Or, more specifically, why they decided to do the M1A3 rather than than M1A2SEP4. And the main reason is weight.
“This list of proposed capabilities for the new design that include:
An autoloader
New main gun new turret
Hypersonic gun launched missiles that maneuver in midair
The ability to pair with robots
Masking capabilities to reduce thermal and electromagnetic signatures
AI systems that detect incoming fire and prioritize return fire
Hybrid electric drivetrain
Reduction of crew from 4 to 3.
Reduction of weight from 75 tons down to sub 60 tons.
But the coolest thing is it’ll likely get a brand new sleek hull for the first time in 30 years.”
“US Army leadership [is] reversing course on decades of tank design philosophy to do a last minute complete overhaul from the ground up based on new lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.”
The gun-launched anti-tank guided missile is something the army has worked off and on for a long time. The Soviet’s had one, but mainly because their main guns were inaccurate at longer ranges. U.S. had a prototype ATGM that hit a T-72 at 8,600 meters. “But the Army never invested in it to go full rate production. Part of the reason for this might be because it’s also true that tank-launched ATGMs have a smaller warhead and they don’t perform as well against modern composite armor compared to the 1970s.”
So why does the army want it now? Line of sight studies in Latvia and Lithuania (i.e, the border with Russia) shows a whole lot of areas where it would be useful.
Tank optics are also a lot better now.
The new XM 360 cannon uses the same 120mm diameter, but save a full ton of weight by using composites, and delivers the same 17 megajoules of energy to the target as a conventional 140mm cannon, thanks to more efficient plasma ignition.
The Russo-Ukrainian War reveals a much more deadly threat environment for tanks. Drones are a huge threat.
“They’re going to link the new cannon to a remote-controlled, optionally manned turret by switching to an autoloader and making the turret interior smaller. That’s a lot less volume that has to be protected by heavy armor, which equates to a lot less tons of armor.” When we last checked with western tankers looking at the T-14s autoloader some six years ago, they were skeptical of both smaller crews (“all we do is maintain tanks, and they still break down”) and autoloaders (Abrams tank crews currently put shots on target faster than Russian crews with autoloaders). But since then, the Russo-Ukraine War happened and technology galloped furiously, and presumably higher crew survivability will make the tradeoff worthwhile.
M1A3 almost certainly wouldn’t have the cassette design that gives the T-72 its turret toss reputation. “Newly designed autoloading tanks can have all of their ammo secured behind a bulkhead blast shield and can work with blowout panels to prevent detonation from cooking the crew.”
“We’ve also seen from combat in Ukraine that the Abrams engine deck with it air intakes and radiators is a popular target point for drone swarms, so the army is looking at unique ways to keep the engine better protected from above without sacrificing cooling performance.”
“The new M1A3 Abrams tank would also upgrade from that puny 50 caliber machine gun to possibly the 30mm chain gun remote weapon station. The big advantage there is that it could fire specially made 30mikemikes that provide air burst capability for shooting down drones.” That sounds both awesome and the makings of an extremely complex turret with multiple automatic-feed weapon systems.
“We have to remember that systems enhancement packages was always supposed to be a stopgap temporary band-aid solution for the Abrams, because the service thought that they would do with that until a full replacement vehicle was chosen that’s how we ended up with like a dozen different variants of Abrams tanks with various levels of advanced features in the early 2000s.”
“The main difference between the M1A1 and A2 is its electronics. However, with this new M1A3, it’s now likely to have a whole brand new hull and turret. There’s conflicting reports on that, but I can’t see any other way that we get the kind of weight reductions that they’re looking for without a whole new hull.”
“The first version of the Abrams tank weighed 54 tons. The SEPV4 that was cancelled was on track to weigh over 75 tons. Add in a mine plow and it was going to break the scales at 83 tons.”
