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Land operations
Recent conflicts, including the war in Ukraine and the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine, have seen small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increasingly used to identify, target and attack armoured vehicles directly or indirectly. Tallha Abdulrazaq reviews the recent history of UAVs in combat, how they have been used against tanks and armoured vehicles, and what tacticians are now doing to enhance the survivability of the tank on the modern battlefield.
Armour piercer W
hen the earliest tanks came into service during the First World War, they were a revolutionary piece of technology that changed the face of battle and reintroduced mobility back into combat that had grown stale in Western Europe’s muddy trenches. Gone were the days of the romanticised cavalrymen who would charge around the flanks of their foes, surround and destroy them. Instead of noble steeds of flesh and blood, elliptically shaped boxes of steel armour and continuous tracks had slowly rumbled their way onto the battlefield, shunting aside the millennia-old horse for the final time to provide mobile protection and firepower to the beleaguered Tommys. While mobile warfare existed on the Eastern Front, particularly in the earlier parts of the war – look no further than the Battle of Tannenberg in
20
1914 – the bulk of the fighting on the Western Front consisted of now-infamous static lines of dugouts, bunkers and warrens of trenches where soldiers lived, fought, died and rarely advanced without paying a hefty butcher’s bill. The British pioneered the invention of the tank that helped them and their allies to prevail in the Great War, but by the Second World War it was clear that the Germans had taken it to its fullest operational potential, combining armour with mechanised infantry, airpower and supported by artillery to create modern combined arms divisions that continue to form the backbone of many an armed force until the present day. However, now that the world has had tanks in service in militaries around the world for more than a century, the trusty weapon needs to contend with new tactical realities that pose a significant threat to their
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
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