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Subject: Armor: Is perfect the enemy of good enough?
Jeff_F_F    1/9/2007 10:09:35 AM
It sometimes seems that America learned the wrong lessons about armored vehicle development in WWII. Since our main tank was underarmored and undergunned during most of our participation in the war, we seem to have developed an aversion to "good enough" weapon designs during the post war period. We try to sqeeze the last tiny bit of armor and weapon performance out of every design. As aresult we often end up with development programs that are delayed by specifications that were unachievable to begin with and which change while the weapon is being developed, and which are plagued by cost over-runs as a result. In the case of the Stryker it seems we have ended up with designs that also overshoot weight limits, and an AGS version that is too powerful for the chassis it is based on. The unwillingness to mount a low pressure gun on the AGS seems to be part of an unwillingness to mount anything less than a MBT gun on its light tanks ever since WWII. Although undergunned and armored compared to enemy tanks, the Sherman was extremely successful at exploiting breakouts because of its good mobility and rugged reliability. We fixate on the difference in guns and armor between the Sherman and its German opposition because these are easy to compare, and because every tanker lost to enemy fire is a painful tragedy. It is much harder to compare factors like mobility and reliability, especially since being on the defensive generally did not make the gross deficiencies that late war German armor suffered in these areas particularly apparent, and because it is harder to project what effects reductions in mobility in favor of armor and firepower would have had on the success of American armor. We attribute our success to "quantity vs. quality", yet I see no evidence that quality--in terms of gun power and armor strength--was a decisive factor in any major battle in WWII or since. In my view the key factors have always been crew training and tactics, operational initiative, and the support of a strong combined arms team. Am I wrong?
 
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Panpiper       1/26/2007 5:30:56 PM
First I must admit that I am not a military professional, I am simply a relatively well informed layman. I have read Dunnigan's 'How to Make War' four times and a few dozen other text books on strategy, the military and military history, albeit mostly over twenty years ago. I have no actual military experience. I do have a great many years of martial arts for what it is worth.

I do not believe that the wrong lessons were learned circa WWII. I believe it is more that we have forgotten lessons. It was for instance not until the US developed the M1 that the US had a tank that could confront and beat enemy tanks decisively. The design philosophy prior to then was that 'good enough' was more than enough. That was back when the US conventional strategy was frankly, reliance on nukes.

The problem we face now is that we want vehicles that can be all things in all situations. The end result is our jack of all trades designs are masters of none and in some cases such as the AGS Stryker you mentioned, disasters.

The failing in WWII was not that the Shermans were bad designs. They were great for a great many things. The failing was that we did not have a corresponding heavy tank for appropriate situations. In situations that called not for breakthough exploit but rather armored assault, having only Shermans was sad. It was a failure of combined arms in my opinion. We lacked an arm to combine.

Nowadays we need equipment for the job of combined arms.  Tank guns belong on tanks, good tanks designed to fight tanks and otherwise scare the bejesus out of the enemy. The infantry need APCs that can protect them from anything except tanks while getting to where the infantry need to be deployed. For fire support the infantry needs not tank guns on APCs, but artillery, ...and tanks.

Perfect does not mean designs that can be all things in all cases. Perfect means perfectly suited to their role. Tanks need great armor and firepower and adequate mobility. APCs need adequate armor and firepower and exceptional mobility (I am completely convinced that wheeled APCs are inadequate).

There is no question that the factors you mentioned are huge multiplicative factors that determine victory. But they multiply the effect in the final analysis of the unit they affect. To use wargame parlance, if the gun strength of your tank is X and your 'quality' factors multiply that by three, you will be twice as effective if your gun strength is 2X. Plus the cost of maintaining all that quality, such as crew training and experience, is going to be much better spent if your crew doesn't get killed by a shell from a T55.
 
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Herald1234    One comment.   1/27/2007 7:32:37 PM
The Panther was actually a better crosser of soft ground than the standard Sherman. It also had a better slope climbing ability. it took a wide tracked sherman to equal the Panther in cross country mobility.
 
One more thing; doctrine drives procurement. Stupid American tank destroyer doctrine in WW II delayed the development and deployment of a better medium tank as a followon to the Sherman. Plus; bungled engineering in designing the original tank meant that the Sherman, itself, was a bit more difficult to product improve to even keep up with an antique like the PZKW IV, which proved to be a very product improvable industrial artifact..
 
Good enough is good enough, but wrong choices plus dead end line of engineering development =heavy casualties to make up for the wrong equipment used incorrectly.
 
Dig up the Australian Sentinel tank for a program that started off on the right track and showed the promise of being what the Sherman should have been.
 
Herald 
 
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Jeff_F_F       1/28/2007 3:26:11 PM
Thank you for your comments. These views are the conventional wisdom, but there is another side of all this that is less obvious.
 
