By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization
(Washington DC) The current chaos in Russia and instability raises far too many questions to answer at the moment, yet there is little doubt that it presents a new category of potentially unanticipated risks. At the same time, Russian instability does not preclude the likely reality that Russian tanks will soon “clash” or “engage in tank on tank” warfare with export variants of the M1 Abrams tank. Such a possibility will only become more likely as more Abrams continue to arrive in coming months.
Open source web sites closely tracking Russian tank losses such as Oryx have documented massive destruction of Russian tanks, and many have suggested that Russia’s existing tank fleet may now be one-half or less than what it was. Clearly much of this is due to anti-armor weapons and successful tactics employed by committed Ukrainians, yet Russian tanks are also being lost to Ukrainian rockets, artillery and armored vehicles. As mechanized armor-on-armor war continues to increase in coming months, there is a massively increased possibility that there will be many more tank battles. The long-cherished, massively upgraded and combat-tested Abrams, which proved extremely successful against Soviet-built T-72s in the now famous Gulf War tank wars.
M1 Abrams vs T-90
Russia’s T-90M tank has been hyped and heralded as a formidable platform with a handful of integrated next-generation technologies including reactive armor, advanced gunners thermal sights, smoke grenades and advanced EW for “jamming” attacking anti-tank missiles.
However, despite these attributes, Russian T-90 tanks continue to get decimated in Ukraine by committed fighters using anti-armor weapons and advanced tactics. As part of this, numerous reports and photographs showing that the advanced Russian tanks are, in fact, quite vulnerable to overhead or “top-down” attack. Whatever kinds of Active Protection Systems the tanks have appear to not be hemispheric and, given that the top of a T-90 is less protected by armor, Ukrainians have been using buildings and elevated terrain to target and destroy Russian tanks.
While it is known that Russian armored vehicles such as the T-90 have continued to prove quite vulnerable against Ukrainian anti-armor attacks, some might now be inclined to wonder if Russia’s T-90M will perform well against the arriving export variants of the M1 Abrams tanks.
