Chariots of Iron

Chariots of Iron:
An Analysis of the Development of the Tank And Its Utility in
Modern And Near-Future Warfare
By Paul Adrian Bussard
(847009)
.The author knocking on the front of a British Challenger I MBT in front of the Bovington Tank Museum. Photo ©
Jessica Cawley 2016. Used with permission.
Submitted to Swansea University in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of
Arts in War and Society.
Swansea University, 2016

1
Abstract
In this dissertation, I will analyze the role played by the tank throughout its history,
compare this role to its function in modern conflicts, and determine what developmental changes
the tank will likely have to go through to adapt to modern war, including its not-inconsiderable
value as a cultural symbol. To accomplish this task, I will incorporate information from
academic sources, media sources, and military personnel who interact directly with armoured
fighting vehicles. This dissertation will be arranged in a structured analytical fashion, initially
examining the role of the tank on the battlefield historically, then asking if such a role remains in
an era of asymmetrical warfare, and analyzing the potential future of the tank as it attempts to
adapt to the changing battlefield conditions of modern war. Finally, the symbolism of the tank
and its power in the media will be investigated to demonstrate its utility beyond its mere form
and function. The need for such an in-depth analysis of the role of the tank in modern warfare,
including media and propaganda, is imperative and even overdue, for if the tank has indeed
reached the end of its martial utility, then all of the tank development programmes across the
world are simply wasted efforts. If the tank has not reached the end of its historical relevancy, a
deep analysis of modern warfare and its relationship to the tank is still needed - the world has
come a long way since NATO armour was designed to spar with advancing Soviet tank
regiments in central Europe, but the tank has changed very little. If lives could be saved, and
wars ended more quickly than ever before, by examining and addressing the tank’s current
failings, then we are obligated to do our utmost to be absolutely critical of the concept and its
current iteration at all times.

2
DECLARATION
This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently
submitted in candidature for any degree.
Signed ……………Paul Bussard…………………………. (candidate)
Date ……………………29 September 2016……………………………….
STATEMENT 1
This dissertation is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated.
Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended.
Signed …………………………Paul Bussard…………….. (candidate)
Date ……………29 September 2016…………………..
STATEMENT 2
I hereby give my consent for my dissertation, if relevant and accepted, to be available for photocopying and for
inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organizations.
Signed ……………………Paul Bussard……………………. (candidate)

3
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Chapter I: The Role of the Tank in History 6
Chapter II: The Modern Tank 22
Chapter III: The Tank in the Near Future 31
Chapter IV: Tank as Symbol 42
Conclusion 53
Bibliography 56

4
Introduction
Since its inception, the basic design of the tank has had to overcome many obstacles to its
continued existence and utility to militaries. In fact, even its inception was a result of an
otherwise nearly insurmountable problem in industrial conflict: the immobility of warfare in the
modern, technological era. The military history of the 20th century is, in many ways, a history of
the tank, present in every conflict almost since the beginning, each new generation of vehicles
being more capable, more powerful, and more enduring than the last.
However, in the 21st Century, the tank faces its greatest challenge. Created for an era of
mechanized, industrial war on massive, international scales, the tank is beginning to lose its
value when confronted with the challenges of modern, fourth-generation warfare. Traditional,
mechanized doctrine as developed in the 20th century is no longer applicable, and tanks designed
to fight for or against the Soviet Union in Europe are finding themselves in unpredictable,
unstable situations, where their presence and sheer destructive power is more harmful than it is1
helpful to their cause. In this dissertation, the way the modern tank has evolved will be explored,
then the challenges and trials of the modern tank will be considered, before going on to examine
the cutting-edge developments in the field of tank development and the future of the tank, ending
on a consideration of one of the most powerful tools the tank has in its arsenal in modern
warfare: the tank as a important symbol in media, art, literature, and popular culture.
For most of these chapters, the tank will be critically examined from a developmental
point of view. Ever since the first tanks trundled off of the factory floors in the First World War,
there have been three major points of design consideration. The first, and most important, was
1
Lind, W. S., and Nightengale, K., et al. ‘The Changing Face of War: Into The Fourth
Generation.’ Marine Corps Gazette, 100 (3), 86-90. October, 1989.

5
and still is battlefield compatibility. In some texts, this is shortened to ‘mobility’, with the great
trifecta of tank capabilities being summed up as ‘mobility, firepower, and armour.’ This is an2
oversimplification; the tank’s power lies not with ‘mobility, firepower, and protection’ but rather
‘battlefield compatibility, firepower, and protection’. The first criterion, therefore, when studying
the development of the tank will be battlefield compatibility. This includes mobility, indeed, but
also includes other factors which may reduce the tank’s performance on the battlefield, including
weapon firing arcs, vision and surveillance capabilities, weight, and mechanical reliability,
among others. Battlefield compatibility covers the tank’s engagement with its surroundings that
are not enemy personnel or equipment. The next criterion will be firepower; throughout the ages
of the tank, many different armament configurations have been tried, and though it was stable for
the last half of the 20th Century or so, modern tanks and armoured vehicle designers are, again,
fiddling with the armament of their vehicles in an attempt to compensate for the tanks’ relative
lack of utility in modern, fourth-generation warfare. Lastly, the tank has always needed to endure
enemy firepower to deliver its own and to achieve its objectives, and so the armour protection of
the vehicles will be the third lense through which tank development is considered. This category
might alternatively be called ‘protection’ as the 21st Century approaches, since new technologies
and innovative designs make the tank able to endure enemy firepower more readily without a
great wealth of simple, passive armour.
The inter-war theories that brought the tank its great, famous successes during and after
the Second World War will also be briefly examined, through the lense of their effects on tank
development. The writings and theories of authors and soldiers such as Liddel Hart, J.F.C. Fuller,
2
Chant, Chris. Tanks, MBI Publishing, St. Paul, MN, USA. 2004

6
George Patton, Heinz Guderian, and Charles de Gaulle will all be briefly summarized, and the
resulting changes in tank development will be examined closely.
A prospective look at the future of the tank will stem from an examination of current
cutting edge trends in tank development from two of the most modernized militaries: the Russian
and the American. Similarities between their current, brand-new vehicles will be examined for
relevance, and information will be extrapolated, while differences will also be considered and
hopefully reconciled to resolve a possible glimpse of the near future of tank development.
Finally, the lense used to examine the symbolism the tank has possessed throughout
history will be media. The modern media readily picks up trends from popular culture, references
literature, and utilizes images and photographs, the latter on a staggering scale. Through
investigation of these photographs, articles, and videos, the symbolism and role of the tank in
popular culture will be examined in detail, hopefully bringing to light some of the most often
overlooked aspects of the powerful combat vehicles.
Chapter I: The Role of the Tank in History
Throughout the history of the 20th century, the tank went through several different
iterations before settling on a largely consistent pattern we understand today, which is a turreted,
tracked, all-terrain armoured vehicle with sloped armour and a single, large-calibre cannon with
smaller secondary weapons for self-defense. Even a cursory glance at the first tanks from the
First World War clearly demonstrates the sheer evolutionary changes that the tank must have
endured to reach its current iteration. Most of these alterations to the basic concept occurred
because of significant changes in role and function on the battlefield; though technological

7
determinism would suggest that technological evolution was the prime motivator of the tank’s
development, it instead seems to be situational changes which necessitated that relevant
technology be developed.
In the First World War, the tank was originally conceived of by soldiers such as Colonel
E.D. Swinton, who believed that mobility must be restored to warfare on the Western Front. The
war had degenerated into what modern military historians sometimes term as ‘trench warfare’: a
system of defensive earthworks with carefully sighted machine-guns and barbed wire that
effectively stymied infantry advances, and in the rare cases where such advances were
successful, the war-torn landscape and heavy artillery barrages prevented the effective use of
cavalry in a breakthrough. In this cauldron of fire and devastation was the formula necessary to
provoke the development of the tank concocted. This meant that the tank’s role on the3
battlefield, fundamentally, was to restore mobility to an otherwise static war.
The first and most important obstacle that the tank had to surmount was the nature of the
battlefield. It had become a literal obstacle course, riven by shell-craters, striated with barbed
wire, and bordered by ditches, earthworks, and deep, wide enemy fortifications, especially in the
case of the German front line. This sort of terrain was what effectively prevented the cavalry
from being an effective fighting force, and even the armoured cars used by the Royal Navy
ground forces could not effectively navigate the terrain. Fortunately, in America, the Holt tractor
company had been experimenting with tracked vehicles for use in farmland and off road
conditions, and it was precisely this vehicle that Swinton had in mind when he proposed using
all-around tracks for the tank’s primary motive drive system. After rigorous testing, it was
3
Ibid

8
proven that the track, combined with the internal combustion engine, did give the tank the ability
to conquer the obstacles and terrain of the World War I battlefield; even at a slow speed with an
underpowered engine, any ability to traverse the battlefield was a leap ahead in military
capability and mobility.
Of course, being able to move towards the enemy necessitated the ability to endure
incoming enemy fire; in World War 1, at least until the very end, armour-piercing bullets were
uncommon if not outright unavailable to soldiers, and this meant that only a few millimetres of
steel armour was required (16mm at its thickest in the case of the British Mk. V, the ultimate
landship of the war). Metallurgy had progressed to the point where armour could be
face-hardened, even if the steel was comparatively soft; such techniques had been developed to
armour battleships for decades. Such armour also made the tank better able to endure
shell-splinters from nearby exploding shells, as well as the great variety of other shrapnel present
in such a modern war. Such armour made the tank seem inviolate, it’s advance unstoppable as
even the most powerful weapons the enemy possessed failed to stop the machines. Erich Maria
Remarque, a veteran of World War I, wrote in his famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front:
“We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are
men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as
the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up
again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable
steel beasts squashing the dead and the wounded--we shrivel up in our thin skin before
them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades
matches.”4
4
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Random House Publishing, New York
City, New York. 2013. Ebook. Accessed at
<http://esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Learning.Audiobooks/All.Quiet.on.the.Western.Front/18/text.ht
ml> 12 September 2016.

