T-72 ΜΒΤ modernisation and variants

It all was the low intensity conflicts where tanks didn't fight another tanks.

They used tanks because the tanks had been developed and available.

What I am saying is that in low intensity conflicts where the chance of an enemy tank popping in to view is near zero there is no need for tanks with high pressure 125mm guns firing sticks of nuclear waste at just under 2km/s.

A 120mm rifles gun mortar like NONA or VENA makes rather more sense and is likely cheaper.

as long as the armour is good enough.

Never heard of what. Typhoon is just a MRAP. I suppose it will be used by police and internal troops mostly, may be for supply convoys in the Army or a light brigade transportation, but still I never saw a Typoon-based IFV project.

You have heard of Armata, Kurganets, Boomerang, and Typhoon?

These are not MBT, BMP, BTR, and BRDM... these are vehicle families.. Armata is a vehicle family of 50-65 ton vehicles... command vehicles, MBTs, IFVs, APCs, artillery, air defence, engineer, etc etc

In an Armata brigade all the vehicles will be armata based so the logistics train need only carry parts and spares for armata vehicles.

An armata brigade will be a heavy track brigade that can be either tank or motor rifle depending on how many MBTs and how many APCs and IFVs it has.

A Kurganets brigade will have all Kurganets 25 ton class tracked vehicles, so MBT, IFV, APC, command, engineer etc etc vehicles based on the Kurganets... with a tank and a motor rifle medium tracked brigade.

Boomerang will have all Boomerang 25 ton class wheeled vehicles so MBT, IFV, APC, command, air defence, artillery, engineer, etc etc with tank and motor rifle medium wheeled brigades.

Typhoon will have all Typhoon 10-15 ton class wheeled vehicles...

AFAIK the Boomerang will be an 8x8 or 10x10 wheeled amphibious vehicle, and Typhoon will be a 4x4 and 6x6 wheeled vehicle that might or might not be a shortened Boomerang design... hense sometimes Typhoon is called Boomerang-10 with the medium vehicles called Boomerang-25.

If you start putting upgraded T-72s in these units then you have to add spares and support for different vehicles... which totally ruins the whole purpose of the vehicle families in the first place.

It will be self-propelled AT guns, nobody would use it like tanks as the medium planforms are lightly armoured.

With Afghanistan APS able to stop APFSDS rounds it might not be so lightly protected...

They supposed to be a successors of tank brigades.

There will likely still be tank heavy and IFV heavy brigades depending on what they are going to be doing.

This will be successors of motorised infantry brigades, most numerous and tactically-flexible.

They will be cheap and relatively easy to produce, but also have awesome firepower and mobility. their net centricity should make them very capable on the modern battlefield.

And Tigr/Wolk based.

Tigr and Volk are modified SUVs. Typhoon will be an armoured vehicle with rather less windows an more weapons/armour.

It will also likely be a 4x4 and 6x6 based vehicle family.

still its a pity that they didnt change the ERA. I mean how hard would it have been for a dude with a blowtorch to remove the Kontakt-5 cassettes, and another one with a welder to mount brackets with Relikt. You dont even need to have Relikt active elements- just the container.

Even with Kontact-5 these vehicles are well armoured... perhaps they felt it wasn't worth extra expense.

Beware gold plating.

Pardon my ignorance: what's this panorama sight? Is it not installed on the T-90A? Is it for commander use? Does it improve hunter-killer capability? Thanks and sorry for the incompetence.

Very simply the pano sight is for the commander to scan for targets or threats while the gunner engages targets.

Commanders generally have rotatable sights but don't always offer 360 degree fields of view... this can be solved by turning the whole turret, but obviously not while the gunner is shooting.

The 360 degree pano sight offers the commander better situational awareness without sticking his head out of his turret.

For a long time netizens of Key Publishing Forum, militaryphotos.ret, and ... were under the impression that each T/R element in an AESA was a separate radar, and they imagined that it was through that "characteristic" that AESAs attained their magical power to change lead into gold.

Technically each AESA array element includes a transmit and a receive module and can perform some basic processing which reduces the load on the main processing computers and can improve signal performance and speed as noise can be filtered out early so no time is wasted processing it.

AESA radars are certainly not bad things.

It's a NATO piece of crap (the USSR never used it in reality, because needed it never). It is possible to make a vehicle with low velocity high-calibre gun, high protection and mobility

And such a vehicle is better suited to infantry support and a range of other roles that don't involve enemy armour. A KV-2 is an example in the extreme for dealing with heavy fortifications... for which it was excellent. It was not so excellent as a tank in tank on tank combat, but with a short barrel 76.2mm gun and low velocity ammo it would have been a useful infantry support vehicle... much like a BMP-3M but with tank level armour.

