting Russia is like an elephant attacking a host of ants. The elephant will kill thousands, perhaps even millions, of ants, but in the end their numbers will overcome him, and he will be eaten to the bone.” Colonel Bernd Von Kleist)
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Tim… They were only able to do that because the US was pumping billions into their economy via Lend-Lease. Absent that? All of the effort that produced those tanks would have had to go into the rest of the industrial requirements they had to meet. They’d have starved to death, in actual fact and industrially.
They can’t do it on their own. They’ve never been able to, because they’re not really a real economy; they’re a resource-extraction economy plastered over with a bunch of Western trappings.
Kamil Galeev has the receipts over on Twitter; he goes over the amount of imported stuff that the Soviets had to bring in, and how they never managed to produce their own. The Azovstal plant in Mariupol? That’s originally something the US sold them, which was paid for with the lives of the Ukrainian peasants that the Soviets starved during the Holodomor; you can draw a line between the food confiscated from them and sold overseas.
Russia has never been a “real” economy; they don’t produce their own machine tools; they don’t process a lot of what they export, which is where all the value-added comes in. It has always been about exploitation, not actually building wealth or providing value-added anything.
Ask yourself this: What’s the major product or brand you know of, by name, that comes from Russia? What do you buy of theirs, by name, because it’s Russian? About the only thing that the average person can even identify as a uniquely Russian industrial product is the Kalashnikov rifle system…
As stated in Lazerpig video the biggest problem with T-14 is the engine, which the whole tank is build around. They cannot put in the older engine that have powered everything from T-32 up to T90 (except T80 which for once actually use turbine engine). The reliability problem have not been fixed since before the selection of it. Unlike South Korea, who managed to reverse engineered German tank diesel engine (that most of the NATO tank makers uses, minus US) for their K2. I don’t wish them luck but they probably will not get it.
[…] WHAT APPEARS TO BE PROPAGANDA RATHER THAN COMBAT: Russia Finally Sends T-14 Armata Tanks to Ukraine. “An auto loader famous for jamming that now cannot be accessed and cleared when it does jam, is […]
The engine thing is part and parcel of the bigger problem that the Russians have with everything… For one, they had to go back to WWII German technology that was never fully developed. The X-form engine was something that never got much past the early stages before the Germans lost the war. And, ohbytheway, the reason the damn thing was chosen in the first place had a lot less to do with its actual merits than with the people who were pushing it as a solution… Like, one Ferdinand Porsche, who really deserves rather more of a reputation as Hitler’s evil-yet-effectively-incompetent tech wizard than he has. He supposedly did all these great things, like design the VW Beetle, but… History shows he was rather more like Edison than Tesla; he apparently stole much of the design for the Beetle from a Czech-Austrian Jewish engineer.
In any event, the engine was never a success. Nobody followed up on it after the war, and most of those compound weird layout engine formats like the Napier Deltic all eventually failed. So, why did the Russians pick it? Well, that has a lot more to do with who was pushing it rather than the actual merits, which really amount to nothing more than “It’s a really compact engine for its power…”. The Russians behind that engine originally wanted to build it for industrial uses, and that didn’t work out because “reliability”. So, why’d they put it into the tank…? Hubris, and someone had an engine they needed to sell, justifying its development expense. And, it’s a really compact engine, too, soooooo… Match made in heaven, right?
Not so much. It’s amazing how these things all come with loose threads going back into history…
During WW II, the US and Britain supplied the Soviet Union with 10% of their tanks and aircraft, and – this is the important one – 50% of their trucks – mostly the rugged and reliable 10 by 10s. No way could the Red Army support the logistical requirements of liberating all the territory the Germans held and fighting their way into Berlin without those trucks. As to Russian built tanks, the US provided tons of high quality steel.
If the Armata T-14 is such a disaster, why do the latest General Dynamics tanks, the M1A2 SEPv4 and the AbramsX demonstrator, copy so many of its features? Features which you specifically find unsatisfactory.
The Russians clearly expended a lot of thought during the design phase to preserve the lives of their tank crews in an increasingly hostile combat environment. Radical changes to military equipment designs often encounter some teething problems, but failing to address changed circumstances with radical design changes can be true failure.
You’ve got the whole “copying” thing backwards. The US and others have tried making the autoloader/crew capsule “thing” work; it’s never, ever gotten out of development because the sensors are not good enough nor reliable enough to actually enable the tank commander to do his job. You can’t maintain 360 degree situational awareness buttoned up under a hull hatch and watching a screen linked to cameras. At least, not with the technology of yore. It may be changing, but even the Israelis have tried it and failed to make it work well enough to really allow a vehicle commander to fight the vehicle properly.
The T14 is conceptually what everyone has been saying would be the ultimate, ideal tank. Reality? You can’t actually build that “ideal tank” with current tech.
As it stands, I suspect that by the time tanks with crewed turrets are really completely obsolete, we’re going to be on to “armored vehicle team” with a manned heavily armored “mothership” controlling outrider tank-surrogate unmanned vehicles and a host of drones. The vehicle will be more a heavily armored, highly-mobile forward command post controlling the actual combat vehicles that shoot and kill the enemy.