9
And so the efficacy of the tank’s armour in the First World War is made clear… or is it? Such
vehicles were not inviolate; riveted armour meant that the ‘invulnerable’ vehicles were almost as
dangerous to their crew as to the enemy when a round struck the flat side of a rivet, and the
openings which facilitated the crew’s vision were unarmoured and uncovered, endangering the
men peering out to shrapnel and bullets that assailed their faces. Even so, however, the tank
largely endured the storm of fire they often drew, and their reputation among the enemy
assaulted by their mechanical might was not ill-deserved.
So armoured and powered, the tank was then given armament of its own; true to the
‘landship’ concept from which it was born, tanks were oftentimes equipped with multiple
weapon systems of varying calibres. On the Allied side, tanks were divided into Male and
Female classes. Male vehicles had cannon armament; in the case of the British vehicles, there
were two mounted in sponsons; in the case of the French vehicles, there was usually a single
cannon mounted in the center of the hull or, innovatively, in a rotating turret atop the vehicle.
Female vehicles were equipped exclusively with machine-guns; however, such armament was
usually more numerous, giving the tanks the ability to fire in every direction with a greater hail
of anti-personnel firepower. These female tanks were designed to protect the male vehicles,
while the male tanks engaged fortified enemy machine-gun or artillery positions and
concentrations of troops with their cannons. This awkward cooperation between vehicles was the
first attempt to solve a problem that tanks have always had to tackle: the balance between the
ability to suppress and kill enemy infantry while simultaneously engaging and destroying hard
targets.

10
In these ways, the tanks were sent to war. Armed to the teeth, armoured in rolled steel
and able to navigate almost every battlefield obstacle, the tank did indeed restore mobility to the
battlefields of World War I. However, the immature technology, overambitious designers,
inflexible commanders, and consistent (if hostile) battlefield conditions stalled the tank’s
development. Tanks from the First World War were relatively consistent in design and
capability, with a variety of vehicles arriving only in the last year of the war. However, during
the Russian Revolution and the rest of the interwar period, the tank would mutate again into an
entirely new beast of incredible capability.
In the lead-up to World War II, including the Russian Revolution, tanks were viewed by
most doctrines predominantly as infantry support vehicles in the same role they played during
the First World War - navigating obstacles, barbed wire, and trenches and enduring before
eliminating enemy fortifications to allow the infantry behind them to continue the advance.
However, there were some innovative officers in the militaries of almost every nation capable of
producing tanks who proposed new, radical modes of warfighting which utilized the tank as a
significant part of their offensive and defensive operations. In the nations whose armies were
labouring under some disadvantage, whether through disorganization and revolution (Russia) or
through treaty restrictions and defeat (Germany), the new theories of war were readily accepted,
and even flourished, while in other countries there was often a struggle between the conservative
‘Old Guard’ that won the First World War and the new officers who proposed similar theories of
war.
During the Russian Revolution, tanks were oftentimes used in small penny-packets not
because of faulty doctrine but because of availability: the British, French, and White Russians

11
simply did not have access to many vehicles, while the Red Army had hardly any at all since
they depended almost exclusively on captured vehicles. However, officers and civilian leaders5
in the Red Army saw the power and capability of the tank, and almost immediately after the
Civil War, the Russians drew up plans for a tank corps and began mass-producing their own
armoured vehicles as best they could. In such an environment, officers such as Tukhachevsky
and Frunze were able to flourish, oftentimes replacing more conservative elements of the Red
Army that clung to old, outdated methods of command and control, which demonstrated their
failure in battles in Japan and Poland as well as the Russian Civil War. These officers proposed
and developed a doctrine of mechanized warfare they termed Deep Battle or Deep Operations,6
in which the tank featured heavily as a linebreaker and exploitative machine, replacing the dual
roles of heavy infantry formations and cavalry. For these operations, tanks had to be utilized in
massive, concentrated elements - a consistent theme in each theory of mechanized warfare, to be
tested in the next great war.
In Germany, Heinz Guderian spearheaded the effort to refine the new mechanized theory
of war. His theory, eventually termed ‘blitzkrieg’ by Time magazine during the Second World
War, was slightly different to the Soviet doctrine of Deep Battle, emphasizing an attack across a
narrow front with immense power (termed a ‘schwerpunkt’), tearing a small hole in enemy lines
with the help of air and infantry support mounted in halftracks. It emphasized the need for
mobility as much as power, proposing an entirely mechanized army, with even the artillery
heavily mechanized to keep up with and support the tanks. While the Russian doctrine7
5
Bean, Tim and Fowler, Will. Russian Tanks of World War II: Stalin’s Armoured Might. MBI
Publishing Company, St. Paul, MN, USA. 2002
6
Ibid.
7
Guderian, Heinz. Achtung-Panzer! Cassel Military Paperbacks, London, UK. 1992

12
emphasized strategic armoured maneuvers, intended to disrupt the enemy’s command and
control systems, blitzkrieg was a purely tactical affair, intended to achieve breakthroughs in the
enemy line without speaking on what, precisely, to accomplish with these breakthroughs. With
the German military gutted after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, and the Empire fallen
to be replaced with the Weimar Republic, such a doctrine was embraced, providing a way for a
small, but elite and heavily mechanized, army to fight a war against a superior foe by achieving
local superiority.
In the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, this new era of mechanized
warfare had its heralds and its theorists, but as victors in the First World War, the officer corps of
each army tended towards conservatism, and in the conservative view, the tank was support for
the infantry. In some countries, such as the United States, officers such as George S. Patton
fought to preserve the tank corps against officers who claimed that such things were merely an
artefact of the First World War, and that tanks should be subordinate to an infantry command. In8
the United Kingdom, officers such as J.F.C. Fuller and theorists such as Liddel Hart made some
headway, but were unable to change the overall doctrine, resulting in a bizarre schism within the9
Royal Tank Corps (soon to be the Royal Armoured Corps) between the conservative infantry
support tank role, epitomized in heavy but slow breakthrough vehicles such as the Churchill
Infantry Tank, and the more innovative, fast-moving armoured assets intended to mass and
puncture the enemy line in the style of blitzkrieg and deep operations, as well as directly engage
enemy armour, called the Cruiser tanks and epitomized by vehicles such as the Cromwell. In the
8
Cooper, Belton. Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armoured Division in World War
II. Presidio Press, New York City, NY, USA. 2003.
9
Wright, Patrick. Tank. Faber and Faber, London, UK. 16 October, 2000

13
French military, the primary harbinger of the new age of mechanized warfare was Charles de
Gaulle, who proposed a heavily mechanized army based around wholesale tank divisions.10
While the French industry was capable of building the armour required (as evidenced by
monstrous heavy tanks such as the Char B2 and Somua vehicles), the French army was not.
Much extravagant expense was spent on making the Maginot Line, and Marshal Petain’s
advocacy of an infantry-based, defensive, immobile army reigned supreme, with De Gaulle’s
works finding greater audience in Germany where it largely aligned with Guderian’s view of
mechanized warfare.11
These theories resulted in a wide variety of inter-war tank designs, not all of them
successful. The emphasis on speed and maneuverability resulted in some rather overcommitted
vehicles, including tiny tankettes made by Carden-Lloyd and sold, predominantly, to the Italians.
Such vehicles did not prove a success. Other inter-war designs, that were arguably even more
radical than the tankette, included behemoth land-battleships designed to break through the
enemy line, such as the Vickers Independent and the Soviet T-35 heavy tank. Such vehicles were
overburdened with armament; to make their weight manageable, they had thinner armour than
was necessary for a breakthrough tank and powerful engines, though each tank was still slow.
The largest flaw, however, was something that tank designers had not yet learned to consider:
ergonomics. The vehicles were difficult to command, with their myriad weapon systems,
difficult to crew, requiring, in the case of the Soviet T-35, eleven men, and difficult to maintain
due to their mechanical complexity. The era of the multi-turreted tank with several different guns
covering a variety of fire-arcs came rapidly to a close, with production being cancelled before
10
de Gaulle, Charles. The Army of the Future. Gainsborough Press, St. Albans, UK. 1941
11
‘Charles de Gaulle’. Time Magazine, Volume 23 Issue 1. 5 January 1959.

14
World War II. The more effective tank designs to result from these theories during the12
inter-war period tended to follow a singular pattern, which is not so foreign today: a single turret,
with supporting machine-guns, on a tracked armoured chassis and with a powerful engine.
However, unlike today, tanks were still divided into classes: heavy tanks, with thick armour but
low speed, were usually designed to break the enemy lines; medium tanks, with less thick
armour but greater speed, were oftentimes designed as exploitation tanks and general purpose
vehicles; and light tanks, with very thin armour and smaller guns, which were designed to take
over the traditional cavalry roles in most armies. Each nation going into the Second World War
had each type of tank either in their arsenals or in development.
These new theories of warfare and the tank designs that they spawned, including their
radical new doctrines regarding how to use these tanks, were to be put to the test soon enough.
The spectre of war loomed over Europe once again with the rise of a reinvigorated Germany
under Hitler, whose rearmament programmes emphasized Guderian and de Gaulle’s theories,
and who worked closely with the Soviet Union to study tank development and construction.
Stalin’s purges wiped out many of the generals who embraced Deep Battle, but the Soviet Union
retained the basic ideas within its officer corps, though at the beginning of the coming conflict
the Soviet Union would not fare well at all. France, too, would be overwhelmed, though not due
to some purge or defeat in some climactic battle but rather simply a failure to observe the
theoretical trends of the inter-war period and an adherence to a less mobile, obsolete form of war.
The British would endure, their hybrid theory of tank warfare more easily able to adapt to the
changes demanded by modern war, and the Americans would study the first two years of the
12
Bean, Tim. Russian Tanks of World War II: Stalin’s Armoured Might. Ian Allan Publishing,
Birmingham, UK. 27 June, 2002

