Retrospective - Introduction
In this edition of Retrospect, we feature two articles published in the Army Journal of March 1970, which take opposing views of the relevance of the Main Battle Tank (MBT). The first article, by Major W Lennon of the Royal Australian Engineers, provocatively asserted ‘The Tank is Dead’. While conceding that, even at that time of writing, the Centurion Tank was still performing effectively on operations in South Vietnam, the author argued that the increased lethality of individual shoulder-fired weapons, especially rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), would ultimately ensure the extinction of the tank.
This view appeared to be vindicated soon thereafter during the Arab–Israeli War of 1973, when both sides incurred staggering losses among their tank forces. As Huba Wass de Czege has observed in his article in this edition of the Australian Army Journal, this represented a revolution in the physics of the battlefield. The emergence of the man-portable guided missile represented a dire threat to the tank. In the immediate aftermath of this war, tanks were often likened to horse cavalry, or even dinosaurs—too ponderous to adapt to a dangerously altered environment.
However, predictions of the demise of the tank proved to be premature. By the mid-1990s, the tank was again being acclaimed as invincible after the impressive performance of the Abrams MBT in the 1991 Gulf War. Yet it is possible to reject the crude dialectic whereby either the tank or its technological nemesis is portrayed as a panacea for battlefield success.
Rather, issues of force employment, especially doctrine and training, are usually more important factors in military performance than particular technologies. In his highly persuasive and painstaking study of military performance in the 20th century, the American scholar, Stephen Biddle, identified mastery of what he termed the ‘modern system’ of force employment as the single most important contribution to battlefield success.
In the introduction to his work, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battles, Biddle argues that, since the First World War, the battlefield has come to resemble a ‘storm of steel.’ Unprotected humans simply cannot survive amid this maelstrom, much less achieve military effects.
As he explained: ‘The modern system is a tightly interrelated complex of cover, concealment, dispersion, small unit independent maneuver, and combined arms at the tactical level and depth, reserves, and differential concentration at the operational level of war. Taken together, these techniques sharply reduce vulnerability to even twenty-first century weapons and sensors. Where fully implemented, the modern system dampens the effects of technological change and insulates its users from the full lethality of their opponents’ weapons.’
Since the carnage of the Western Front in 1916–17, the Australian Army has relentlessly pursued professional mastery of combined arms warfare to conduct close combat. Despite significant technological progress since Battle of Hamel, at which Australian mastery of the ‘modern system’ was first demonstrated, no conventional army has found a viable solution to the problem of close combat that does not entail employment of combined-arms teams. Essentially the sum of technological changes has been to increase the range and impact of weapons without negating the principles governing their effective employment.
Implementation of the ‘modern system’ entails the professional mastery of close combat through the synchronised employment of combined-arms teams of infantry, armour, engineers, aviation and signals supported by indirect fires from artillery. This requires what Sir John Monash referred to as ‘orchestration’. Each element of the combined-arms team contributes to the harmonious operation of the whole, compensating for the limitations of the remainder. Dismounted infantry protect tanks against concealed troops with lethal missiles, while tanks can destroy hardened defensive positions and provide sustained fire support. In this way, the whole exceeds the sum of the parts.
For these reasons it is fatuous and irresponsible to maintain, as some newspaper columnists have done in recent times, that the Army needs more light infantry at the expense of armoured protection. The truth is we need both. It is not an either or proposition.
Indeed, one must question the judgement of any commentator who concludes that the complex contemporary battle space is too dangerous for the tank but invites the more widespread employment of light infantry. Most military professionals will find themselves in agreement with the views expressed by David Kilcullen in the current edition of this journal, to the effect that tanks save lives when employed correctly within the combined-arms team.
Recent operations in Iraq have amply demonstrated this. Tanks have been indispensable to success in complex urban terrain. Not only do they deliver powerful direct fire against point targets and bunkers, they are able to respond with discrimination. This is vital in war amongst the people.
A tank such as the M1A1 Abrams, because it can survive an initial hit in most circumstances, permits its crew to react with discretion by not having to strike pre-emptively. More vulnerable vehicles must eliminate threats by firing first. In complex human and physical terrains, this is not always desirable.
Nor should invoking the example of Iraq be deemed to offer succour to the facile and specious contentions of some commentators that the purchase of the Abrams tank demonstrates that the Army assumes that it will be operating in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. As the second article from the 1970 AAJ, by Major B Ranking, argues conclusively, tanks were widely employed in the close terrain of our immediate region during the Second World War and Vietnam.
The Japanese used tanks in the allegedly impenetrable jungles of Malaya and New Guinea in the early 1940s. At Buna and Gona, countless Australian lives were saved by the employment of tanks in direct support of the infantry. The same can be said of Vietnam. Moreover, the emerging phenomenon of war amongst the people—an inevitable concomitant of urbanisation—means that our soldiers will increasingly be required to conduct operations in urban terrain.
Our region is not immune to the demographic shift of population to littoral cities. It is interesting that the most hysterical assertions about the inability of tanks to operate within our region have emanated from civilians who pride themselves on their grasp of our strategic geography.
These articles traverse the same arguments that have been deployed to support or condemn the acquisition of the Abrams tank. Hindsight permits us to conclude that technological change has not had the effects that Major Lennon predicted. Most significantly, despite enhancements to their firepower and protection, attack helicopters cannot deliver the same effects as a tank. They simply lack the ability to loiter, thus depriving the infantry of sufficient intimacy of support
Moreover, they are more vulnerable to the effects of RPGs than tanks—a lesson emphatically taught during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 and at Karbala in Iraq during March 2003. These arguments from the 1970 Journal presciently frame the extremes of the contemporary debate about the relevance of the tank to modern operations. The Australian Army Journal commends both of these articles to readers.