In May this year, an expert analysis board came to some sobering conclusions. “The M1A2SEP3 and 4 upgrades will improve effectiveness, but not restore dominance. Near transparency in all domains will significantly increase the lethality our forces will experience. We will continue to have to fight outnumbered, exacerbated by a low MBT operational readiness rate and aging fleet.”
“Lessons learned in Ukraine is that tanks are sometimes dead meat if they’re too heavy. They get stuck in the mud, they’re too slow not nimble enough to fire and then escape from drones that are searching for them.”
That same Latvian-Lithuanian study showed lots of no-go zones for Abrams due to their weight in muddy conditions. “From a tactical perspective a defending Force could easily mine trafficable routes, destroy bridges to complicate Abram’s combat operations during the wet season and funnel them into choke points.”
“The study recommends new band tracks to lower the ground pressure to help fix that problem along with the lighter weight.”
SEPV3’s heavier weight lowered operational range from 300 miles down to 264.
He references the role of tank in the army’s current FM3-0 Operations Guide, which you can read at the link.
Transcom says that SEPV3 is too heavy to transport for a lot of roles.
Meantime between failure for current tanks is 200 miles, which does seem worrisome.
“It will likely have the hybrid electric drivetrain that reduces fuel consumption by 50%.” He calls it the Prius of tanks, but it’s not ugly enough for that.
More stealth.
More active protection.
“The future of armored warfare, the way the army envisions it, is that they’ll be preparing for a major change to tank tactics unlike anything we’ve seen since the introduction of the Abrams in 1980 …they all seem to believe that the future will be a combination of manned and unmanned platforms that are integrated with aerial UAVs. The M1A3 is the first step in that direction.”
A major Abrams redesign was probably slightly overdue anyway, but the torrents of real-world information coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War forced their hand to make more radical changes.
Here’s an interesting follow-up to that two Bradleys wreck one T-90M post and video a few weeks ago. In this video, Task & Purpose provides more detailed breakdown of the engagement.
“In the interview with the Ukrainian Bradley commander Siri, he indicated that the three Bradleys made the conscious decision to seek out the Russian tank. However, one of their vehicles had issues and was not able to effectively engage the tank.”
The first Bradley engages the T-90M from a 90° angle, then both vehicles retreat.
The T-90 fires and misses. “Aiming at a target close to you in a tank becomes more difficult because you have to traverse the turret faster, and objects will move across your line of sight faster due to its close proximity.”
One under-appreciated factor: Turret turning speed. “In the 30ton MSA2 Bradley, the turret can spin 360° in about 6 seconds, or 60° per second…The most often cited metric I see [for the T-90] is about 9 seconds to do a full 360°, or about 40° per second.”
“They’re just 50 meters apart. This fight was essentially a ticking time clock for the T-90, because they had a very limited amount of time before the Bradley would manage to knock out their optics and blind them.”
“The T90 only had enough time to get off three cannon shots. The T90 has a stabilized turret and autoloader that can fire on the move with up to eight rounds per minute. The T-90 backed away from the road intersection while blindly firing through buildings.
“The Ukrainian Bradley does the same thing here, with its 25mm chain gun firing dozens of rounds while flooring it along the road away from the tank.”
The encounter took place in the town of Stepove, which is about 12km NW of Avdiivka, where some 40,000 Russian troops have been trying to take the pocket for months.
“Forbes reports that Ukraine’s knocking out 13 Russian vehicles here for every one that they lose.” But Ukraine may still have to fall back here.
“Most of the buildings are completely destroyed, but the rubble is going to be a major advantage for the Bradley’s to fire and then duck and weave behind for cover.”
“The next thing that happens is the T-90M fires off a smoke canister, which is a textbook act to conceal its position and disrupt the thermal sites in the Bradley. There different perspectives on what exactly happened when the smoke was set off. It appears like maybe one of the T-90’s explosive reactive armor pieces might have blown at about the same time, causing that large explosion that we see here. It could have also been from a misfire from the smoke grenade.” I’ve also heard the theory that the Bradley’s 25mm fire may have already damaged the smoke dispenser at this point, triggering the explosive misfire.