In fact during WWII there were plenty of infantry support vehicles used by the Soviet Union that might have appeared in the west to be artillery but in fact were actually used as direct fire support vehicles using 76.2mm and 122mm and later even 152mm guns, while tank hunters like the Su-100 used high velocity tank guns with a different role.

It's an indirect-fire piece of artillery with low protection, it isn't supposed to be used for direct fire often (only in case of a self-defence).

Yes, I know these vehicles are artillery support vehicles and are not intended for front line duties... I was referring to the guns they carry as being useful in the direct fire role by a better protected vehicle.

I've heard about 3 universal platforms and even know people working on one of them (electrical part of it). Typhoon is one of MRAP concepts, no more. There are different MRAPs from many companies now, not one of them is officially chosen by now, as i know.

Typhoon is a popular name so it can be confusing for everyone.

The Russian military has given press releases about 4 universal platforms... being a heavy tracked, medium tracked, medium wheeled, and light wheeled vehicles for their new brigade structure. They are developing electronics, weapons, and sensor suites for these vehicles, so there will be a MBT suite and an IFV suite and a command suite and an artillery suite etc etc and each of the universal platforms will include these vehicle suites... so training will become transferable and standardised.

AFAIK the Typhoon is not an MRAP because it is a universal platform so there will be APC, IFV, MBT, etc etc platforms developed from it... that is the point of a universal platform. To be the basis of a vehicle family.

Most of them, not all. Do you think a commanders jeep would be made on Armata platform too?

Do you think the commander would be safe in a jeep if a heavy brigade is needed?

In Grozny the BMPs were picked off and the Tanks attacked without protection in urban streets because their main guns could not engage targets in basements or in the second floor or above. With an Armata brigade the IFVs will be as hard to kill as the MBTs and with external guns will be able to shoot basement and roof targets.

With an unmanned turret and external gun the Armata MBT might even be able to elevate to hit such targets itself.

There will be no such a thing as kurganets MBT. It's too light for an MBT. here will be somekind of a self-propelled direct-fire gun. You can call it a light tank, but still it's not an MBT.

It can't of course be called MBT because MBT replaced light, medium, and heavy tanks with one design... is this is going the other way by creating gun platform vehicles for the different units with tank level firepower but the mobility and armour of the vehicles it operates with.

Here's Typhoon.

Sorry, the link didn't work.

Boomerang is a completely different platform made by different company. It's looks like Stryker. I've seen it's prorotype irl, and I can't speak about it as it's secret now. Typhoon is not.

There was talk of the 4 universal platforms being reduced to 3 where the Typhoon design is replaced by a shortened lightened Boomerang. In this case Boomerang might be an 8x8 or 10x10 vehicle whereas Boomerang-10 is a 4x4 and 6x6 vehicle.

AFAIK Boomerang, Armata, Kurganets, and Typhoon families have not be revealed to the public yet and there will be lots of competing designs and drawings and models anyway.

That's not a problem. Brigade's logistics would still be easier than now. Much more easier. Trust me, I'm a reserve officer with "military vehicles maintenance and usage" speciality. I know how much it takes to keep a unit's vehicles fit for service taking into the account there are more support vehucles than combat ones, most of them are on a special purpose platforms.

So you are fully aware of all the dozens of different vehicles a brigade will operate that will be replaced by these universal platforms.

No logistic issue is worth tankmen getting killed due to low protection of their vehicles without any benefit, except of "better logictics". Would you risk your life because of some guy in MoD thinks you don't need a MBT, but rather badly protected vehicle, because he don't want to spend money on more complex tech-support?

I could turn the question around and say why does a tank man get better protection than an IFV crewman when modern threats facing them both from extreme ranges.

In a heavy brigade all vehicles have tank level protection and tank level mobility.

That is not to say they wont have recon assets etc.

Don't know what are you talking about. What is APS?

Active protection system... Like Shater, Drozd, and Arena.

I've shown you what a Typhoon is. It's lightly armored MRAP truck basically.

That sounds like Taifun... a Kamaz development.

"Net centricity" is US generals feature which means "look what kind of a cool staff we spent goverment money for, now we can dominate poor countries even more hi-techy".

It is about C4IR... communication, command, control, finding targets and destroying them.

It is no accident that the US forces demolished the Iraqi forces in Desert Storm... and their C4IR is the main reason for this success of a smaller force over a much larger one. To a degree it was also why the Germans were successful during WWII until the allies started doing it back to them... without all the computers too of course.


