While Russian tanks have a higher tendency to blow up because of ammunition stowage issues, lots of tanks (and armored vehicles) are merely damaged, broken down, or stuck. Recovering these armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) is important to keep the troops equipped.
The Russians and Ukrainians are scrambling to replace AFV losses:
With Ukraine’s supply of Western-donated vehicles beginning to dry up after its counter-offensive failed to produce a breakthrough, and with Russia losing hundreds of tanks in failed eastern assaults, engineers are using every means at their disposal to plug the gaps in their forces.
In some cases, they have had to reach deep into storage facilities and scrap heaps, pulling out weapons systems and parts of vehicles that have not seen combat for decades and grafting them together to create entirely new vehicles.
What is not really mentioned as a source of these vehicles and parts to rebuild AFVs is battlefield recovery:
This highlights a feature of armored warfare long evident. Controlling the battlefield is key to winning the campaign. If you control the battlefield, you can recover the 90% or more of vehicles lost from minor hits, mechanical breakdown, or just getting stuck and abandoned. Just as important, you keep the enemy from recovering their immobilized vehicles. Keep doing that battle after battle and the balance of forces can swing dramatically through attrition. Controlling the battlefield, as we do in Iraq, provides dramatic benefits for us.
This leads to another issue, how we kill enemy armor (or defend our own). While the most obvious way to kill enemy armor is to penetrate its armor to detonate ammunition and fuel with a dramatic explosion that sends a turret spinning through the air to land 50 meters away, soft kills knock out a tank just as surely in the short run.
In situations where we can reasonably predict that we will control the battlefield for at least a week or so, we can afford to kill enemy vehicles with soft kills. Given time, our troops can blow up enemy vehicles damaged or tow them away to repair and use them. And recover and repair our own, of course, to send them back into battle.
On the other hand, in situations where we won't be controlling the battlefield, we will need to actually blow up enemy vehicles to keep them from just being temporary losses.
Think of them as temporary mothball fleets or aircraft boneyards for armored vehicles.
And controlling the battlefield expands enemy losses and makes it easier to make enemy "soft" kills during a battle into permanent losses. And of course, adding that mobile, protected firepower to your own side. Ukraine received a considerable amount of Russian AFVs during 2022.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