If I had to guess at it all, I think the whole idea of an actual manned combat vehicle is going to die a slow and cruel death as all this drone technology comes in. The only people putting “people” into the vehicles and then exposing them to AT fires will be the people who have no other damn choice at all, and they’re going to be on the losing side in most engagements.
The T14 Armata will likely go down in history as a failed interim attempt at a viable armored vehicle, a transition between a manned turreted tank and one that’s fully unmanned and somewhat autonomous. Russians actually field that thing in large numbers, it’ll probably break them economically, and leave them with a really shiite solution for combat while everyone else is going to be bopping around the countryside with things that aren’t putting people with the weapons.
Or, not. The whole business of predicting where military technology is going is fraught with potential for error; there’s no telling what the idjit class running things will actually do. Their track record for prescient actions taken with forethought? Laughably bad. Expect disaster; do not expect a “Short glorious war, home by Christmas…” no matter what the idiots told you. Look at Ukraine; how many predictions have panned out, other than the ones predicting Russian mass failure?
“The engine thing is part and parcel of the bigger problem that the Russians have with everything… For one, they had to go back to WWII German technology that was never fully developed. The X-form engine was something that never got much past the early stages before the Germans lost the war. And, ohbytheway, the reason the damn thing was chosen in the first place had a lot less to do with its actual merits than with the people who were pushing it as a solution… Like, one Ferdinand Porsche, who really deserves rather more of a reputation as Hitler’s evil-yet-effectively-incompetent tech wizard than he has.”
The Simmering-Graz-Pauker Sla 16 X-16 engine was laid out by Porsche’s Paul Netzker, and Ferry Porsche had little to do with this design. Firma Porsche had little to do with the engine after the middle of 1943. Prototypes seem to have worked fairly well, but by late 1944 it was not possible to launch it in production.
The Russian did use the captured Simmering-Graz-Pauker technologies to make the Yakovlev M-501 42 cylinder ‘star’ format engine which was quite successful. The Yakovlev M-501 was produced and used until it was replaced by gas turbines. General Motors Electromotive made hundreds of 16-184A X-16 engines during and after WW II for marine applications. They worked well.
There is no reason that the Chelyabinsk 12N360 X-12 engine won’t work, and it offers tank designers a number of advantages over turbines and V engines. Volume under armor comes at a premium in AFVs and the X engines, with or without hybrid electrical drives, are probably the future.
“An auto loader famous for jamming that now cannot be accessed and cleared when it does jam, is somehow heavier and slower than the tank it has replaced, and comes combined together in a package so expensive the company that made it immediately went bankrupt. The country that bought it cannot afford it and it has about as much export potential as English whiskey.”
The Russians have two distinctly different 125mm autoloader mechanisms used in their tanks. The Kharkov (Ukrainian!) Morozov Machine Building Design Bureau combined radial/vertical storage autoloader used on the T-64 and T-80 tanks is complex and fraught with problems. The Kartsev UralVagonZavod radial storage design autoloader used on the T-72 and T-90 tanks is much simpler and has a good track record for reliable performance.
UralVagonZavod selected the Kartsev design autoloader design for the T-14 tank’s new, hard hitting 2A82-1M 125mm main gun. We have no reason to believe that its autoloader is unreliable or slow.
We shall see. I have always had great doubt about the Soviet tank designs, and that’s proven out. They’re cheap, they’re designed to essentially serve as disposable items, and I doubt that they’re going to do at all well with the T14.
We’re going to see the Soviet mindset put up against the Western one here, shortly. I don’t think it’s going to do very well, frankly… Low-quality soldiers married to cheap equipment, intended to be “least common denominator”, given minimal training, commanded by incompetents more concerned with grift and theft of resources?
Russia has not shown itself very well, in the last year. I don’t think they’re going to pull any surprises out of their ass at the last minute.
re; ed in texas:
1. Russia had about 7 years to try fixing the reliability of T-14 engine. Still doesn’t work. We’ve visually seen 8 tanks in their parade unit, so that’s the bare minimum number of T-14 in existence.
2. T-14 design was revealed to the world AFTER Russia’s invasion of Crimea, in which sanction starts to stack up. A lot of the electronics are cheaper previous generation NATO material. They simply don’t have the ability to actually make them. Right now, it’s night impossible for them to acquire legally.
3. There’s been no export market to help shoulder the development cost. China and India would’ve been the obvious partners, but both found the offering wanting and went back to develop their own tanks.
Thanks everyone who responded to my question. I don’t often comment on military matters because I’m probably the least informed person here, but I still don’t understand their thinking.
Sure, Russia doesn’t have lend lease this time, but Ukraine isn’t the Wehrmacht either. It still seems like the human wave approach of fielding the largest possible number of men and basic equipment would be more viable than trying to employ advanced technology that they can’t get right anyway.
“It still seems like the human wave approach of fielding the largest possible number of men and basic equipment would be more viable than trying to employ advanced technology that they can’t get right anyway.”