15
war, drawing their own conclusions about the utility of the tank and the theory of mechanized
war - conclusions which would serve them well when they entered the conflict officially.
The Second World War itself saw the tank progress rapidly. Tanks began the war as
comparatively small vehicles, with the largest tank being the French Char 2C at 68 tonnes.13
Nonetheless, they were effective - the theories utilized by Germany initially and by all
combatants by the end of the war employed the tank as a vital component even despite its
comparative inefficacy at the beginning of the war. The theories that employed it, however, as
well as the battlefield conditions under which the tank served during the war, all went through
changes. The theories were refined, improved and perfected, while the battlefield conditions
varied simply due to the spread of the war - there was fighting in almost every type of situation,
and in most of the combat, the tank played a central role. This role, however, evolved and
changed to match the refined theories and variable conditions.
As with the First World War, the battlefields of World War 2 themselves provided some
of the most important challenges for tank designers to overcome. Tanks during the war had to
contend with deep sand or snow, their immense ground-pressure sinking them until they were
stuck; freezing temperatures congealed fluids and made metal brittle; urban street-fighting
blinded and trapped the vehicles; and rough, muddy terrain slowed them to a crawl, alongside
myriad other specific challenges such as the French hedgerows to the Western Allies or the
earthwork fortifications the Germans protected their Festerplatz with on the Eastern Front. In14
13
Chant, Chris. Tanks: Over 250 of the World’s Tanks and Armoured Fighting Vehicles.
Silverdale Books, UK. 15 March, 2004
14
Hitler, Adolf. ‘Fuehrerbefel No. 11’ 08 March, 1944.
<http://archive.is/20150409131837/http://www.96id.de/geschichte/ixanhang/weisungenfuerdiekr
iegsfuehrung/weisungnr53.php>

16
order to tackle these challenges, tanks became considerably improved over their World War 1
counterparts: firstly, and most importantly, engine power increased. The vehicles, despite having
similar weights, were no longer restricted to the speed of a walking man - such power gave them
the ability to simply bully through many of the obstacles that confronted them. Ground clearance
increased, giving the vehicles better ability to cross obstacles and earthworks without bottoming
out. Vehicular vision was improved, and a turret with a 360-degree field of fire became standard
for general-purpose tanks, with only specialized vehicles retaining a fixed forward-firing
armament in a protected casemate as the early World War 1 French tanks. In these ways, the
recognizable silhouette of the modern tank began to appear.
The battlefields themselves, however, were not the only challenge to the tank that
required innovation on the part of designers. Technology in all fields increased rapidly, and
soldiers were given the ability to easily engage and destroy the paltry-armoured tanks of World
War 1 - even the armour piercing bullets fired by modern rifles during the Second World War
could have killed or at least disabled a tank from the First. Designers and engineers where thusly
challenged, and new and better ways of protecting vehicles began to emerge. Initially, it was
simply through thickening the armour - the same basic box-shaped tank grew larger, and its
plating grew thicker. This, however, was not a solution by itself; the resulting weight increases
reduced the mobility and therefore battlefield compatibility of the vehicles: arguably their most
important trait. Materials science was next, with rolled, homogeneous nickel-steel alloy armour
replacing the traditional, face-hardened steel of World War 1 vehicles. This made the armour
both harder and less brittle, improving protection without increasing weight. The most crucial
advancement in armoured protection, however, was the sloping of armour. Sloped armour not

17
only improved its ballistic shape, making a ricochet more likely at certain angles, but also
improved the effective thickness - even an enemy projectile that did not ricochet and managed to
‘bite’ into the armour had more metal to go through on a horizontal plane of sloped armour than
it would have if it had struck the same weight and thickness of steel at a perpendicular angle.
Sloped armour proved to be a crucial edge on the tanks that were so endowed; early
sloped-armour vehicles such as the Soviet T-34 proved almost invulnerable to the standard
antitank ammunition of most contemporary German guns (such as the 3.7cm Pak36) despite
having only 45mm of armour - thinner than its contemporary rival the Panzer IV, with 50mm of
armour. The sloping of the T-34’s armour was a decisive factor in the tank’s survivability, and15
by the end of the war, almost every combatant would adopt sloped armour as a necessary part of
tank development. Through its mating with the rotating turret that improved the tank’s field of
fire on the battlefield, the sloped armour of these late-war tanks manifested the typical shape of
the ‘modern’ tank.
The last crucial adaptation in tank design came from firepower. With the addition of a
rotating turret to improve the field of fire of the guns and the addition of sloped armour to the
vehicles, designers went through a variety of different configurations of primary and secondary
weapons before a design reminiscent of modern vehicles appeared. The interwar period saw, as
mentioned, attempts at a variety of armament configurations, though the multi-turreted design
was found impractical even before the Second World War, with only the Soviet T-35 heavy tank
and T-38 medium tank serving in the war, and not much was expected of them by the Stavka.
This left the only survivors as casemate-mounted guns without a turret; turreted secondary
15
Bean, Tim. Russian Tanks of World War II: Stalin’s Armoured Might. Ian Allan Publishing,
Birmingham, UK. 27 June, 2002

18
armaments with a larger, primary weapon in the hull, and myriad machine-guns; and a primary,
turreted main armament without any secondary weapons save machine-guns, and with a
contiguous armoured hull sporting only one machine gun, if any.
During the war, the adoption of the turret on most battle tanks relegated the
casemate-mounted weapons to specialist vehicles such as tank destroyers and assault guns, and
in some countries (such as America and the UK), combat vehicles without turrets were
completely discarded. This left only the two competing configurations: a single, large gun in the
turret supported by machine-guns, or a smaller gun in the turret and a larger, hull-mounted
weapon system. Early World War 2 tanks such as the French Char 2C, the Mk. 1 version of the
British Churchill heavy tank, and the American M3 Lee vehicles all attempted the latter
configuration, but German and Russian tanks of the early war had already settled on the
single-primary-weapon concept. After some initial fighting, the advantage of such a system was16
made clear; having the primary weapon in the hull with a secondary in the turret made tanks
which were inferior to a one-big-gun system in the turret.
This was due to myriad factors, but perhaps the most significant was the tactical
flexibility of turreted vehicles. Vehicles such as the aforementioned American M3 Lee had
severe disadvantages in maneuver warfare, and even in static fighting were unable to go ‘hull
down’ - a crucial element of tank tactics. Hull down means that the hull of the tank is hidden
from enemy fire by intervening terrain, either by a hill (which the tank can fire over due to the
depression of its gun in the turret), some sort of embankment, or even a deliberate fortification
16
Ibid.

19
for the vehicle. This means that in a set-piece battle, the only exposed portion of the tank is the17
comparatively small turret, which is also the part of the tank where typically the thickest armour
is provided. A ‘hull down’ position for a tank lets it engage the enemy with multiple weapons
systems, including its main armament, without exposing as much of the vehicle to enemy fire;
this was a clear advantage for turreted vehicles. Tanks with their primary armament mounted in
the hull had to, of course, expose their hull and turret to enemy fire to bring their weapons to
bear, and could quickly be knocked out. Even in a mobile battle, when the battlelines were
intertwined and there were no effective fortifications to be seen, the turreted vehicles proved
superior: they could fire at any angle! The hull-mounted guns of tanks like the French Char 2C
meant that in order to fire the gun at a target, the entire tank had to be facing it, which meant
stopping, traversing the vehicle, and aiming carefully. A turreted tank can engage targets in
every direction while on the move, and even with the limited technology available in World War
2, they could lay in the gun on the move and simply stop to adjust their aim and fire, without
having to turn the entire vehicle after stopping.
The multi-turreted, turretless casemate-mounted, and hull-mounted weapon systems had
all been soundly beaten by the turreted primary weapon configuration, at least in
non-specialized, line-of-battle tanks. This means that the late war tanks of every nation, whether
the M26 Pershing in America, the heavy German Tiger II, the Russian IS-3 or the British
Cromwell, all had turreted primary weapons with co-axial secondary machine guns, oftentimes
omitting other secondary armament or leaving it as optional; the tank had settled into a design
that would last for the rest of the century: a single, turreted, primary weapon for direct
17
Chris Chant. Tanks: Over 250 of the World’s Tanks and Armoured Fighting Vehicles.
Silverdale Books, UK. (15 March, 2004)

20
engagement of the enemy, supported by machine-guns for close defense against enemy infantry.
Mated with the mobility provided by the drive-trains, vision improvements, and thick, sloping
armour protection, this armament configuration completed the development of the general design
of the main battle tank we see to this day.
After the Second World War, designers in each nation seemed to have settled on the same
basic design: as mentioned, this included a rotating turret with a 360 degree field of fire and
armed with a single large cannon and only machine guns as secondary weapons, with
comparatively high mobility and protected by sloping plates of thick armour. The war had been
fought in almost every conceivable battlefield condition, and the theories of total, mechanized
war had been perfected to almost an art. The only remaining challenges to the tank’s supremacy
were technological and doctrinal, though the primary threat from each field was almost fatal to
the tank as a combat vehicle.
Technologically, the tank was confronted with a new, powerful weapon system: the
HEAT warhead. High-Explosive Anti-Tank shells existed in World War II, but they were of a
relatively low, unrefined quality and not present in sufficient numbers to have a large impact.
With the advent of guided missiles, however, and an increase in precision manufacturing, the
engineering challenges to the HEAT warhead’s effectiveness were overcome, and they became
very powerful tools indeed. HEAT warheads, sometimes called chemical-energy warheads, used
an inverted cone-shaped assembly of high explosives around a steel core. When the round
impacted a target, the cone of high explosives detonated all at once, focusing the steel core into a
single, sliver-like jet of molten metal, sometimes moving as fast as 7,000 meters per second,
possessing far greater kinetic energy than any high velocity tank round. Such a jet of metal could

