From Powerhouse to Pariah: The Decline of Russia’s Tank Forces
The once formidable Russian military is now a shadow of its former self, with its tank forces dwindling at an alarming rate. The situation has become so dire that Russia has resorted to deploying 75-year-old T-54s and T-55s to Ukraine. The question that begs to be asked is, how did one of the largest countries in the world, known for its military prowess, end up in such a predicament?
The T-55 was a beast of a tank when it first entered service immediately after the end of the Second World War. It was one of the most produced tanks in history, with an estimated 100,000 built. Its introduction scared NATO allies so much that Britain hurried to develop a new tank gun and the US rushed the M60 tank into production. The T-54/T-55 was a formidable monster, with 205 mm of frontal turret armor and 120mm slanted hull armor. It was so tough that it could survive a nuclear explosion up to 15 kilotons in yield at a range of just over 300 meters. Its 100 mm gun could penetrate about 300mm of rolled steel armor, making it a significant threat to anything in NATO inventories. Its crew enjoyed the benefit of some of the first thermal sights, giving the tank the ability to operate at night.
However, today, the T-55 is a sign of desperation for an embattled Russia. The question that arises is, what happened to Russia’s modern tanks? The answer lies in a series of tactical blunders and poor doctrine during Russia’s initial offensive into Ukraine. Tanks are the fiercest weapon on any battlefield. They can deliver destruction, take and hold ground like no other weapon can. Their main cannons can level most small buildings, and their advanced composite armor can defeat even the most powerful projectiles. But all of these advantages mean very little if tanks aren’t properly supported, a lesson Russia has failed to learn in three major conflicts now.
During the first Chechen war, Russia mobilized its massive arsenal of tanks and armored vehicles with a plan to literally crush the Chechen resistance underfoot. However, the Chechen rebels didn’t have tanks, but they did have RPGs, anti-tank missiles, and even IEDs and tank mines. They also had an incredibly good doctrine that exploited Russia’s biggest vulnerability. Russian warfighting doctrine states that tanks lead the way, with infantry fighting vehicles providing close support. However, the infantry inside the infantry fighting vehicles can’t do their job if they’re not dismounted. During the invasion of Chechnya, the Russians decided that the best way to protect their infantry was to keep it inside their armored vehicles. The Chechens were counting on this.
Rebel forces used the verticality of the urban terrain to get up above the tanks, providing them with two distinct advantages. The first was that from above the tank, they could use weapons that would normally have little to no effect against the thick front armor, or even the slightly less thick side and rear armor of the tanks. The roof of the tank has very thin armor, often just a dozen or two dozen millimeters thick. This thin roof armor was especially vulnerable to regular rocket-propelled grenades, which the Chechens had in abundance. With so many of these simple and cheap weapons laying around, and the Chechens using the verticality of urban terrain to get above the tanks, Russian armor soon became a critically endangered species.
The second weakness exploited by the Chechens was the lack of elevation on Russian tank’s main guns. An M1 Abrams has an elevation of +20 to -10 degrees on its gun, allowing it significant vertical reach. A T-72, meanwhile, has an elevation of only +14 to -6 degrees. A T-80 is slightly better, with a range of +18 to -4 degrees. Such a poor range on Russian tanks meant that they were physically unable to respond to enemy action in the windows and roofs above their heads, frustrating Russian tankers as they watched their friends get destroyed from above.
The Chechens also exploited a tank’s thin floor armor by utilizing IEDs and anti-tank mines. Often, they would hide in holes in the ground or sewers that tanks would roll over, only to pop up and attach mines that resembled limpet anti-ship mines, or simply toss out an IED and duck for cover. The thin floor armor would provide little if any protection to the crew, so not only would these IEDs knock the vehicle out of commission, but would also likely kill its crew.
To counter all of these threats, most modern militaries utilize infantry. In a modern, combined arms military, the infantry is often playing the role of babysitter for friendly armor. Western powers dismount their infantry to do so. While this makes them more vulnerable, it also allows them to better use their senses to detect and neutralize threats, while the Russians force them to remain inside their protected armor vehicles looking out a thin slit.
When it came time to invade Ukraine, the world assumed that Russia had paid attention to its two humiliating lessons from both Chechen wars. The world would be wrong. As Russian armor poured into Ukraine, a peculiar sight began to appear across the countryside. Groups of Russian tanks all operating on their own, with no other armored vehicles or dismounted infantry to be seen anywhere. The Ukrainians saw much the same thing, and immediately leapt to exploit their enemy’s grave mistake. Mighty Russian armor was being absolutely decimated in a series of ambushes utilizing soldiers armed with Stugna and western anti-tank weapons. The entire time, Russian infantry was nowhere to be seen.
Russian doctrine hadn’t changed since Chechnya, and its troops were equally poorly trained. In multiple instances where infantry was present, it failed to do its job of screening the flanks for armor forces, and instead chaos caused by ambushes led to a visible breakdown of command and discipline. Every vehicle was out for itself, and infantry being ambushed by machine gun teams rushed to find cover next to or behind armored vehicles. More than a few grisly instances of Russians being crushed to death by their own vehicles have come to light since then.
