So tank protection can now be considered in the categories of passive (armour plate or composite), reactive (exploding bolt-on boxes), or active (interceptor missiles, disruptive munitions, or jamming), sometimes categorised into soft-kill and hard-kill systems. And finally, active armour, which senses the incoming round or missile and intercepts it before it even reaches the MBT. Then explosive reactive armour, placed on the outside of conventional protection, which detonates to disrupt the incoming attack. Then spaced or composite armour designed to defeat an attack by high explosive shaped-charge warheads designed to penetrate steel plate using molten, focused metal jets. This competition has continued ever since.

The enemy quickly devised and deployed anti-tank rifles which fired a bigger, heavier round to penetrate the tanks’ armour.

When first deployed on the Somme the tank was proof against German machine guns (although not against artillery rounds). And it won’t come to pass this time either, not yet anyway, for reasons I shall now explain.įirst, the history of the tank in warfare since its first introduction by the British in 1916 during the Great War has been one of a see-saw battle between its protection levels and the potency of weapons designed to defeat that protection. I have heard this cry numerous times before over the past forty years and it has yet to come to pass. If you would like to submit your own article on this topic or any other, please see our submission guidelines. This article is the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the UK Defence Journal.

What has been widely portrayed in the popular media has led, once again, to predictions that “the age of the tank is over”. Unfortunately, the abiding images in the public view are of heavily armed and armoured, not to say highly expensive, armoured fighting vehicles being destroyed and neutralised wither by plucky individuals with hand-held anti-tank weapons or by cheap – relatively speaking – armed drones and the so-called ‘loitering’ or ‘kamikaze’ munitions. Recent conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan and, more tellingly, the current war in Ukraine have brought a renewed focus on the role of the main battle tank in modern, conventional military operations.

Future military tank designs