21
sear through any steel armour of any reasonable thickness, and combined with the accuracy of
the guided missile, the HEAT warhead nearly made tanks obsolete almost overnight.
Many strategies were devised to deal with HEAT ammunition by tank designers. The first
was called ‘spaced armour’, in which air was left between two layers of armour. This is the
inspiration behind the famous German shurzen side-skirt armour during World War II. The idea
is that the jet of molten steel formed by the HEAT warhead finds the air pocket underneath the
armour and begins to expand in all directions, blunting the tip and disrupting the jet, allowing the
second layer of armour behind the air pocket to endure. While not entirely effective, such
spaced-armour designs did help. The true answer to the problem of HEAT warheads, however,
came in the form of composite armour. Composite armour is armour made up of a variety of
materials in a ‘laminate’ form; it included steel, of course, but also ceramic, plastics, and
sometimes various other material such as carbon fibre and depleted uranium. These materials
improved the hardness and thickness of the armour, while the steel in which it was contained
retained flexibility and protected the more fragile elements, such as ceramics, from damage from
‘lesser’ sources such as small arms. Most importantly, composite armour made the armour more
heat resistant, and when coupled with air pockets in the armour, effectively resisted HEAT
warheads.
Another innovation in tank armour that arose in the Cold War period after World War II
was ‘reactive armour’ or ‘explosive reactive armour’, usually abbreviated as ERA. The basic
premise of ERA is to place a panel on the outside of a tank’s passive armour which contains
explosives and a fragmenting laminate sheath. These panels are designed to explode outwards
when impacted by an incoming projectile. This small explosion would not meaningfully impact

22
the tank’s passive armour beneath the ERA panel, but would effectively disrupt the incoming
HEAT warhead. Against solid, kinetic projectiles, ERA is less effective, but even just changing
the impact angle or blunting the tip of the penetrator can aid the passive armour in deflecting the
round, and later generations of Russian ERA (such as the Kontakt-5 system) were demonstrated
to be capable of actually disintegrating the penetrator of some modern tank cannon rounds with
their explosion.
In this way, through World War II and the challenges of the Cold War, did the modern
form of the tank take shape. The next major leaps forward would not occur for nearly three
decades; the T-64 was the first tank with composite armour in Russia, for example, while the
T-90, 26 years later, was the first to have truly built-in electronics. The digital revolution would
change the tank as much as any other part of society - and, combined once again with the
pressures of a changing battlefield, would eventually make it almost unrecognizable.
Chapter II: The Modern Tank
Just as mechanization radically altered military theories as well as army composition and
the tools available to generals, so too did digitization. The digital age only enhanced the speed of
armies - commands in the Second World War had to be relayed by radio or wireless, with the
time of day or even something as trivial as shifting atmospheric patterns affecting the quality of
the signal and the ability to reach its destination in a timely manner. When radios malfunctioned,
messages had to be carried in person to their destination. In the digital age, however, satellite
signals can reach across the globe in a matter of moments, largely heedless of the same
phenomena that hindered radio signals (though admittedly affected by their own perils). Radio is

23
now the backup, and wireless networks span the globe. Digitization improved the speed and
power of machinery, with navigational GPSs guiding vehicles and ships across vast, trackless
landscape with nary an hour’s notice, while computers analyze every little datum for information
and threat. The speed of conflict was drastically improved, and, paradoxically, the tank, once the
weapon of choice to restore mobility to static warfare, risked being left behind.
While designers had largely settled on a single basic pattern of tank during World War II,
and the Cold War period saw the advent of such innovations as composite and reactive armour,
tanks after 1980 and especially after the end of the Cold War have had myriad different threats,
not all of them even foreseeable when the tank was originally conceived, and again were forced
to adapt. Many designers turned to digitization as the answer, and the tank’s speed and power
improved leaps and bounds once again. Battlefield mobility and awareness was improved by
digitization of the drive train and by high-tech sensors that can perceive information in ways
once thought limited to the sphere of science-fiction. Offensive systems were most effectively
aided not by improvements in cannon calibre or shell technologies but by improved fire-control
systems. Tank survivability was improved not through the thickening of passive armour, strange
material additions, or a shift in engineering principles as it had before; instead, computers
allowed for a whole new sphere of engagement, including ECM (electronic countermeasures),
ADS (active defense systems) and other forms of masking and jamming. Whether or not these
changes would indeed improve the tank as the designers hoped, and bring it forward into the new
era of digital, globalized warfare, remained to be seen and tested.
World War II and the post-war period saw the tank enter combat all over the world in a
wide variety of battlefield conditions. No longer was the tank hindered by most battlefield

24
conditions around the world; innovations saw the useful employment of the same tanks on the
Russian steppe as in the deserts of North Africa or the forests of northern France; the struggle
against the battlefield had largely ended by the end of the Cold War. Instead, tanks contended
with the laws of physics and ergonomics: the mobility of a modern tank is primarily limited only
by the capabilities of its driver and the engineering tolerances of its drive train. Surveillance on
the modern battlefield, of course, is ever improving, and between improved mobility and
improved surveillance, the main battle tank has continued to enhance its battlefield compatibility.
The most current innovation to improve the mobility of tanks and other tracked armoured
fighting vehicles is to improve ergonomic utility; the less work the driver of the vehicle has to
do, the more efficient he is as a crewman at his designated task. The digital age provided myriad
driver aids to the vehicle, including engine monitoring and automatic control, but perhaps most
significantly, it allowed for automatic electrical and electronic transmissions. These18
transmissions not only alleviate one of the driver’s most arduous tasks (ensuring that the 70-odd
ton battle tank is in the correct gear for the given situation is most important!) but it also makes
that task more efficient: the computer, when programmed with the engineering tolerances and
powerplant capabilities of the vehicle, can easily compensate with speed and precision for any
unexpected changes, such as an increase in power from abrupt acceleration or a sudden drop in
power due to engine malfunction or damage. While these computerized drive-trains did indeed
improve the tank’s mobility and therefore battlefield compatibility, the most significant
adaptation of the tank to the modern battlefield is an improvement in surveillance gear.
18
Child, Jeff. ‘Networking Dominates Vehicle-Based C4ISR Advances’ The Journal of Military
Electronics and Computing, (May 2015)

25
Much like the rotating turret and corresponding vision improvements of World War II
vehicles, modern tanks have undergone many changes for the sake of surveillance. Originally,
during the Cold War, technologies such as infrared searchlights gave limited, though functional,
ability to see in the darkness. However, the digital age has provided many more systems to the
tank, through miniaturizing previously known technology as well as entirely newly innovated
systems. Technologies such as night-vision equipment, improved and miniaturized infrared
sensors (which see infrared, rather than emitting it like a searchlight as the Cold War era vehicles
did), low-light televisions, GPS, and radar gave tanks unprecedented vision and surveillance
capabilities on the battlefield. Such improvements in surveillance and awareness make the tank
one of the hardest types of military units to approach if they are on an active-alert status in a
defensive posture.
Unfortunately, however, such technologies have not entirely kept up with the reality of
the situation on the modern battlefield. These technologies have significant limitations,
especially when approaching enemy positions or in cluttered environments (such as urban
terrain), where concealment combined with the sheer density of terrain features renders such
systems relatively helpless. This was the situation that confounded the first Russian armoured
offensive against Grozny - the tanks were moving into enemy defenses concealed in urban
terrain, and the tanks’ otherwise impressive surveillance systems were rendered blind, unable to
aid the vehicles when they were ambushed by dedicated Chechen tank-hunter teams. The first,
largely unsupported, armour offensive was nearly wiped out, with staggering tank losses to the
Russian army. The Russians eventually were able to adapt, and began using their vehicles as19
19
Arquilla, John and Karasik, Theodore. ‘Chechnya: A Glimpse of Future Conflict?’ Studies in
Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 22, Issue 3, (1999).

26
bait to lure in said tank-hunter teams before engaging and destroying them with their own
dedicated infantry teams. Such a tactical adaptation, however, only occurred after staggering
tank losses from the terrain and defenses present in Grozny. Similar situations have occurred (or
are occurring!) around the globe, including Israeli tanks in Lebanon engaged in close terrain and
Syrian vehicles in Aleppo. More radical design changes will be required to make the tanks cope
with this new form of guerilla warfare in dense terrain than mere technological innovation.
Command of an open, empty battlefield is well and good, and easily within the capabilities of the
modern main battle tank, but wars are no longer fought on open battlefields; technological
supremacy has made the inferior force adopt guerilla warfare to compete, and no guerilla force
will engage the tanks where they are supreme! The tanks must take the fight to terrain and
situations which are unfavorable to its newfound surveillance and motive capabilities, and so it
must, once again, adapt.
Of course, when a tank is capable of getting to grips with the enemy, its firepower
remains undeniable. American vehicles in Iraq, Israeli vehicles in Lebanon, Russian vehicles in
Chechnya, and Syrian vehicles in Syria have all proven this. Whatever challenges there are to the
tank in the modern era, its direct fire capabilities remain supremely powerful, when they are able
to engage the enemy. The digital age only enhanced the tank’s power, by the addition of
graceful, stabilized fire-control systems, which take into account weather phenomenon, the
movement of the firing tank, and movement of the target to create a firing solution, meaning the
gunner need only place his crosshairs over the target and fire, and computers and sensors do the
rest. One of the most famous innovations during the Cold War was the laser rangefinder, which
fired a pulse of light which, when bounced off the target and returned to a sensor, indicated the

27
range to the enemy. Such a spectacular, often-touted system is merely a single component now
of a larger, centralized, digital fire control system utilized by almost every modern main battle
tank. Modern tanks, too, are festooned with machine-guns, giving them an impressive20
close-defense armament, capable of engaging and suppressing any enemies that the tank catches
in its sights even if the main armament is otherwise occupied.
That said, such firepower is almost worthless on the modern battlefield against a skilled
enemy. No enemy is going to wilfully place themselves within the tank’s ungentle mercies, and
so the already blind vehicles are rendered harmless as well. This does mean that some battles can
be won without firing a shot, as an enemy guerilla force retreats given the presence of a tank or
self-propelled gun, but the trouble with guerillas is that winning a given battle simply doesn’t
mean much! In certain cases, such as the second offensive in Grozny or the U.S. Army’s
intervention in the botched Marine operation in Fallujah, Iraq, the tanks are attacking into
prepared, visible defensive positions, and in both situations, their firepower proved its supremacy
once again, but in countless other engagements, such as against Hamas in Gaza or ISIS in Syria,
tanks have barely been able to engage the enemy, even if sometimes it is only because such
organizations tend to retreat or blend into the populace when a tank unit arrives, only to return
later once the monstrous vehicles have departed.
The digital age has also dramatically increased the threats to the tank, necessitating an
increase in protection as well. Missiles such as the American FGM-148 Javelin, and the Russian
9M133 Kornet are devastating anti-tank weapons, and even cheap, unguided antitank rockets
20
‘Optex Systems - Vision sights, Periscopes, and Fire Control Systems for Armored Vehicle
Platforms’, army-technology.com, 08 August 2016.
<http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/surveillance/optex-systems/>