The physical damage to the T-90s turret may appear minimal to us, but to a Russia tank crew, it would like being inside a large bell being hit by a hammer. “The Russian tank crew would have been extremely disoriented by the blasts, even if the chances of that smaller caliber round penetrating was very unlikely. It’s easy to forget the human factor in these fights.”
The Bradley’s “M242 25mm bushmaster chain gun fires roughly 200 rounds per minute at the highest cyclical setting.”
“Inside the turret are two ready boxes which feed the linked ammo into the receiver. This gives you the ability to fire two different types of ammo on the fly. That includes the M919 APDST, or armor-piercing discarding sabo tracer depleted uranium round, and the M792 high explosive incendiary tracer rounds.” There’s a switch to change between the two.
“The Bradley’s anti-armor 25mm cannon round can penetrate between 30mm to 100mm of steel, depending on the angle at which the round strikes the target.”
“However, the Russian T90 reportedly has 400 to 900mm” of armor. Unmentioned here is that the T-90M (like the US, UK and Germany) uses composite armor rather than just steel.
So how did the Bradleys disable the T-90? Theory #1 is they destroyed both the commander and gunner’s optics. “If you’re able to hit them, then the crew is completely blinded and essentially combat ineffective.” Ukrainian commander Siri said he learned the tactic from War Thunder. (Are American tanks taking sufficient precautions to keep this from happening to them? To be fair, the chance of enemies getting a 25mm auto-canon this close to an Abrams seems…remote.)
Theory #2: Turret ring connection destroyed (much more likely electronics than hydraulics) sent the turret into auto-rotation as seen at the end of the video.
Why wasn’t the TOW missile not used? Maybe it wasn’t working, or maybe it was just too close for the TOW to arm properly.
The Bradley crew might have run out of APDST and switched to high explosive.
Russian tanks have slower reverse speeds than American armored vehicles.
There are some 78 Russian attacks a day in this sector. “Ukraine counterattacks with Bradleys, raking the tree lines with 25mm cannon fire. Bradley’s also transports small assault teams that clear out Russian stragglers from time to time. Once Stepove and the tree lines by the railroad are clear, or mostly clear, of Russian troops, Ukraine pulls back to their functional defensive positions and waits for the next Russian attack.”
There’s lots more interesting technical and doctrinal details I’ve cut for the sake of brevity.
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.
German defense company Rheinmetall has unveiled a prototype of a 130mm smoothbore gun for a future main battle tank (MBT). Combined with a state-of-the-art auto-loader, this system is the latest evolvement in Rheinmetall’s, Main Battle Tank Advanced Technologies competence. According to the company, the increase of 8 percent in caliber results in 50 percent more kinetic energy over the 120mm smoothbore gun from Rheinmetall, installed in thousands of main battle tanks worldwide. The 130mm developmental cannon delivers leap ahead capabilities in lethality for next generation main battle tanks.
A MBT equipped with the 130mm cannon would be capable of successfully engaging better-protected opponents at greater ranges with superior firepower. Rheinmetall developed its 130mm main gun technology demonstrator to address the emerging necessity of gaining significant performance enhancements against modern armored vehicles. The 130mm live fire demonstrator has completed developmental efforts that have showcased superior energy and output performance when compared to the standard 120mm L55/L55A1 cannon in a direct live fire test with modern targets. The 130mm/L51 smoothbore gun weighs (without mounting components) 3,000 kilograms with a barrel length of 6.63 meters.
Since Rheinmetall currently supplies the L/55 120mm cannon used as the main gun on the M1A2 Abrams (as well as the German Leopard 2, Japan’s Type 90 and Korea’s K1A2), I expect the 130mm to get a serious look as an upgrade for the M1A2, or in the next-generation tank currently being designed under the Next Generation Combat Vehicle—Future Decisive Lethality project, though that effort is said to be looking at lighter and faster tanks.