You may be right, but given the ineffectiveness of human wave attacks since . . . oh the 1960s (thinking primarily of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980, to say nothing of Russia’s less-than stellar performance against Ukraine) . . . that says a lot more about an inability to employ advanced technology than it is an endorsement of human wave tactics.
The Ukrainian Army isn’t the Wehrmacht, but they have inherited the heritage of the Cossacks. They have Lend-Lease, and the motivation of hornets whose nest has had a rock thrown through it by a 12-year-old boy.
“Russia had about 7 years to try fixing the reliability of T-14 engine. Still doesn’t work. We’ve visually seen 8 tanks in their parade unit, so that’s the bare minimum number of T-14 in existence.”
The U.S. M1 tank took about 8 years from drawing board to first production model at a time when the U.S. defense industry was very aggressive. Most of the delays were caused by the turbine engine; specifically the air filtration system for the turbine. It was actually 14 years before the M1A1 entered production, finally besting the performance of Soviet tanks.
Military goods are long lead time items. The French and Germans are quoting a 15 year time horizon to production of their latest tank, which is a mashup of the already produced LeClerc and Leopard 2.
The “Russia Stronk” types are amusing. Nearly as amusing as the Wehraboos. They both have this vision of their vaunted “team” as being invincibly correct and incredibly powerful, undefeatable.
Problem with that is that both the Russians/Soviets and the Germans were and are incredibly bad at a lot of things, including some very basic military tasks. Like, having the common sense not to get into fights they can’t win. The Germans were incredibly good for this, because they managed to be very good at tactical- and operational-level war, and incredibly bad at the strategic and industrial levels.
The Soviet Union was much the same; Russia inherited that same delusional form of incompetence. A large reason the Soviets went bankrupt in the first place was that huge fleet of half-ass tanks they built, the same ones our informers here are telling us make them so powerful.
The root of the problem is that they’re as deluded as the Soviets were. Filling tank parks with inadequate, obsolete vehicles that can only be scavenged to enrich the corrupt officers managing them ain’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of incompetence at war and an inability to do the very basic things that win them. The Soviets “won” WWII only because they had US logistical backing and then expended the vast majority of their adult male population fighting a war they brought on themselves and essentially enabled by pumping billions of dollars worth of resources into Nazi Germany. This is brilliance? LOL. Yeah. Right.
Ukraine is more of the same, with the same philosophy and the same warfighting techniques. They spend the lives of their soldiers like water, for ephemeral gains in territory that they can’t hold, blowing through the legacy armored vehicle fleet that the Soviet Union bequeathed them like the spendthrift sons of a miser father whose wealth stemmed from from the immiseration of his family and employees. There’s no real economic depth to their efforts; most of the systems that make the T14 even slightly viable are imported. They can’t build their own, and what they have built isn’t economically viable across the denuded former Soviet “defense industry” that they built, and which became the anchor that drowned the Soviet Union. The days are gone when Stalin could decree, and everyone would go nuts copying the B-29 down to the last rivet and mistaken drill hole. The workers that performed that feat are dead, and not replaced. They can’t even keep production on basics like ball bearings going for their railways; how do you suppose they’re going to manage keeping the tanks running, once the Ukrainians start going after the Russian electrical grid and train fleets?
This was a very stupid war started by very stupid men, who were stupid enough to believe their own BS, which included the T14. It’s a Potemkin tank; most of the componentry enabling its construction came from the very people whose gear they’re fighting in Ukraine right now. Without it, those tanks are never going into full-scale production, so they might as well squeeze out the last bit of propaganda toothpaste out of the tube so that they get some value out of the wasted money.
In the end, the T14 will be a footnote in history, like the King Tiger was in WWII. People will argue over whether or not it ever saw “real combat”, and any footage of one shooting or being shot at by Western tanks will be highly valued and much-argued about. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Russian tankers will die in obsolete and poorly-supported hulls like the T-62M and up.
You wonder why there are so many videos of abandoned Russian vehicles being destroyed by drone-dropped grenades? It’s because they break down, the crews can’t fix them, the maintenance support is non-existent, and they just run without bothering to close the hatches on them, which makes it ever so much easier for the Ukrainians to destroy them.
End of the day, I expect that we’ll know a lot more about how this will all play out by the end of May. It’s my belief that the Russians are going to be in a very bad tactical and operational position by that point, and may even be back behind their borders in a lot of sectors. The T14 will likely be either pulled back so as to prevent anyone from capturing one, or some panic-stricken mobik will have cut and run, leaving one or more behind in order to save their own skin. Hell, if the Ukrainians are smart, they’ll offer a million dollars apiece to any and all crew members of a defecting T14 that brings one over intact. I’ll bet they have lots of takers on that offer, if the Russians are so foolish as to put them on the front line.
Frankly, this T14 fielding strikes me as very much a “Hail Mary” maneuver by the T14 program managers and the plant building them. Much like the idiotic fielding of the Army’s failed XM-25 in Afghanistan, it’s all about the optics and being able to say their failed system is “combat proven”.