28
such as the RPG-18 can kill tanks when utilized in large numbers or at close range. Armour,
even made of high-tech composites, is simply no longer capable of enduring the threats and
dangers posed by the tank from all angles due simply to weight and design limitations. Other21
solutions have been found, already including Cold War era reactive armour plating, but modern
main battle tanks have several innovative systems brought about by the digital age to help them
withstand the storm of new, powerful, and comparatively cheap anti-tank firepower available to
their foes.22
Before detailing the changes the modern tank has gone through to adapt to these new
weapons, it is necessary to explain the typical categorization of defensive systems. Traditional
armour is considered a ‘passive’ system - it does not react to enemy fire in some way, nor does it
actively seek out and deter or destroy threats. The passive armour remains the mainstay of the
tank’s protective systems, but its primary disadvantage is its weight; simply stacking passive
armour atop passive armour is what yielded the monstrous experimental heavy tanks at the end
of World War II such as the German Maus, which, while supremely protected, simply did not
possess the battlefield compatibility to function in the role of a tank. The second category of
armour has already been mentioned: ‘reactive’ systems are defensive systems similar to passive
armour, but which react when impacted by a projectile. Such reactive armour systems include the
Russian Kontakt-5 Explosive Reactive Armour system, but can also include so-called ‘energized
armour’ systems, using electrically conductive plates to induce a charge on the outside of the
tank’s armour, which, when struck, would discharge, disrupting or destroying the incoming
21
Huntiller, Mark. ‘Anti-Armour from the East.’ Armada International, Volume 32, Issue 1,
(February/March 2008)
22
Bias, Eric H. and Gander, Terry J. ‘Changes All Around - The Future of the AFV: Keeping
Harm at Bay.’ Armada International, Volume 25, Issue 6, (December 2001/ January 2002)

29
round. Such systems remain experimental, but have been meeting with success in certain tests.23
Reactive armour is more effective than passive armour per unit of weight, but has one significant
disadvantage: it is usually one use. After a given reactive charge is expended, only the passive
armour of the tank remains to protect it from enemy fire. In protracted engagements this is an
obvious weakness, but weapons such as tandem-HEAT warheads, which create two penetrators,
one after another, on detonation, means that an enemy can discharge the reactive armour and
then penetrate the passive armour in a single blow!
The third category of defensive systems on armoured vehicles, however, is considerably
more complex. Called ‘active protection systems’ or APS, these systems actively seek out and
destroy or disrupt incoming threats to the vehicle, utilizing the variety of sensors available to the
modern main battle tank. Active protection systems are divided themselves into two further
subcategories: so-called ‘soft-kill’ and ‘hard-kill’ systems. Soft-kill systems are designed to24
interfere with the projectile’s guidance or targeting in some way. Such systems include laser
jamming, to upset the guidance of laser-guided missiles, or electromagnetic interference to upset
the radio guidance of SACLOS (semi-automatic command line of sight) missile systems. These
soft-kill systems have been operational on Russian tanks being utilized in the Ukrainian conflict,
and have been likened to a ‘magic shield’ around Russian tanks by Ukrainian military anti-tank
missile operators. In fact, such systems have proven so effective that the primary anti-tank25
23
Kemp, Ian. “Hard Shell.” Armada International, Volume 29, Issue 5, (October/November
2005)
24
Meyer, Tom J. ‘Active Protective Systems: Impregnable Armor or Simply Enhanced
Survivability?’ Armor, Volume 107, Issue 3, (May/June 1998).
25
Karber, Philip A. ‘DRAFT: Lessons Learned from the Russo-Ukranian War.’ Historical
Lessons Learned Workshop. Paper presented at Johns Hopkins University by The Potomac
Foundation. (6 July, 2015)

30
weapon in the Ukrainian conflict at the moment is the 125mm smoothbore tank gun, forcing
tanks to engage each other with direct-fire kinetic penetrators just as they did during the Second
World War. Even if such a ‘magic shield’ fails, however, the second type of active protection
system, the hard-kill type, use the same sensors to detect incoming munitions as the soft-kill
system but instead of interfering with the targeting or the guidance of such systems, instead fire a
projectile of some sort at the offending threat, intending to disrupt or destroy it by more direct
means than mere electromagnetic or laser interference, hence the term hard-kill.
The disadvantage of these new, high-tech, computerized defensive systems is primarily
their unreliability. As with any computerized system, there are many steps between
target-detection and engagement with an active system, and many things can go wrong,
including target misidentification, phantom returns triggering active responses, or simple
computer programming bugs and errors. The systems also have sensitive hardware, though on
most modern tanks they are well-protected from enemy fire. Despite their success in operational
use in the Israeli and Russian militaries, such systems are not a defensive panacea, and merely do
their part in protecting the tank, working alongside passive and reactive armour systems.
Again, the tank has adapted to changing battlefield conditions, enemy defenses, and
enemy attacks just as it did during other periods of conflict since its inception as an integral part
of the typical mechanized army. Modern conflicts, however, often see even the
highest-technology tank, utilizing all these adaptations, rendered either useless or too expensive
to deploy for meagre combat benefits. Warfare is no longer between armies, and all the fancy
surveillance, supercharged fire-control systems, and invulnerable defensive arrangements will
not avail the tank when confronted with modern guerrilla or insurgent warfare if they cannot get

31
to grips with the enemy. If the enemy continues to fight on their own terms, then the tank will
always remain a secondary request by frontline units. Rapid action, battlefield and strategic
intelligence, psychology, and communication are essential to modern warfare, and the tank will
have to become swifter, smarter, scarier, and more connected in order to keep up. Simple
advancements in battlefield compatibility, firepower, and armour is no longer enough to make
the tank relevant.
Chapter III: The Tank in the Near Future
So what will the tank of the near-future look like? Will the word have any meaning in
two, three decades? Or will insurgency, terrorism, cyberwarfare, and the other facets of modern
war render the tank obsolete, as barbed wire, artillery, and machine-guns ended the relevance of
cavalry or naval airpower decisively ended the reign of the dreadnought battleship?
It is, of course, impossible to know with certainty. However, armies have been looking
into the problem of the future of the main battle tank, and each has come to a variety of useful
conclusions. Examining these conclusions might allow us to divine some perception of the future
of the tank, and how it might adapt once again to cope with the sheer complexity of modern war.
To determine what, precisely, might be needed of future combat vehicles, a close look
must be taken at the two armies most involved in modern, high-tech conflicts. The Americans
and Russians both have developed new armoured vehicles in the last decade, and many of their
declassified prototypical vehicles also provide useful insights into their military’s respective
interpretations about how to handle the dangers and obstacles confronting the tank in modern

32
war. Not every vehicle examined will be a tank, but it will be a class of armoured fighting
vehicle, and will provide some useful insight into the future of the tank.
The American military has repeatedly attempted to halt the production of the M1 Abrams
tank, originally designed in 1979, in an effort to spend money instead on developing a new
vehicle, becoming a ‘lighter’ force. However, such attempts at funding reallocation have been
met with opposition from the American congress, who continue to allocate funding for tank
production against the wishes of the U.S. Army. The Army’s opposition to buying new tanks,26
according to Gen. Ray Odierno, the Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army, stems from a desire to
become a lighter, more mobile force. This can be seen in the latest serial production armoured
vehicles to enter service with the American military: the Stryker family of armoured vehicles,
originally designed as an interim solution for the post-Cold War U.S. Army while it sought to
develop a whole new family of armoured vehicles; however, development of said new vehicles,
dubbed the Future Combat System program, was cancelled.
The closest Stryker analogue to a modern main battle tank is the M1128 Mobile Gun
System. Other strykers are infantry carriers, but the MGS Stryker is purely a fighting vehicle,
designed with a 105mm gun. It is designed for direct engagements of enemy forces with a single,
large, direct-fire weapon, in a similar combat role to the tank. The U.S. Army brought the M1128
into service in an effort to become a lighter and more mobile force: one of the cited advantages
of the stryker is its air mobility: it is capable of being deployed in brigade combat strength
26
Sisk, Richard, ‘Congress Again Buys Abrams Tanks The Army Doesn’t Want.’ Military.com,
Web. 18 December, 2014.
<http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-again-buys-abrams-tanks-the-army-d
oesnt-want.html>

33
anywhere in the world in 96 hours. The Stryker teams, including the MGS, are thereafter able27
to maneuver rapidly, utilizing the high combat speed of the vehicle, as well as its
communications and command suites, to react to enemy threats with greater flexibility and
rapidity than a main battle tank unit, which would have to be shipped by sea - such vehicles are
not transportable by air, at least in brigade strength, readily.
The Stryker MGS must make compromises, however, to achieve such great speed,
flexibility, and weight reduction compared to the American MBT, the M1 Abrams. These
compromises come firstly in the form of armour sacrifices. The modern American military still
lacks an operational Active Protection System, and so American vehicles must rely on their28
passive and reactive armour to withstand enemy firepower. All variants of the Stryker dispense
with composite armour, leaving only 12.7mm of high-hardness steel as their integral armour;
without applique plates, it is limited to protecting them only from 7.62mm ball ammunition,
(such as that fired by an AK-47), and even the bolt-on upgrade ceramic armour plates upgrade
the protection only slightly, making it resistant only to 14.5mm machine-gun rounds at best.29
Even the reactive and slat armour applied to the striker is of limited utility against antitank
munitions - the light weight of the vehicle making even the applied reactive and slat armour
packs small and ineffectual. Even the RPG-7, a relatively basic anti-tank weapon against which
27
‘Narrative of Stryker Air Deployability Demonstration’ from the U.S. Army, 17 October,
2002. Accessed through defense-aerospace.com.
<http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/release/12281/stryker%3A-all-you-ever-wante
d-to-know-(oct.-18).html>
28
Dagoni, R. ‘New Hope for Rafael Tank Protection System in US: The US Senate Has Ordered
a Reassessment of the ‘Trophy’ Active Defense System.’ McClatchy - Tribune Business News,
07 September, 2006
29
Coustan, Dave. ‘How Strykers Work’, 17 September, 2004.
<http://science.howstuffworks.com/stryker2.htm>