We have had a lot of discussion about the future of Russian armour in these threads:

https://www.russiadefence.net/t2333-first-photos-of-t-95-and-t-90am

https://www.russiadefence.net/t2002-kurganets-boomerang-discussions-thread

https://www.russiadefence.net/t1854-official-armata-discussion-thread

A lot of reading, but your opinion and criticisms would be most welcome.

I look forward to discussing this with you and anyone else that wants to join in the fun...

You mean self-propelled guns? They were some kind of turretless tanks with a larger guns.

Yes, often obsolete chassis fitted with more powerful guns than the original vehicle was designed for like the T-34 with a short barrel 122mm gun mounted on it.

Most of they were actually better in tank-hunting, than soviet tanks (until IS-2 and T-34-85)

No doubt, and pretty much everything larger calibre was used when enemy tanks appeared, but many of these vehicles were designed and used to support infantry like the Su-76 and various SU-122 and SU-152 vehicles with short stub barrels.

After the war they blended into a MBT concept mostly for a standardization.

They did, but clearly with the entry of service of the BMP-1 they found larger calibre direct fire weapons were useful... when the BMP-2 with its 30mm cannon was introduced the BMP-1s 73mm gun was kept in service as the two very different weapon types complimented each other. To the point that the replacement BMP-3 had both the auto cannon (2A72 30mm cannon) and a heavier weapon (2A70 gun launcher in 100mm rifled). They even adopted a rifled weapon because the standard round was a HE shell that was better stabilised by spin than by fin.

Air superiorty is a key. C4IR just make it easier to archive.

Air Superiority is a Key, but without C4IR what would be the point.

The greatest challenge to C4IR is guerilla warfare where any vehicle on the side of the road could be an IED and any civilian could be an enemy wanting to kill you... and the civilian population greatly outnumbers you.

Being able to command and control and communicate with your troops is vital, but intel and recon capability are also critical to the success of the mission.

And actually... I don't think there were great difference in numbers in Iraq, as there were near 500K NATO serviceman in the Iraq campaign, AFAIK. And Iraq forces were badly trained and motivated, not to mention their poor equipment (thanks to sanctions). NATO ground forces met near to no resistance to speak of, generally, with few exceptions.

they avoided enemy troop concentrations and penetrated defences without what would traditionally be the required three to one numbers advantage.

Mobile units, mobile artillery. mobile air power will make future Russian ground units rather more powerful than they ever were.

Do you know US Army managed to take Baghdad with just two BTGs? They just entered the city, made a few shots... there were no actual test of sophisticated C4IR.

I freely admit their mission was made easier by their focus on securing the oil fields rather than saving the Iraqi people, but I think you are confusing Desert Storm with the Invasion of Iraq.

Nothing more that germans could archive in 1940's without satellites, ect.

In many ways I think what the Germans achieved in 1940 was really about C3IR... they obviously didn't have computers...

It has an a recoilless gun based on SPG recoilless gun design, which was used as a company/battalion level AT gun. It isn't an infantry support weapon on the first place, as future war was planned as a total nuclear war with the large tank clashes, not an assymethrical conflict

It started out as a pure anti armour weapon to fill the gap... well chasm created by the minimum effective range of the Sagger.

Later on however there was a HE Frag rocket developed and deployed, and the fire control system on the BMP-1 had a HE setting for the autoloader long before the round was available.

AFAIK the extra HE firepower of the 73mm gun of the BMP-1 was appreciated leading to the use of a direct fire HE large calibre weapon on the BMP-3... even when the minimum range of ATGMs was reduced to 25m or less.

Obviously the 100mm gun and ammo on the BMP-3 is vastly more effective than the 73mm gun on the original BMP... it is interesting that the west did not copy it.

There was some US interest in the Vasilek Auto mortar for use on a light wheeled platform and to be honest I was surprised the BMP-3 didn't just use a belt fed weapon of similar design. the HE rounds of the 100mm 2A70 gun are compact and rather more powerful than any 82mm mortar however.

it's just what Wehrmacht did 60 years earlier without net-centricity, and satellites, and radars, and economic sanctions. And against much more advanced opponents.

Very true, their weapons were not that superior and in many areas inferior... Panzer I and II and III were no super tanks, and they were facing enormous numbers.

Even Russia won a local war with Georgia in 2008 not having good communications and all sort of that things. It could do it better with that the Army have now, but still. This is how wars are won and lost.

Which is not to say the Russian Army does not need C4IR... I suspect a good C4IR system would have allowed much more efficient operations with less effort and fewer loses and more effective use of fire power on the enemy forces.

Yes, there were no real-time video streaming missile cameras directly on Youtube, no cool led displays in HQ's, no push-to-talk radios on every rookie, but it worked not even bad for an 80s

The west has often been fixated with gold plating...