Lay all y’all long odds that there will be a spate of suicides by Polonium and defenestrations going on with the folks behind the T14 before this is all over.
Watch this video from last October during the Kharkiv counter offensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY_iqtGkEW0 . In the middle part, there’s this masked commander (probably no more than just LT in his 20s) directing battle field using a drone and a tablet like he’s doing RTS. The actual tank guys are grizzly 40-50 year NCO and the overall scene is somewhat surreal.
I think that one of the things a lot of people need their noses rubbed in would be the essential unreality that a lot of nations bring to the table when it comes to things like the weapons they design and procure.
The US, for example? Worshipped the cult of the individual marksman for far too much of the 20th Century. The Soviets? They have this nutty fascination with fully-automatic fire in their individual weapons, expending much effort on trying to make that work with things like the AN-94 and the balanced-recoil AK-based rifles. For what purpose, though?
It boils down to a lack of realistic investigation and thought about the things going on in combat, a fetishization complex wrapped around idealized things. For the Russians, it’s the WWII Ppsh-41 carrying tank-riders; for the US, it’s the lone Minuteman with his trusty Kentucky long rifle, going out to shoot at British troops from behind cover.
Neither fantasy fetish actually bore that much contact with reality, but there ya go: Both of them inform things like where they put their money in developing new weapons. Fantastically unrealistic.
The long line of post-WWII Soviet and now Russian tanks carry that out. Cheap-and-cheerful disposable tanks, manned by half-ass poorly disciplined and poorly trained troops, meant to attrit the enemy by dying in mass quantities before the third- or fourth-echelon waves overrun the Seelowe Heights yet again… It’s a fantasy construct, just like the “God of Artillery” fantasy that they bought into for years and years. Which has died before the arc of precision coming down on it…
The nature of conflict is immutable. How we fight isn’t; you have to be honest about yourself with that, and then adapt accordingly. Had the Russians had one freakin’ iota of sense about how they needed to fight, they’d have ensured they had reliable encrypted comms going, well-trained troops, and good logistics enablers. But, because they’re the very worst sort of fantasists, well… We have what we have on display in Ukraine. They think that German Schrecklichkeit was a good idea, something to emulate and make a part of their warfighting repertoire. All it does is ensure that their opponents will fight to the death, and that everyone else will sympathize with them and hand them free toys to kill Russians with. What’s the legacy of attempted Russian subjugation of Finland? Oh… Yeah. Right–Eternal hatred. Observe what happens in Ukraine after this little escapade finishes; Russia is going to be lucky if it does not recapitulate the experience of the Israelis vs. the Arabs in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. It’ll likely be worse, however; the Ukrainians aren’t the sort of people who go in for the dramatic and self-destructive. They’ll mostly be happy with turning the Dnieper drainage area into a no-go zone via drone strikes on power grids and railways. Buh-bye to a considerable chunk of Russian economic potential, if they’re stupid enough to keep provoking Ukraine.
Russians are not stupid people. They are, however, historically all too prone to outsmarting themselves and doing extremely stupid and foolish things in the name of demonstrating how “smart” they are. See “supporting Serbians in Bosnia, pre-1914” and “Supplying Hitler, 1939-41”. They’re really, really good at “own goals”.
Armata is another in a long line of classic Potemkin weapons systems that the Russians can conceive of, theorize about, justify said theorizations and rationalizations ad infinitum, and somehow, never actually get into production…
Remember all those impressive war-winning airplanes and tanks that they had in the 1930s, and which the Germans rolled over and either captured or turned into scrap metal? All that wunnerful, wunnerful theorizing about “airborne”, and “deep battle”, which they never quite pulled off?
The Russians have a huge problem, in that they’re delusional about things like logistics. They buy the tanks; they hardly ever buy the tank transporters or the recovery vehicles. And, given the lack of depth in their industrial sector, they can’t make up for that stuff when the wars start. If the Soviet Union had been forced to fight the Germans by themselves, which they manifestly deserved after playing fluffer to the Wehrmacht right up until Barbarossa lit off, wellllll… In all likelihood, everything from the Urals to the Black Sea would be speaking German to this day. Which says a hell of a lot more about Soviet incompetence and corruption than it does about German superiority. Absent the massive Lend-Lease fountains they took advantage of, the Soviet Union would have gone down hard. Best they could have managed would have been a German Pyric victory, one that left the Soviet Union destroyed and the Germans too damaged to take advantage of their victory.
The T14 represents yet another occasion where the Russians vision outranged their reach, and will almost certainly prove to be a disaster for whoever has the bad luck to have the things foisted off on them. That engine, alone? WTF? It’s a totally unproven technology, an X-shaped mechanical monstrosity initially designed as an industrial motor for the oil industry. Where it failed.
Really good writeup is here:
https://topwar.ru/207749-armaty-ne-budet-mozhno-rashoditsja.html
It’ll show up initially in Russian, but a machine translation of the page will outline most of the problems with the engine. The rest of the project…? Oi.