34
modern full-weight main battle tanks are almost completely invulnerable (for example, a
Challenger II in Iraq near Basra endured over 70 hits from enemy RPGs), can destroy a Stryker30
with a single direct hit, as happened in combat in Iraq. 31
Despite these losses, however, soldiers and the Army itself stand behind the Stryker as an
effective combat system, praising its speed, stealth, and reliability. These traits all happen to be32
traits missing from the modern main battle tank of the U.S. Army, the M1A2 Abrams, which is
heavy and slow, loud, and possesses an incredibly complex and sensitive gas turbine engine,
almost like a small jet engine. With Stryker production accelerating and the U.S. Army, as
mentioned, seeking to actively halt main battle tank production, it is clear the traits possessed by
the Stryker are those desired by an army heavily involved in modern, asymmetric combat in a
very high technology environment. In other words, in order to adapt, the tank must, at least
according to the U.S. Army, adopt some of these traits.
In Russia, conversely, main battle tank production has ramped up. Due to the fighting in
Chechnya, the Russian military has had arguably greater experience than the American in
warfighting against insurgents, and, much like the Israelis, have sought a way to adapt the main
battle tank to the situation at hand rather than replace it entirely as the Americans have.
Combined with their experience in Afghanistan, their experience in Grozny was especially
30
BBC News. ‘Tanks, Artillery Face The MoD Axe’. BBC News. 3 April 2004.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2905817.stm>
31
Associated Press ‘Stryker Losses Raise Questions.’ Military.com, 14 May 2007
<http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,135721,00.html?wh=news>
32
Defense Industry Daily Staff ‘M1126 Strykers In Combat: Experiences and Lessons’, 11
October 2005
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/m1126-strykers-in-combat-experiences-lessons-01323/

35
traumatic, and they have striven ever since to make their heavy armoured units capable of
operating in all sorts of terrain against insurgents equipped with high-tech weaponry.
Unlike the Americans, whose focus has been on lighter, faster vehicles, the Russians have
focused on making more survivable vehicles, and on accepting that while a vehicle may be
disabled, the crew may be preserved. This has yielded the early adoption of unmanned vehicle
components and cutting edge technology in both the defensive and offensive systems of their
vehicles. These systems are currently operational in the form of the T-14 Armata, but before
their current operational iteration is investigated, it is worth looking at its purpose built, less
conventional, certainly more radical predecessor: the BMPT-72 Terminator II.
The BMPT-72 is a vehicle designed by the private company UralVagonZavod, based on
their original prototype BMPT “Ramka-99” which was built during the Soviet era for a Red
Army requirement for an urban combat vehicle with the protection of a main battle tank, the gun
elevation of an infantry fighting vehicle or air defense vehicle, and firepower capable of
engaging and suppressing as well as destroying all possible target types. This order was a direct
reaction to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, and presented tank designers with several
insurmountable problems for some time. The project actually outlived the Soviet Union, and
only in 2013 did the UralVagonZavod believe that technology and design had progressed
sufficiently to officially introduce the now privately-designed vehicle at an armour expo. Such a
difficult order resulted in a variety of prototypes from the designers at the Chelyabinsk Tractor
Factory, the Soviet-era state-run predecessor to the UralVagonZavod armoured vehicle company.

36
Needless to say, UralVagonZavod refused to let so many years of work go unhindered, and
picked up the remainder of the project as a private venture, continuing to develop it.33
The BMPT, as mentioned, is a direct reaction to the Soviet and Russian wars against
insurgents. They found that main battle tanks had sufficient armour, from most angles, but
insufficient gun elevation, while the BMP infantry fighting vehicles had excellent gun elevation
but insufficient armour. The BMPT is an attempt to mate the two, while adding in its own
innovative systems to aid in battlefield compatibility. Its primary improvement is the adoption of
an unmanned, remote-control turret. This turret is designed to preserve the crew, rather than
being heavily armoured - if a turret module is damaged, the entire assembly can be pulled out
and replaced. The crew are nestled in the hull of the vehicle, which is well-armoured. This34
utilization of a comparatively thinly-armoured, unmanned turret makes the BMPT considerably
lighter than a full battle tank, despite still having similar protection for the crew. The second
improvement in battlefield compatibility is the addition of extra weapon-systems, able to cover a
wide arc around the tank even when the main armament is occupied engaging another target,
including extra grenade launchers attached to the sides of the hull.35
These extra weapons, of course, add to the firepower as well. In fact, the BMPT-72 tank
could arguably be seen as a ‘reimagining’ of the multi-weapon, multi-turreted vehicles of the
inter-war period in the 20th Century, bolstered now with computerization and other high-tech
enhancements to improve the tank’s ergonomics. The omission of the traditional tank cannon
reduces the so-called ‘loiter time’ of the BMPT (that is, how long it can remain in combat
33
‘BMPT Ramka-99’, BTVT Narod, 09 June 2016 <http://btvt.narod.ru/3/bmpt.htm>
34
Ibid.
35
Army-technology.com ‘BMPT Tank Support Combat Vehicle, Russia’.
<http://www.army-technology.com/projects/bmpt-vehicle/>

37
without pausing to reload) but it bears a frightening array of weapon systems: the primary
armament is two 30mm autocannons, and four tube launchers for missiles, which can be
anti-tank, anti-air, or thermobaric for anti-fortification and anti-personnel duties. This armament
is bolstered by the addition of two 30mm grenade launchers mounted co-axially to the main
armament, giving the vehicle an impressive, almost ridiculous, amount of firepower. The36
purpose of these guns, of course, is to suppress the enemy in urban combat: when fighting
insurgents, targets that you cannot see, then simply being able to lay down a curtain of fire from
five separate automatic weapons improves the survivability of the vehicle and the personnel
around it by forcing the enemy to keep their heads down. When an enemy is sighted, the
machine can employ one of its guided missiles, ensuring their destruction. This emphasis, on
firepower rather than protection, surveillance, stealth, or speed, is testament to the traumatic
experience of Russian tank crews in Grozy.
In terms of protection, the BMPT-72 is not innovative. It has the relatively unchanged
hull of a T-72 MBT, with an unmanned turret addition. Modern additions, such as slat armour
and reactive armour to defeat some HEAT anti-tank warheads, is fitted, but the primary
protective innovation of the BMPT is simply the acceptance that the tank will be damaged. The
unmanned turret is comparatively thinly armoured, with components easily disabled by a direct
hit from enemy anti-armour weapons. The crew, deep in the vehicle’s hull, will be safe, but no
longer is the vehicle designed for total survivability; designers accept that the vehicle will likely
become damaged, and that crew survivability is paramount.37
36
‘BMPT’. Military-today.com, 29 May, 2016.
<http://www.military-today.com/tanks/bmpt.htm>
37
Ibid.

38
While it was submitted for trials in 2005, the BMPT did not enter service with the
Russian military. Due to its utilization of the T-72 hull, and therefore Soviet-era technology,38
the modern Russian military chose not to adopt it, instead focusing on the development of its
own, brand new, main battle tank. However, certain lessons were adopted from the BMPT
programme. While the new Russian main battle tank, the T-14 Armata, has a different overall
take on how to deal with insurgents, guerillas, and modern warfare than the raw firepower of the
BMPT, certain useful traits of the BMPT can be seen on the Armata.
The first trait is the adoption of the unmanned turret. The Armata’s main and secondary
armament are all mounted in a remote-controlled, unmanned turret deep within the hull. Unlike
the BMPT, this turret is well-armoured, though less so than a fully manned turret. The vehicle’s
weight is also lighter than most contemporary main battle tanks, giving it the ability to easily
navigate obstacles and bridges, increasing both its mobility and battlefield capability. Though the
information is classified, some experts have also suggested that the vehicle possesses a
hydrostatic transmission and suspension system, based on videos of the T-14 in parade39
rehearsals. Each of these improvements mean that the T-14 is built with an eye towards
battlefield compatibility, avoiding excessive weight and likely incorporating the latest drive-train
technologies.
The firepower of the T-14 is not innovative. There have been suggestions that a
prospective 152mm cannon was designed for the T-14, but its current production model
possesses only a slightly improved 2A8 125mm main gun, basically the same gun as the 2A6
38
Konovalov, Ivan. ‘Prospective Armour Obsolete Before It Became Operational.’ Kommersant.
08 April 2010. <http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1350456>
39
Military Industrial Company team, ‘Tank T-14 Armata or T-99 Priority’. VPK LLC. 12 May,
2015. <http://vpk.name/library/f/armata.html>

39
125mm on the T-90. Two machine-guns are fitted, as is the case with most modern tanks.
Clearly, the Russian military believes that the great failure of the tank was not a lack of
firepower, perhaps explaining their rejection of the BMPT’s heavy firepower emphasis in favor
of the Armata platform, which retains the BMPT’s mobility and improves its armour at the cost
of a reduction in firepower to that of a conventional modern main-battle tank.
The primary focus of the T-14 seems to be it’s protective systems. While it retains a high
mobility, it is unknown whether this is the result of cutting-edge improvements in the drive train
(such as the suggested hydrostatic transmission earlier) or simply a carefully-balanced design
consideration. It is also possible that the mobility is enhanced simply through careful allocation
of armour protection and defensive systems. Some experts, for example, have lambasted the
T-14 as ‘stale’, claiming that, among other things, the T-14’s armour is no better than the
Challenger II, the Abrams, or the Leopard. However, this may be a deliberate design40
consideration - as mentioned earlier, modern main battle tanks in the vein of the Challenger II
are almost completely invulnerable to easily-available insurgent weapons such as the RPG-7.
This thickness of armour, a break with Soviet tradition from earlier battle tanks such as the T-90
which sacrificed armour protection for speed, is of more utility than some would believe when
mated with the very advanced APS and reactive armour systems. The APS fitted to the Armata is
named the ‘Afghanit’, a clear reference to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and incorporates
both hard-kill and soft-kill components. This is the same system that Ukrainian anti-tank gunners
were calling a ‘magic shield’ around the T-72s and T-90s employed in that theatre, and is likely
to be further improved, with a new system, the ‘Barrier’, under development for employment on
40
Trevithick, Joseph. ‘Russia’s New Tanks Are Pretty Stale’. Offizere.ch Magazine, 10 June
2015. <http://www.offiziere.ch/?p=20941>