One year after its invasion of Ukraine, Russia had lost an estimated 1600 of the 2500 tanks it had rolled into Ukraine with. It’s recovered and repaired, or built brand new, an estimated 850 of those lost tanks. But that was back in February, and by May Russia had lost the biggest tank battle of the war, with 120 armored vehicle losses, which compounded with the rest of the casualties all along the eastern front. Only Russia knows how many tanks it’s truly lost of the estimated 2500 it began with, but its losses are bad enough to prompt it to move literal antiques out of storage and even museums and send them to the front lines.
Every month, Russia fields increasingly less capable tanks- a problem for Ukraine as well, but one offset by the growing movement to send ever larger numbers of western tanks to Ukraine. Russia’s real problem though is that it can’t hope to replenish its losses, while Ukraine can count on its western allies for support.
No one, except maybe a few individuals in the Russian government, truly knows how many tanks Russia can produce each year. According to Russian sources, one of its largest armor plants can produce 20 tanks a month, but other sources say that it also refurbishes 8 tanks a month. This makes it unclear if the plant produces 20 total tanks, or 12 new tanks and 8 refurbished ones from its deep storage. Similar reports from other plants place their total at around 17 tanks a month. With two new tank plants being hurried through construction, an estimated 90 tanks could be hitting the battlefield a month- but nobody knows how many of those will be new T-80s or T-90s, or simply refurbished T-62s and the like. Even at the most optimistic figure of 90 tanks hitting the battlefield, this simply doesn’t compare with the 150 tanks Russia loses a month.
What we do know is that the tanks coming off the assembly line are in no way modern. Both refurbished and new tanks are lacking modern electronics and specialized kit like thermal visions. With all of those supplies coming from overseas and now cut off by sanctions, modern tanks like the T-90 are even harder to build, with Russia lacking specialized parts and tools needed for complex engineering. Less advanced T-72s are more achievable for Russia, though the country faces a similar problem it did during World War 2, when tanks rolled right off the production line and straight into combat with no sights and no radios.
Especially damaging to Russia’s industry is sanctions targeting optical systems, ball bearings, and machine tools. Without western supplies of thermal and night visions, Russia is being forced to either produce tanks without these vital components, or push old tanks into a modern battlefield without them. Instead, Russia is putting basic gunner’s sights on its tanks, reducing the range of their cannons by an estimated 2 kilometers- and that matters a great deal as German Leopards begin to show up on Ukrainian battlefields, joined at the end of the summer by American Abrams. Even against modern Russian tanks, western armor had a decided range and precision advantage- but now Russia’s only real hope is to use its armor in close quarters combat where its tanks can be more accurate.
The embargo on advanced semiconductors to Russia has also impeded its ability to develop new modern fire control computers, forcing it to cobble together what it can from civilian appliances or smuggle low quantities at great expense through China and other friendly nations.
You probably don’t think much about ball bearings. But ball bearings are critical for the production of modern vehicles. These shockingly simple devices are ingenious and function off the basic premise that things roll better than they slide. Yet it’s no easy feat creating high-quality ball bearings which often have to endure high levels of heat and stress. The production of modern ball bearings is such a technological feat that nations are ranked by their capacity to create them. And unfortunately for Russia, it doesn’t rank high on that list, with 55% of its ball bearings before the war all coming from Europe, Canada, and the US. Now the nation is forced to rely on small domestic production and cheaper, lower quality variants it can import from places like China or Malaysia.
Russia is losing on two fronts. Not only is it unable to produce large numbers of new tanks, or even refurbish old ones to anything resembling a modern standard, it’s being forced to pay exponentially greater prices for supplies needed to create the small number of modern tanks it manages to crank out. The combination of low production and skyrocketing cost is a death blow for a cash-strapped Russian government, who blew through its projected annual defense financing in the first few months of 2023.
And new sources of revenue aren’t forthcoming. European price caps on Russian oil, inherent inefficiencies in Russia’s extraction and processing, and now even greater costs in shipping to places like Asia, have all conspired to make Russia’s oil revenues reach about break-even levels. This is a disaster for the Russian government budget, because Russia’s oil and natural gas industry accounts for about 20% of its GDP, and about 45% of its budget just one month before invasion.
Making matters worse, Russia has now began to tax its own oil industry based on Brent crude prices, rather than its own oil prices- meaning energy companies in Russia have to pay taxes on revenue they did not generate. As if problems weren’t bad enough, even in the best case scenario that Russian energy is at break-even revenue, this is still a national disaster. At break-even levels, energy companies can’t afford to invest in new infrastructure or exploratory missions to expand operations. That means no new oil fields coming online, no replacement of bad infrastructure, and no addressing inefficiencies in Russian production that it used to rely on western technology to overcome or at least mitigate. Russian energy is in the same death spiral that its tank forces are.
But Ukraine is in an equally- if not more immediately precarious position. Because while it’ll take years for Russian energy, and thus budget, to go bust, Ukraine is wholly reliant on its western partners. If the west’s financial or military support wavers, even poorly equipped Russian forces could secure victory. So while Russia’s tank fleets may be in a laughable state right now as Cold War antiques are dragged out of museums, at least it still has tanks to put on the battlefield. Ukraine is stuck with what it has, a constantly diminishing quantity that only western support can replenish. A T-55 is a big joke on a modern battlefield, until suddenly your side has no more tanks and no more anti-tank missiles to stop it with.