There hasn’t been a single MBT yet that’s pulled off an entirely unmanned turret. I personally have my doubts about the viability of the autoloading idea across the board, and I really doubt the wisdom of the way the Soviet/Russian tanks implement it, sitting the turret on top of the ammo carousel.
My guess is that the T14 deployment will go about the same way as the US Army’s deployment of the XM-25 went: It’ll be allowed limited exposure to the enemy, fired a few times, and then they’ll announce it was a success while carefully ensuring nobody ever sees one anywhere near the battlefield. If the Ukrainians manage to capture one, it’ll be a sign that the Russians have collapsed entirely in that area, maybe even all over. The Russian officer or soldier that has anything at all to do with losing at T14 and discrediting the the whole fantasy? They’ll be deader than dead before they even finish making the report to their bosses.
When the Allies realized a Tiger could outduel 3 Shermans, they didn’t up-armour the Shermans or muck them up with all the latest whatevers, they just sent 5. That’s how Stalin won the eastern front (“The German Army in fighting Russia is like an elephant attacking a host of ants. The elephant will kill thousands, perhaps even millions, of ants, but in the end their numbers will overcome him, and he will be eaten to the bone.” Colonel Bernd Von Kleist)
This the Russians can do. So why don’t they?
[…] of Venezuelan opposition leader, and I saw the old man on the reelection video BattleSwarm: Russia Finally Sends T-14 Armata Tanks to Ukraine Behind The Black: Rocket engine company Ursa Major raises $100 million in private investment […]
Tim… They were only able to do that because the US was pumping billions into their economy via Lend-Lease. Absent that? All of the effort that produced those tanks would have had to go into the rest of the industrial requirements they had to meet. They’d have starved to death, in actual fact and industrially.
They can’t do it on their own. They’ve never been able to, because they’re not really a real economy; they’re a resource-extraction economy plastered over with a bunch of Western trappings.
Kamil Galeev has the receipts over on Twitter; he goes over the amount of imported stuff that the Soviets had to bring in, and how they never managed to produce their own. The Azovstal plant in Mariupol? That’s originally something the US sold them, which was paid for with the lives of the Ukrainian peasants that the Soviets starved during the Holodomor; you can draw a line between the food confiscated from them and sold overseas.
Russia has never been a “real” economy; they don’t produce their own machine tools; they don’t process a lot of what they export, which is where all the value-added comes in. It has always been about exploitation, not actually building wealth or providing value-added anything.
Ask yourself this: What’s the major product or brand you know of, by name, that comes from Russia? What do you buy of theirs, by name, because it’s Russian? About the only thing that the average person can even identify as a uniquely Russian industrial product is the Kalashnikov rifle system…
As stated in Lazerpig video the biggest problem with T-14 is the engine, which the whole tank is build around. They cannot put in the older engine that have powered everything from T-32 up to T90 (except T80 which for once actually use turbine engine). The reliability problem have not been fixed since before the selection of it. Unlike South Korea, who managed to reverse engineered German tank diesel engine (that most of the NATO tank makers uses, minus US) for their K2. I don’t wish them luck but they probably will not get it.
[…] WHAT APPEARS TO BE PROPAGANDA RATHER THAN COMBAT: Russia Finally Sends T-14 Armata Tanks to Ukraine. “An auto loader famous for jamming that now cannot be accessed and cleared when it does jam, is […]
The engine thing is part and parcel of the bigger problem that the Russians have with everything… For one, they had to go back to WWII German technology that was never fully developed. The X-form engine was something that never got much past the early stages before the Germans lost the war. And, ohbytheway, the reason the damn thing was chosen in the first place had a lot less to do with its actual merits than with the people who were pushing it as a solution… Like, one Ferdinand Porsche, who really deserves rather more of a reputation as Hitler’s evil-yet-effectively-incompetent tech wizard than he has. He supposedly did all these great things, like design the VW Beetle, but… History shows he was rather more like Edison than Tesla; he apparently stole much of the design for the Beetle from a Czech-Austrian Jewish engineer.
In any event, the engine was never a success. Nobody followed up on it after the war, and most of those compound weird layout engine formats like the Napier Deltic all eventually failed. So, why did the Russians pick it? Well, that has a lot more to do with who was pushing it rather than the actual merits, which really amount to nothing more than “It’s a really compact engine for its power…”. The Russians behind that engine originally wanted to build it for industrial uses, and that didn’t work out because “reliability”. So, why’d they put it into the tank…? Hubris, and someone had an engine they needed to sell, justifying its development expense. And, it’s a really compact engine, too, soooooo… Match made in heaven, right?
Not so much. It’s amazing how these things all come with loose threads going back into history…
During WW II, the US and Britain supplied the Soviet Union with 10% of their tanks and aircraft, and – this is the important one – 50% of their trucks – mostly the rugged and reliable 10 by 10s. No way could the Red Army support the logistical requirements of liberating all the territory the Germans held and fighting their way into Berlin without those trucks. As to Russian built tanks, the US provided tons of high quality steel.
redeffect did a good job demolishing lazerpig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyWAd1pQiwU
If the Armata T-14 is such a disaster, why do the latest General Dynamics tanks, the M1A2 SEPv4 and the AbramsX demonstrator, copy so many of its features? Features which you specifically find unsatisfactory.