40
the T-14 Armata specifically. The Armata also incorporates a new reactive armour system, the41
‘Malachit’, designed to be a double-layer, two-stage system to defeat weapons such as the42
‘tandem-charge’ HEAT warheads mentioned earlier, which are designed to penetrate
conventional reactive armour. Through passive armour which is considered comparable to any
modern tank, reactive armour designed specifically to counter modern threats, and an active
defense system already proving its defensive strength in the Ukraine conflict, to the frustration of
the Ukrainian military, the Armata, unlike the American Stryker, emphasizes protection.
Now that the American and Russian solutions to the tank’s dilemma in modern combat
have both been investigated in detail, some conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, though each
nation’s modern armoured vehicles are vastly different, they both share similar qualities. They
both, for example, emphasize mobility, battlefield compatibility, and weight concerns. The
Armata is lighter than most other current main battle tanks, and the Stryker is air-transportable.
They are both capable of speeds in excess of 70 kilometers per hour, though in the Armata’s case
this is due mainly to a powerful engine rather than the incredibly light weight of the Stryker.
Even so, it is clear that both agility and top speed are concerns in modern warfare. Both vehicles,
as well, do not possess abnormally high firepower: the Stryker MGS has a relatively typical tank
cannon on it, with no supporting machine-guns, while the Armata, too, does not change much
from the original capabilities of tanks such as the T-90, at least in terms of firepower. Both
41
Litovkin, Dimitri. ‘Armata against Leopard: A New Russian Tank to Surpass World
Analogues’, Zvezda News, 22 November, 2014.
<http://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/content/201411211239-uvb5.htm>
42
Vasilyev, Andre. ‘Prototypes of The Armata Tank’, Military Review, 29 June 2013.
<http://topwar.ru/30166-prototipy-tanka-armata.html>

41
vehicles emphasize electronic warfare, with the Stryker’s brand new computer systems and the
Armata’s unmanned, remote-control turret and weapon stations.
The major differences between the vehicles can be put down to the different strategic
situations for their parent nations, rather than a different take on what is needed in modern
warfare. Russia, with its long borders, has easy train and road access to its potential foes,
whether it be ISIS in the Middle East or the Ukraine in Eastern Europe. This means that
deployment of a vehicle can be done by train and across bridges; it is no coincidence that the low
weight of the Armata is just below the tolerances of most safe, modern bridges. This means that
the designers simply had more weight to work with, and with the firepower of a modern tank
being deemed sufficient, the true innovations of the Armata are in mobility, battlefield
compatibility, and protection. The Stryker, conversely, is built by a nation largely physically
isolated from the conflicts in question, meaning that a rapid response time will require an airlift,
meaning the vehicle must be airlift-capable. Mobility remains high, and firepower remains
around the same level as the Armata, but its protection is reduced, giving the Stryker lower
survivability when actually in combat. It is telling, however, that this is not seen as an issue by
the U.S. Army, who has repeatedly asked Congress not to buy it any more main battle tanks;
sheer enduring survivability is no longer the priority of the U.S. Army.
From these two examples, it can be seen that the modern tank has not yet completely
adapted to the modern battlefield. Each nation continues to probe ahead with developments,
increasing the digitization of the vehicles, increasing crew protection, increasing mobility, and
increasing battlefield awareness. However, the future remains obscured. It is possible that the
Russian emphasis on crew survivability will prove more economically sustainable for the almost

42
constant war of the 21st Century, since material is relatively easy to replace compared to trained
personnel. This might result in the future tank being some sort of drone or autonomous combat
system, either being teleoperated by a human from a safe position or making its own decisions in
combat without human interference. This is the direction that Russian developments, and other43
developments around the world, seem to be moving with their remotely controlled, unmanned,
turrets and weapon systems. America, conversely, emphasizes speed and striking power, sparing
no expense on its military, even if it means higher personnel losses than other militaries with
better protected vehicles. Vehicles like the Stryker can, indeed, run rings around vehicles like the
Armata, which, while nimble and fast, are not quite as nimble and fast as a vehicle five times
lighter. One thing is certain, however: whatever the future prospect of the tank, it will remain an
important vehicle in the arsenals of modern militaries; its adaptation is continuing, it is not
stagnant, and will not be made obsolete, even if its recognizable form changes.
Chapter IV: Tank as Symbol
One advantage the Armata has over the Stryker, however, is its sheer brutish look; for
one of the most important, if often overlooked, aspects of the tank is its symbolism, particularly
in America and Russia. Especially in Russia, though by no means exclusively limited to Russian
media, the tank has oftentimes been seen as a physical manifestation of state power for better or
worse; at Tiananmen Square, for example, a single photograph made history. In America, in
more recent times, the tank has even transcended its status as an emblem of state power; it has
43
Inigo, Mathew A. et al. ‘Proposed Method to Save the Soldiers Inside the Main Battle Tank
Via High Bandwith Links Remote-Controlled Tank.’ American Journal of Computer Science
and Engineering Survey, Volume 3, Issue 6, (2015).

43
become almost a symbol for war and strife itself. There are a plethora of examples of both
symbolic functions, some more sinister than others, but they all have one thing in common: the
tank is not merely a tank. Importantly, too, in the early periods after its inception, the tank was
seen as a symbol for mechanization and modernity, the relentless progress of technology which
overran more traditional parts of life. What the tank is became less relevant than what the tank
represents.
Much like the dreadnought battleships of the early 20th Century, the tank represents
power and nationalism simply through the difficulties surrounding their production and
employment. Tanks are costly to create, usually exceeding the price of other classes of armoured
vehicle both in development and per-unit. Their engineering challenges are myriad and difficult,
requiring well-educated teams of designers beyond the capability of many nations to grow within
their own education systems. Deploying the tank is also expensive; their excessive weight and
logistic consumption through fuel and ammunition makes them staggeringly difficult to employ
for anything other than the most vital and significant operations. This means, of course, that the
more tanks a nation builds and utilizes, the more that says about the industrial, economic,
educational, and logistical capabilities of the nation, as well as its ideological conviction and
resolve to see the incident through to its end.
Media has always, to some extent, picked up on this phenomenon starting with the
Second World War when the popular understanding of ‘blitzkrieg’ was introduced. In Germany,
it was used simply to mean a short war, but in the West, due to their sheer shock of the force of
German offensive power during the Battle of France, it became inextricably linked to Germany’s

44
panzer divisions. In the modern era of warfare, of course, media perceptions have become more44
and more important, with the tank riding media coverage since its inception. The most important
of these incidences, arguably, is the aforementioned Tiananmen Square photograph, where a
brave, if somewhat foolhardy, shopper finds himself in front of a Chinese tank.
The Tiananmen Square ‘tank man’ photograph is one of the best case studies of the tank
as a symbol of state power simply because it is so famous and so striking. Even as recently as
2009, journalists praise the power of such a photograph; a power which would be absent if the45
tank itself were not imbued with some kind of symbolism. Stripped of its symbolism, the tank is
merely one in a myriad collection of war-machines; there are missiles more devastating, ships
more enduring, satellites more technological, vehicles more striking, and equipment more
numerous than the tank in every single army; but if one replaced the tank in that image with say,
a jeep, or a man with a rocket launcher, or the shadow of a plane high above, the image would
immediately become less powerful. The tank’s status as an unstoppable war machine is yet
unparallelled in history, and its brutish form, forged of hardest steel and powered by some of the
most powerful land-based powerplants yet devised, is stopped by the power of a single man. The
tank itself is not the important part of the image - it is what the tank stands for: the power of the
Chinese state, stymied by one man who had the bravery to stand before it. A reminder, perhaps,
that this technology and modernist symbol still requires human resolve to deploy and utilize it,
undermining the technological determinist position which is so often taken when military
hardware is written about.
44
Doughty, Robert. Col. ‘The Myth of Blitzkrieg’, Lecture, October, 1998.
45
Sterba, Jim. ‘It Was the Single Bravest Act I Had Witnessed.’ The Times, (30 May, 2009).

45
Of course, the symbolism of the tank in America and Russia is not merely tied to the
power of the state that employs it; rather, the tank itself can be seen almost as a harbinger of
total, unequivocal war. This specific symbolic power comes from the unique nature of the tank
among all other combat arms. The aforementioned difficulties in deployment and employment of
the tank contribute, certainly, to its uniqueness, and this becomes even more readily apparent
when the symbolism of other famous martial pieces of equipment is compared to that of the tank.
Consider, firstly, the personal equipment of the soldier: aside from colouration, perhaps, this sort
of gear is not out of place on a police SWAT team or paramilitary organization; right away, the
symbolic power of personal equipment is broad and easily misinterpreted. Photographs of
soldiers can mean many different things, whereas a photograph of a tank can only mean a
significant military commitment: in other words, war. Scaling it up to heavy weapons helps little;
many paramilitary and criminal organizations, not fighting what we would consider a
conventional total war, possess anti-tank rocket launchers and heavy machine guns; nothing
specifically about these weapons gives them quite the impact that a tank in a similar setting
would have. Scaling our view up further to jeeps and other forms of military transport begins to
give us a similar, though not the same, outlook to that of the tank. Jeeps and other unarmoured
military transport vehicles (such as cargo aircraft) are, indeed, sometimes seen during peacetime
and do not necessarily have the same connotations of actual, ongoing fighting that a tank would,
even when they are photographed driving through the countryside or being loaded with soldiers.
However, they can often indicate that something sinister or disastrous is happening that46
46
Meyer, Tommi, Sgt. ‘Indiana National Guard Heads For Border.’ U.S. Army website, 26
October, 2006.
<https://www.army.mil/article/444/Indiana_National_Guard_heads_for_the_border> (see
photograph)