The Chieftain Nicholas Moran talks about the pros and cons of autoloaders, a subject we’ve touched on before, especially in relation to the Russian T-14 Armata.
The point about autoloaders providing better crew safety through thicker ammunition storage bulkheads is a good one, as is the immediate capacity advantage of immediately accessible ammunition.
He comes down on the side of yes, autoloaders are the wave of the future, but no, we should try to retrofit the M1 Abrhams for them.
A couple of mild caveats on his assertion that an autoloader won’t be any more prone to malfunction than other tank mechanical components:
Other tank components have undergone a century of evolutionary pressure in actual combat environments. Autoloaders are bootstrapping on decades of civilian factory automation innovations, but those happened outside the chaotic, dust-and-debris filled atmosphere of a moving combat platform. Experience as to how autoloaders break down in actual high-intensity conflict is scarce, with the possible exception of Russian tanks. (Lots of things went wrong with Russia’s invasion of Chechnya, and I get the impression that autoloader issues did not loom significant among them. And T-64s and T-72s were so badly outmatched in Desert Storm that I doubt much useful information got back to Russia about their field performance. Hard to get after-action reports on autoloader failure modes when your tanks start blowing up before getting off a shot…)
Current turret confines probably provide sufficient space for autoloader maintenance and troubleshooting. But if turrets shrink to reduce weight/increase armor in absence of a loader crew, that’s probably going to reduce maintainability. In which case a significant number cannon issues will probably go from crew-fixable to depot maintenance.
Last week was almost Russian Tank Week on BattleSwarm, but a plethora of news intervened (like Vladimir Putin intervening in the affairs of neighboring states).
But one interesting tidbit I didn’t get to was the fact that Russia has introduced a new generation of tanks (and mechanized fighting vehicles more generally, all based off the same base platform).
So is the new Russian T-14 Armata main battle tank something to worry about, or does the M1A2 Abrams retain clear technological superiority?
To my very, very outsider eyes, the answer is somewhere in-between.
First the description from Jane’s:
The T-14 is Russia’s first truly new tank design since the T-72, designed in the early 1970s. Based on the Armata Universal Tracked Platform, the T-14’s most attention-grabbing feature is its unmanned turret, with all of the MBT’s three crew (commander, driver, gunner) seated in a well-protected crew compartment at the front of the hull.
Notably, the unveiled turret dispels suggestions the MBT would be armed with a coaxial 30 mm cannon, in addition to its 2A82A 125 mm main gun. Indeed the pre-production vehicles paraded by Russia feature neither a 30 mm cannon nor a coaxial machine gun (MG) armament as expected, although the production vehicles might eventually feature the dual 30 mm cannon/7.62 mm MG.
Although the T-14’s turret features a large bustle, it remains unclear whether this features the autoloader/weapon-handling system for the MBT’s main gun or serves another purpose (meaning the T-14 would retain the vulnerable hull-mounted carousel system present in previous Russian MBTs). Some reports also indicate Russia has not entirely abandoned its ambitions to arm Armata with a 152 mm main gun. If this is the case, it could explain why the T-14’s unmanned turret has an unusually high profile relative to the position of the 125 mm main gun, with the turret possibly designed to incorporate growth potential up to the 152 mm calibre.
T-14 is armed with a remote-controlled turret (RCT) armed with a 7.62 mm PKTM MG, with the unit also functioning as the commander’s independent sight. The gunner’s sight is mounted to the left side of the main gun and shielded by a two-piece armoured door to protect it from small arms fire. A barrel reference unit is mounted above the base of the 2A82A main gun, which notably lacks a fume bore extractor (which would be superfluous given the turret is unmanned). Metrological, satellite communications, GLONASS, datalink, and radio communications antennae are fitted on the roof of the turret.