The Russians clearly expended a lot of thought during the design phase to preserve the lives of their tank crews in an increasingly hostile combat environment. Radical changes to military equipment designs often encounter some teething problems, but failing to address changed circumstances with radical design changes can be true failure.
You’ve got the whole “copying” thing backwards. The US and others have tried making the autoloader/crew capsule “thing” work; it’s never, ever gotten out of development because the sensors are not good enough nor reliable enough to actually enable the tank commander to do his job. You can’t maintain 360 degree situational awareness buttoned up under a hull hatch and watching a screen linked to cameras. At least, not with the technology of yore. It may be changing, but even the Israelis have tried it and failed to make it work well enough to really allow a vehicle commander to fight the vehicle properly.
The T14 is conceptually what everyone has been saying would be the ultimate, ideal tank. Reality? You can’t actually build that “ideal tank” with current tech.
As it stands, I suspect that by the time tanks with crewed turrets are really completely obsolete, we’re going to be on to “armored vehicle team” with a manned heavily armored “mothership” controlling outrider tank-surrogate unmanned vehicles and a host of drones. The vehicle will be more a heavily armored, highly-mobile forward command post controlling the actual combat vehicles that shoot and kill the enemy.
If I had to guess at it all, I think the whole idea of an actual manned combat vehicle is going to die a slow and cruel death as all this drone technology comes in. The only people putting “people” into the vehicles and then exposing them to AT fires will be the people who have no other damn choice at all, and they’re going to be on the losing side in most engagements.
The T14 Armata will likely go down in history as a failed interim attempt at a viable armored vehicle, a transition between a manned turreted tank and one that’s fully unmanned and somewhat autonomous. Russians actually field that thing in large numbers, it’ll probably break them economically, and leave them with a really shiite solution for combat while everyone else is going to be bopping around the countryside with things that aren’t putting people with the weapons.
Or, not. The whole business of predicting where military technology is going is fraught with potential for error; there’s no telling what the idjit class running things will actually do. Their track record for prescient actions taken with forethought? Laughably bad. Expect disaster; do not expect a “Short glorious war, home by Christmas…” no matter what the idiots told you. Look at Ukraine; how many predictions have panned out, other than the ones predicting Russian mass failure?
“The engine thing is part and parcel of the bigger problem that the Russians have with everything… For one, they had to go back to WWII German technology that was never fully developed. The X-form engine was something that never got much past the early stages before the Germans lost the war. And, ohbytheway, the reason the damn thing was chosen in the first place had a lot less to do with its actual merits than with the people who were pushing it as a solution… Like, one Ferdinand Porsche, who really deserves rather more of a reputation as Hitler’s evil-yet-effectively-incompetent tech wizard than he has.”
The Simmering-Graz-Pauker Sla 16 X-16 engine was laid out by Porsche’s Paul Netzker, and Ferry Porsche had little to do with this design. Firma Porsche had little to do with the engine after the middle of 1943. Prototypes seem to have worked fairly well, but by late 1944 it was not possible to launch it in production.
The Russian did use the captured Simmering-Graz-Pauker technologies to make the Yakovlev M-501 42 cylinder ‘star’ format engine which was quite successful. The Yakovlev M-501 was produced and used until it was replaced by gas turbines. General Motors Electromotive made hundreds of 16-184A X-16 engines during and after WW II for marine applications. They worked well.
There is no reason that the Chelyabinsk 12N360 X-12 engine won’t work, and it offers tank designers a number of advantages over turbines and V engines. Volume under armor comes at a premium in AFVs and the X engines, with or without hybrid electrical drives, are probably the future.
“An auto loader famous for jamming that now cannot be accessed and cleared when it does jam, is somehow heavier and slower than the tank it has replaced, and comes combined together in a package so expensive the company that made it immediately went bankrupt. The country that bought it cannot afford it and it has about as much export potential as English whiskey.”
The Russians have two distinctly different 125mm autoloader mechanisms used in their tanks. The Kharkov (Ukrainian!) Morozov Machine Building Design Bureau combined radial/vertical storage autoloader used on the T-64 and T-80 tanks is complex and fraught with problems. The Kartsev UralVagonZavod radial storage design autoloader used on the T-72 and T-90 tanks is much simpler and has a good track record for reliable performance.
UralVagonZavod selected the Kartsev design autoloader design for the T-14 tank’s new, hard hitting 2A82-1M 125mm main gun. We have no reason to believe that its autoloader is unreliable or slow.
We shall see. I have always had great doubt about the Soviet tank designs, and that’s proven out. They’re cheap, they’re designed to essentially serve as disposable items, and I doubt that they’re going to do at all well with the T14.
We’re going to see the Soviet mindset put up against the Western one here, shortly. I don’t think it’s going to do very well, frankly… Low-quality soldiers married to cheap equipment, intended to be “least common denominator”, given minimal training, commanded by incompetents more concerned with grift and theft of resources?