46
requires the redeployment of soldiers. Even light armoured vehicles and helicopters are used in
peacetime by police, their deployment representative of strife, certainly, but not war. Skipping
over the tank for a moment, to the very high-tech weaponry of the modern age such as jets and
drones, yields nothing of the symbolism of outright war. Perhaps they are too new to be yet
associated with total war, or perhaps they have been used in too many conflicts by nations which
have not committed ground forces and aren’t fighting a total war. Either way; drones and aircraft
lack the symbolic power of the tank at representing the core of total war. Lastly, even the naval
arms of a nation, expensive and vast though they might be, are not as symbolic of total war as the
tank, often being deployed to ‘protect interests’ or ‘project threat’ even in situations where no
war at all is being fought.47
In contrast to every other weapon or piece of equipment listed here, however, the tank
has rarely, if ever, been deployed in times of relative peace. Whenever the tank is deployed, it is
indicative either of war or of a preparation for war, such as along the Iron Curtain during the
Cold War. This means that media coverage of war and especially the threat of impending war
often includes a photo or video of a tank, and is designed specifically to indicate either the
brutality of ongoing war or the threat of future war. The tank itself may be irrelevant to the48 49
actual content of the article, but the photographs or clips that accompany news are often as
47
Cavas, Christopher. ‘U.S. Navy Deploys Most Carrier Strike Groups Since 2012.’ Defense
News, 06 June, 2016. Web.
<http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense-news/2016/06/06/navy-aircraft-carrier-strike-group
s-deployed-china-russia-operations/85526820/>
48
Puri, Samir. ‘Syria Conflict: Truce, Cessation, or Ceasefire?’ BBC News. 23 Februrary, 2016.
Web. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35642639>
49
Vandiver, John. ‘Report: Russia Defeats NATO in Baltic Wargame.’ Military.com, 05
February, 2016. Web.
<http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/02/05/report-russia-defeats-nato-in-baltic-war-game.
html>

47
important as what the article or other media is seeking to cover, and in certain qualitatively
militaristic articles, the a picture or clip of a tank is the chosen image.
Of course, all symbols can be turned on their head and inverted to mean the opposite of
what they stand for with a bit of modification, and the tank is no exception. No nation
understood the symbolic power of the tank more than the Soviet Union, who erected hundreds of
tanks on plinths at the end of the Second World War as monuments to their industrial and
military supremacy over Nazi Germany. Originally symbols of state power and martial prowess
both, these tanks were turned into caricatures of those very same concepts after the fall of the
USSR. In various places, the tanks were upended, cast off of the plinths, to be sold for scrap and
never recovered. In other places, the tanks were taken from the plinths to be interred in more
respectful surroundings such as a museum, though when removed from their monumentalist
architecture their power as symbols understandably declined. Perhaps the most famous
modification to a World War II tank memorial, however, was one painted pink in the Czech
Republic. A Soviet IS-2 obr 1944 heavy tank (erroneously identified as a T-34 in50
Wesolowsky’s article) was placed in a square in Prague to commemorate the Soviet liberation of
the City from the Nazis, but since the fall of communism has been a catalyst for conflict. An
enterprising artist painted the tank bright pink, determined to make it a caricature of war and to
deliberately peel the history of the Czechs away from the memory of Soviet state power. Of
course, officials and the Russian ambassador protested, and since then, the tank has been a
catalyst for argument in Prague’s districts. It eventually caused so much controversy that the
local community disavowed the tank, not wanting either its symbolism of Soviet power and
50
Wesolowsky, Tony. ‘In Prague, Officials See Red Over Pink Tank.’ The Christian Science
Monitor. 02 April 2016.

48
therefore oppression or its symbolism of Czech freedom and a rejection of militarism at the cost
of insulting the sacrifice of Soviet soldiers who liberated the city. The tank was removed to a
military museum eventually; but the controversy and ongoing coverage of the tank’s fate speaks
to the power of the tank as a symbol.
Another inversion of the tank’s symbolic meaning came with the recent attempted coup
in Turkey. Several pictures were circulated on the media, not of soldiers throwing down their
weapons or jets grounded at airbases but of tanks subdued simply by people climbing upon them.
Nowhere was this symbolism more realized than in the BBC’s article covering the aftermath of
the coup, titled ‘Turkey Coup: How Mobiles Beat Tanks and Saved Erdogan’. Even the article51
of the title is awash with symbolism: much like the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword,”
the title invokes some relatively impotent civilian tool as the key to overcoming an implement of
military power. The coup did not just involve tanks - there were bombings by aircraft, areas held
by soldiers, helicopters on patrol, and more besides. The gravitas of the tank, however, was
inescapable, and their significance as symbols of military power is made clear by the title of this
article even as it studies their defeat. Even the photographs and footage covering the coup and its
defeat in Turkey revolve around tanks, such as a tank pushing protesters back as they assail a
bridge, or a tank being stood upon by victorious citizens, and even footage of two tanks running
over a man. These clips were chosen for coverage not because no other military arms were
involved, but also because the tank is such a powerful symbol, even in defeat, of military
strength and brutality.
51
Poole, Thom. ‘Turkey Coup: How Mobiles Beat Tanks And Saved Erdogan.’ BBC News, 18
July, 2016. Web. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36822858>

49
Beyond its symbol as a terrifying war-machine or an unyielding reminder of state power,
however, the tank, for a time, held a unique role in human culture, one in which it has perhaps
been superseded. In World War I, the initial development of the tank was fraught with difficulty,
but designers continued to propose different and ever-improving designs until almost every
nation in the war had acquired an armoured vehicle of some kind, even if they were bought from
another nation’s factories. At the beginning of World War II, the tank’s symbolism had not yet
solidified but for one single event, almost certainly fabricated by German propaganda. At the
Battle of Krojanty, a charge by Polish Uhlan riders was disrupted by the arrival of German
armoured cars after their initial success against Wehrmacht infantry. This story became inflated
by Goebbels and German propaganda into a claim that Polish cavalry had charged German tanks,
which became repeated in so many sources that the original story oftentimes is forgotten. Why52
has this event, which is clearly propaganda (no one seriously believe a right-thinking cavalry
officer would order a sabre charge against tanks), survived for so long? Why has it been repeated
despite its obvious falsehood?
It persists because of its symbolism. For the Germans, it symbolized the inferiority of the
‘other races’, whose ignorance led them to charge tanks with sabres. To a German citizen, it
demonstrated the supremacy of the Nazi system, whose industrial war machine overwhelmed
even the vaunted Polish cavalry through sheer technological supremacy and reinforced the idea
that Germany was a modern state. It proved, once and for all, that the Nazi doctrine of ‘might
makes right’ was meant for Germany and the German people. This was the role the symbol
played in German propaganda, and images were plastered on Hitler Youth magazines or touted
52
Wright, Patrick. Tank. Faber and Faber, London, UK. 16 October, 2000

50
in post-war memoirs as ‘remembered’ events. Fair enough for the Germans to have leveraged
this symbol for all it’s worth; again, they tapped into the earlier symbols of state power and
martial prowess. But the story lived on past the defeat of Nazi Germany through the efforts of its
conquerors; the story would not be left to die by the propagandists of the Allied nations, for it
was too powerful of a symbol.
The Soviet Union adopted the story for its own ends, ends that approached more closely,
and even drew from, to an understanding of the symbolism of the image which echoes into the
21st Century. The Soviet Union touted the story to the Polish populace as an example of the
perils of trusting bourgeois: the story emphasizes that the cavalrymen were almost certainly all
aristocrats, which means that their failure is emblematic of the failure of the bourgeois system to
protect the country and its proletariat from the threats, invasion, and eventually tyranny of
foreign invaders. The Soviet Union’s claims were not entirely fabricated, however; the Polish
cavalry had indeed been made up mostly of the aristocracy and nobility of the country for
centuries, certainly since the medieval period. This event, however falsified, was interpreted by
the Soviet propaganda engine in Poland as the final, shuddering gasp of the traditional Polish
aristocracy, and as a representation of the utter failure of the system of bourgeois aristocracy to
protect the proletarian citizenry.
It was an assault against Polish tradition, nationalism, and history. It was, in some way, a
recognition of a rejection of modernity in Polish culture, and an attempt to eradicate that culture.
The Polish cavalry, as well as a proud martial tradition, had a proud aristocratic tradition; Polish
nobles were expected to serve in the cavalry at some point during their lives. The history of the
famous Polish hussar made the importance of cavalry to the Polish military inescapable, even as

51
it grew increasingly obsolete in the face of mechanized warfare. Therein lies the deeper, more
pervasive, symbolism of the tank, that has always lurked in the background of the tank’s history
since the beginning of World War 2: the herald of mechanization. Much like the Battle of
Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu wars proved the supremacy of gunpowder and breech-loading rifles
against lifetimes of training and a martial culture, so too did the panzers’ embellished fight
against the lancer morph the tank into some sort of harbinger of the technological war to come.
The image of the cavalryman striking out against the tank with sword and sabre is eternal,
not because it actually happened or because it provides some specific ideological message
(which is what both Germany and the Soviet Union sought of it), but because it is a symbol of
the struggle for the human soul during the early days of mechanization. In the image painted by
the falsified scene, the Polish cavalry are hot-blooded young noblemen, whose homeland was
under attack and who are famous for their fierce resistance, enviable courage, and masculine
strength. The German panzers, conversely, are impassive creations of an intellectual and
industrial system; they are soulless abominations, mass-produced by their thousands and
conquering not through elan, courage, or strength, but through sheer, brute inevitability. In this
image is seen the same conflict J.R.R. Tolkien set up in the Lord of the Rings, when the
industrial might of Saruman’s Isengard struck out against the Fangorn Forest, using the ancient
and wise trees as fuel for the fires of industry; but there were no Ents to be seen in World War II.
The soulless machines overwhelmed even the most courageous of young men, and earned
themselves a spot in history.
Just like every other time the tank has been used as a symbol, however, the message
could be inverted: so too did the virtues of mechanization become manifest in such an image.

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