The MBT’s turret is literally covered in a variety of launcher and sensor systems understood to be linked to a new APS system, which some reports call ‘Afghanit’. At the base of each side of the turret are five large and fixed horizontally arrayed launch tubes covering the 120° frontal arc of the turret. These bear a strong resemblance to the launchers for the earlier Drozd and Drozd-2 APS, which fired a hard-kill 107 mm unguided projectile armed with a high-explosive-(HE) fragment warhead to defeat incoming anti-tank guided weapons (ATGWs).
The T-14 is also fitted with four sets of smaller-calibre launchers, with each unit armed with 12 launch tubes. Two horizontally trainable launcher units are fitted on either side of the top of the turret, while two apparently fixed and vertically facing launcher units are recessed into the top of the tank’s turret.
It is unclear whether this second system fires hard-kill (ie warheads) or soft-kill (ie anti-infrared/laser-obscuring smoke) munitions, or a combination of the two. It is also unclear if the vertically mounted units are fireable, or simply storage for reload units for the two trainable launchers. One limitation of the Drozd systems were that they provided no protection against threats emanating from above the tank, so mounting the fixed launchers vertically could be one way to provide protection against top-attack threats.
Providing warning and guidance for the APS system are two types of sensors mounted around the T-14’s turret. Two large sensors, believed to be electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR)-based laser warning receivers, are angularly mounted on the front of the turret providing 180° coverage, while four smaller sensors (covered but believed to be radars) are mounted around the turret providing 360° coverage.
Armata features a notably different hull design to the T-72/90. One striking difference is the road wheels, which are of a different design to the T-72/90’s, while the Armata features seven road wheels, to the six of the previous MBT designs, with the drive wheel at the rear. This is similar to the T-80 MBT family, which also has chassis with seven smaller road wheels.
It is not known whether Armata is equipped with a gas-turbine or a diesel engine [given how the Russian chain of command swore off gas-turbine engines after the T-80’s performance in the first Chechen war, probably diesel. -LP] , but the T-14’s powerpack is mounted at the rear of the MBT, with two internal fuel tanks mounted on either side, and exhausts also mounted on either side. Day/night cameras are mounted around the T-14’s turret to provide situational awareness, while a forward-looking EO/IR (FLIR) system is mounted on the front of the hull for the driver. The driver’s hatch has no periscopes. When driving buttoned-down, the driver may be in a reclined position, using a set of periscopes mounted on a second hatch directly behind him.
NII Stali is understood to have designed a new form of steel armour for the Armata family. Speaking to TASS, a NII Stali representative said the “steel armour alloy, named 44S-sv-Sh [44S–], is approved by the Armata’s developer. The alloy’s operational testing has been started and it can be used in prospective vehicles’ parts”. The use of the 44S-sv-Sh steel in Armata is intended to provide protection at a similar level to STANAG 4569 (first edition) Level 5. The high level of 44S-sv-Sh’s protection is ensured by the short-grained material structure, the optimised legation process and the special heat processing. The steel has also been designed to maintain its characteristics in very cold conditions.
The Armata design is also understood to utilise explosive reactive armour (ERA) within its base design (rather than the appliqué ERA tiles seen on previous Russian MBTs), with views from above the MBT showing a distinctive tiled pattern indicative of ERA on the top of the vehicle’s chassis and turret. Although what appear to be ERA tiles are present on the turret roof, much of the sides of the turret appears to be just a thin cladding covering the various APS and sighting systems rather than armour. Appliqué armour (unclear if passive or ERA, or both) is fitted to the forward two thirds of the T-14’s sides, while the rear third is protected by bar armour to provide clearance for the T-14’s exhausts.
Here’s a picture of the front by way of NPR:
I’m not going to get into the electronics/sensor/packages, since it’s all devil-in-the-details stuff impossible to evaluate at this point. (The active protection system could be very interesting, but there’s no way of knowing how it stacks up to Israel’s Trophy or the still-under-development U.S. Quick Kill.)