Russia has not shown itself very well, in the last year. I don’t think they’re going to pull any surprises out of their ass at the last minute.
OK, 10x, one question.
Why haven’t the russian’s been able to sell (or buy) a regiment (or battalion) of the wondertank?
re; ed in texas:
1. Russia had about 7 years to try fixing the reliability of T-14 engine. Still doesn’t work. We’ve visually seen 8 tanks in their parade unit, so that’s the bare minimum number of T-14 in existence.
2. T-14 design was revealed to the world AFTER Russia’s invasion of Crimea, in which sanction starts to stack up. A lot of the electronics are cheaper previous generation NATO material. They simply don’t have the ability to actually make them. Right now, it’s night impossible for them to acquire legally.
3. There’s been no export market to help shoulder the development cost. China and India would’ve been the obvious partners, but both found the offering wanting and went back to develop their own tanks.
Thanks everyone who responded to my question. I don’t often comment on military matters because I’m probably the least informed person here, but I still don’t understand their thinking.
Sure, Russia doesn’t have lend lease this time, but Ukraine isn’t the Wehrmacht either. It still seems like the human wave approach of fielding the largest possible number of men and basic equipment would be more viable than trying to employ advanced technology that they can’t get right anyway.
“It still seems like the human wave approach of fielding the largest possible number of men and basic equipment would be more viable than trying to employ advanced technology that they can’t get right anyway.”
You may be right, but given the ineffectiveness of human wave attacks since . . . oh the 1960s (thinking primarily of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980, to say nothing of Russia’s less-than stellar performance against Ukraine) . . . that says a lot more about an inability to employ advanced technology than it is an endorsement of human wave tactics.
The Ukrainian Army isn’t the Wehrmacht, but they have inherited the heritage of the Cossacks. They have Lend-Lease, and the motivation of hornets whose nest has had a rock thrown through it by a 12-year-old boy.
“Why haven’t the Russians been able to sell (or buy) a regiment (or battalion) of the wondertank?”
Political priorities of years past.
The very same reason we cannot manufacture more than a trickle of M795 155mm shells today.
“Russia had about 7 years to try fixing the reliability of T-14 engine. Still doesn’t work. We’ve visually seen 8 tanks in their parade unit, so that’s the bare minimum number of T-14 in existence.”
The U.S. M1 tank took about 8 years from drawing board to first production model at a time when the U.S. defense industry was very aggressive. Most of the delays were caused by the turbine engine; specifically the air filtration system for the turbine. It was actually 14 years before the M1A1 entered production, finally besting the performance of Soviet tanks.
Military goods are long lead time items. The French and Germans are quoting a 15 year time horizon to production of their latest tank, which is a mashup of the already produced LeClerc and Leopard 2.
The “Russia Stronk” types are amusing. Nearly as amusing as the Wehraboos. They both have this vision of their vaunted “team” as being invincibly correct and incredibly powerful, undefeatable.
Problem with that is that both the Russians/Soviets and the Germans were and are incredibly bad at a lot of things, including some very basic military tasks. Like, having the common sense not to get into fights they can’t win. The Germans were incredibly good for this, because they managed to be very good at tactical- and operational-level war, and incredibly bad at the strategic and industrial levels.
The Soviet Union was much the same; Russia inherited that same delusional form of incompetence. A large reason the Soviets went bankrupt in the first place was that huge fleet of half-ass tanks they built, the same ones our informers here are telling us make them so powerful.
The root of the problem is that they’re as deluded as the Soviets were. Filling tank parks with inadequate, obsolete vehicles that can only be scavenged to enrich the corrupt officers managing them ain’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of incompetence at war and an inability to do the very basic things that win them. The Soviets “won” WWII only because they had US logistical backing and then expended the vast majority of their adult male population fighting a war they brought on themselves and essentially enabled by pumping billions of dollars worth of resources into Nazi Germany. This is brilliance? LOL. Yeah. Right.
Ukraine is more of the same, with the same philosophy and the same warfighting techniques. They spend the lives of their soldiers like water, for ephemeral gains in territory that they can’t hold, blowing through the legacy armored vehicle fleet that the Soviet Union bequeathed them like the spendthrift sons of a miser father whose wealth stemmed from from the immiseration of his family and employees. There’s no real economic depth to their efforts; most of the systems that make the T14 even slightly viable are imported. They can’t build their own, and what they have built isn’t economically viable across the denuded former Soviet “defense industry” that they built, and which became the anchor that drowned the Soviet Union. The days are gone when Stalin could decree, and everyone would go nuts copying the B-29 down to the last rivet and mistaken drill hole. The workers that performed that feat are dead, and not replaced. They can’t even keep production on basics like ball bearings going for their railways; how do you suppose they’re going to manage keeping the tanks running, once the Ukrainians start going after the Russian electrical grid and train fleets?
This was a very stupid war started by very stupid men, who were stupid enough to believe their own BS, which included the T14. It’s a Potemkin tank; most of the componentry enabling its construction came from the very people whose gear they’re fighting in Ukraine right now. Without it, those tanks are never going into full-scale production, so they might as well squeeze out the last bit of propaganda toothpaste out of the tube so that they get some value out of the wasted money.
In the end, the T14 will be a footnote in history, like the King Tiger was in WWII. People will argue over whether or not it ever saw “real combat”, and any footage of one shooting or being shot at by Western tanks will be highly valued and much-argued about. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Russian tankers will die in obsolete and poorly-supported hulls like the T-62M and up.
You wonder why there are so many videos of abandoned Russian vehicles being destroyed by drone-dropped grenades? It’s because they break down, the crews can’t fix them, the maintenance support is non-existent, and they just run without bothering to close the hatches on them, which makes it ever so much easier for the Ukrainians to destroy them.
End of the day, I expect that we’ll know a lot more about how this will all play out by the end of May. It’s my belief that the Russians are going to be in a very bad tactical and operational position by that point, and may even be back behind their borders in a lot of sectors. The T14 will likely be either pulled back so as to prevent anyone from capturing one, or some panic-stricken mobik will have cut and run, leaving one or more behind in order to save their own skin. Hell, if the Ukrainians are smart, they’ll offer a million dollars apiece to any and all crew members of a defecting T14 that brings one over intact. I’ll bet they have lots of takers on that offer, if the Russians are so foolish as to put them on the front line.
Frankly, this T14 fielding strikes me as very much a “Hail Mary” maneuver by the T14 program managers and the plant building them. Much like the idiotic fielding of the Army’s failed XM-25 in Afghanistan, it’s all about the optics and being able to say their failed system is “combat proven”.
Lay all y’all long odds that there will be a spate of suicides by Polonium and defenestrations going on with the folks behind the T14 before this is all over.
re: tim macguire
Watch this video from last October during the Kharkiv counter offensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY_iqtGkEW0 . In the middle part, there’s this masked commander (probably no more than just LT in his 20s) directing battle field using a drone and a tablet like he’s doing RTS. The actual tank guys are grizzly 40-50 year NCO and the overall scene is somewhat surreal.
I think that one of the things a lot of people need their noses rubbed in would be the essential unreality that a lot of nations bring to the table when it comes to things like the weapons they design and procure.
The US, for example? Worshipped the cult of the individual marksman for far too much of the 20th Century. The Soviets? They have this nutty fascination with fully-automatic fire in their individual weapons, expending much effort on trying to make that work with things like the AN-94 and the balanced-recoil AK-based rifles. For what purpose, though?
It boils down to a lack of realistic investigation and thought about the things going on in combat, a fetishization complex wrapped around idealized things. For the Russians, it’s the WWII Ppsh-41 carrying tank-riders; for the US, it’s the lone Minuteman with his trusty Kentucky long rifle, going out to shoot at British troops from behind cover.
Neither fantasy fetish actually bore that much contact with reality, but there ya go: Both of them inform things like where they put their money in developing new weapons. Fantastically unrealistic.
The long line of post-WWII Soviet and now Russian tanks carry that out. Cheap-and-cheerful disposable tanks, manned by half-ass poorly disciplined and poorly trained troops, meant to attrit the enemy by dying in mass quantities before the third- or fourth-echelon waves overrun the Seelowe Heights yet again… It’s a fantasy construct, just like the “God of Artillery” fantasy that they bought into for years and years. Which has died before the arc of precision coming down on it…
The nature of conflict is immutable. How we fight isn’t; you have to be honest about yourself with that, and then adapt accordingly. Had the Russians had one freakin’ iota of sense about how they needed to fight, they’d have ensured they had reliable encrypted comms going, well-trained troops, and good logistics enablers. But, because they’re the very worst sort of fantasists, well… We have what we have on display in Ukraine. They think that German Schrecklichkeit was a good idea, something to emulate and make a part of their warfighting repertoire. All it does is ensure that their opponents will fight to the death, and that everyone else will sympathize with them and hand them free toys to kill Russians with. What’s the legacy of attempted Russian subjugation of Finland? Oh… Yeah. Right–Eternal hatred. Observe what happens in Ukraine after this little escapade finishes; Russia is going to be lucky if it does not recapitulate the experience of the Israelis vs. the Arabs in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. It’ll likely be worse, however; the Ukrainians aren’t the sort of people who go in for the dramatic and self-destructive. They’ll mostly be happy with turning the Dnieper drainage area into a no-go zone via drone strikes on power grids and railways. Buh-bye to a considerable chunk of Russian economic potential, if they’re stupid enough to keep provoking Ukraine.
Russians are not stupid people. They are, however, historically all too prone to outsmarting themselves and doing extremely stupid and foolish things in the name of demonstrating how “smart” they are. See “supporting Serbians in Bosnia, pre-1914” and “Supplying Hitler, 1939-41”. They’re really, really good at “own goals”.
[…] already covered why Russia’s T-14 Armata tank isn’t all that. Here’s a somewhat more balanced look from David Willey of The Tank […]