The big reasons I think the M1A2 retains overall superiority:
“NII Stali is understood to have designed a new form of steel armour for the Armata family.” Unless this new steel armor has radically improved properties, it seems unlikely to be even as effective against HEAT and/or kinetic penetrating rounds as the Chobham ceramic composite armor used by the M1 and British Challenger tanks, now into (at least) its third generation.
I do not like the shape of that turret. At all. Way too high profile, though up-gunning to a 152mm cannon (which I’m skeptical they can do effectively, even with this huge turret) might make it a more acceptable trade-off. (Early T-14 mocks showed a radically low profile turret that evidently turned out to be a pipe dream.) The degree to which the turret bulges out over the side and rear seems like shot traps. That flat section to the right is evidently a gunner sight, which looks like it’s just asking to be targeted. (Then again, the T-72 used this weird stacked bulging steel plate system to provide “non-ractive reactive armor”, which might alleviate the problem some.)
Not seeing any detailed information on the Russian fire control system for the main gun. If there were radically improvements you would expect more crowing and demonstrations to the press for the export market, which I haven’t seen. Since the M1A1 was achieving kills against Soviet armor at the extreme range of its fire control system back during Desert Storm, I’d need a lot of evidence to be convinced the Russians have caught up, and so far I don’t see any.
That said, there are a number of interesting features on the T-14:
The fully automated turret. It’s no surprise that the Russians went in this direct, since the T-72 already used an autoloader. (There were persistent rumors that the T-72’s autoloader had a nasty tendency to rip off crewmen’s arms, but the consensus out on the web seems to be that this is probably untrue.) With the constant march of progress there’s no reason you couldn’t have a reliable auto-loader, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see future American tanks take this direction.
The 125mm smoothbore cannon, which should theoretically outgun the 120mm on the M1A2. (Cue Nigel Tufnel: “Well, it’s 5 bigger, innit?”)
The top speed is reportedly higher than the Abrams, somewhere in the 50 MPH range, which seems quite likely, given that the Abrams is the heaviest modern MBT in current service. However, the T-14 engine may have some reliability concerns:
Integrated reactive armor: Probably a net plus. Like the TUSK package for the Abrams, I suspected this was developed in response to specific experience with asymmetrical urban warfare (in Russia’s case in Grozny, where the T-80 performed very poorly). While I have my doubts that the T-14 can defeat modern two-phase top attack anti-tank missiles like Javelin, it’s probably more than adequate for defeating the average Joey Jihad RPG. The concern is that while reactive armor certainly increase vehicle survivability, it’s very hard not to let it increase fratricidal lethality to nearby friendly infantry. Then again, Russian military doctrine has always had a callous attitude toward infantry casualties…
Maybe the integrated roof launcher array can defeat top attack anti-tank missiles like Javelin and RPGs. Hard to gauge effectiveness without seeing how it performs in actual combat.
I like the wide access door at rear, which reminds me of the rear doors Israel designed to the Merkava after the experience of running out of ammo during the Yom Kippur War. (I’m less wild about the high, relatively exposed positions for the gas tanks at the rear of the vehicle, something the bar armor only partially alleviates. But it might be an acceptable tradeoff.)
All this assumes that significant numbers of the T-14 actually get built, given that Russia has cancelled at least two separate tank programs (Black Eagle and the T-95) to follow on to the T-72/T-80, and that their economy is really biting the yak in the wake of the oil price collapse and Ukraine sanctions. But the shared Armata platform probably helped reduce development and production costs, and I suspect it will get put into production, as a big new main battle tank seems like exactly the sort of thing Vladimir Putin likes seeing built.
This is just a quick overview based on limited information. Those with more information and/or deeper subject knowledge are welcome to sound off in the comments.
The base armour on the new tank consists of metal-ceramic plates. Novosibirsk-based company NEVZ-Ceramics has already launched serial production of this product, according to Andrey Nikitin, the head of the company’s armoured ceramics bureau. “We finished the trials this year and the elements revealed their declared capability,” he said.
Nikitin said the new metal/ceramic armour provides one-and-a-half times more resistance than fully metal systems.