When the Sherman was designed there were no operational German heavy tanks. Compared to the best German antitank vehicle--a Panzer III with 30mm of frontal armor and a 50mm L42 gun (the Panzer IV of the day was armed with a low-velocity howitzer)--the Sherman's 75mm L43 gun and 76mm armor were an overmatch solution as a medium tank. There was no imperative to develop a heavy tank, in fact, quite the opposite. Allied heavy tanks--French, British, and Soviet--had shown little effectiveness, and had been outmaneuvered by more nimble German tanks, isolated, and destroyed by airstrikes and artillery. The lesson seemed clear: heavy tanks were useless. Frankly, the collapse of the Wehrmacht despite the power of their heavy tanks would suggest that it was also completely correct. In no major operation of WWII was success dependent on the combat power of the tanks involved. In most cases, from the Madrid, through Paris to Moscow and Berlin, the loser was the side with the more powerful tanks. The only exceptions were cases where the defender had essentially no tanks of any effectiveness, such as Poland, Denmark, Norway, and Finnland.
 
Besides that, the US was playing catch up. The unfortunate fact is that the fastest that any tank in WWII was designed from the ground up was about a year and a half. The Tiger took at least this long to design, and could be said to have taken more like 3-4 years considering that "Panzer VI" tanks--not Tigers, but heavy tank development prototypes--were being tested as early as 1940. The only reason the US was able to come up with the Sherman so fast was that it
used as many off-the-shelf components as possible. The entire hull and chassis were drawn from the inter-war M2 tank which was armed with a 37mm gun. It took a while to develop a new turret to mount a 75mm gun so the M3 was built. When the M3 arrived in North Africa it was considerablly superior to the German armor available in most respects, and was a major contributor to the British success. It should be noted that the biggest advantage the M3 had
over the British tanks was not its anti-tank performance--German doctrine did not consider tanks to be primarily antitank weapons, and their armored thrusts generally avoided concentrations of enemy armor. At that time the main German anti-armor weapon was the 88mm Flak gun. The 75mm gun--on both the M3 and M4--was designed with indirect fire capability to help combat it.
 
There was simply no suggestion of a need for something heavier than the Sherman until late 1942 when limited numbers of Tigers began to appear on the Eastern Front, and these Tigers were less fearsome than one might imagine--more broke down on the way to battle than actually fought.  By this time the Allies had very good estimates of German tank production capacity, and it was clear that few Tigers could ever be produced. There was talk up upgrading the guns to 76mm
after American encounters with Tigers in 1943, but this was rejected by the commanders in the field, because the main antitank threat was still the 88mm Flak, and the 76mm gun was less effective at bombardment than the 75mm. Besides, combat experience had clearly shown that heavy tanks in limited numbers could generally be avoided and destroyed by aircraft and artillery, so there seemed little need to counter the Tiger directly. By 1943 Panthers began to show up on
the eastern front, but were hardly impressive, having a tendency to transform into pilboxes due to drivetrain problems, or even to catch fire without the need for enemy intervention.
 
Nevertheless the pattern seemed clear and development of more powerful tanks began, but by then it was too late for them to be finished before 1945. Unfortunately by 1944 production of the Panther had gotten up to speed and large numbers of Panthers were deployed in France, forming about half of German tank strength. The prototype medium tanks that eventually formed the basis for the M-26 were an improvement on the Sherman, but unlike the Sherman still suffered growing pains, and were no match for the Panther in a 1:1 fight anyway.
 
The tank destroyer concept wasn't developed in a vacuum. Through 1943, the most visible demonstrations of successful armored doctrine were the German blitzkreigs. Due to this, American armored doctrine was based on the German model. Unfortunately, some aspects of that model would prove to be less than optimally efficient but no one would have guessed because no enemy faced by Germany was effective enough to demonstrate those weaknesses. Particularly regretable was the German division of force between tanks and tank destroying weapons. In
 
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Herald1234       1/28/2007 4:25:22 PM
 
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Herald1234    I think this is interesting.   1/28/2007 4:35:45 PM

PostPosted:    Post subject: ....and Tank destroyers: origins and evolutions.


 

Jackknife

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....and Tank destroyers: origins and evolutions.


The early "emergency" vehicles.

In the initial phase of WW2, here and there, emerged some models of tanks that, due to their thick armor, were a hard nut to crack using the typical "early ww2" antitank cannons. These "light" pieces of artillery equipped even the tanks of those years, so even the standard tanks found themselves ill-equipped to deal with their opponents.

The first ones that had this problem were the Germans, that yet during the campaign, in 1940, had to use their "88" anti aircraft cannons to oppose the heavily armored British "Matilda 2" tanks.

This problem was even harder during the first phase of the Russian campaign, when the tactically superior German forces found their only significant opposition when they had to deal with the occasional T-34 or KV-1 tank.

While waiting for the upgraded variants of the Panzer 4 (the ones with the powerful 75L48 long barrel cannon) and for the still experimental Tiger, the Germans installed powerful antitank cannons, either 75mm or 88/56 until then available only on wheeled trails, on the hulls of light tanks that were not more up to the task of the mechanized war: typically, these hulls were the ones of the Panzer 2 and of the czech tank Shkoda THNP38.
The Shkoda 38 had installed or the 75L48, or the Russian 76,2L41,5, this last equipped with APCBC ammunitions manufactured in Germany, much more effective than the Russian AP ammunitions. The gunners were protected by an opened superstructure, essentially a shield, of thin armor plates, opened on the rear, that was barely enough to protect against the light weapons fire, and the design allowed a limited firearc.

These hastily assembled vehicles had significant limits: barely sufficient mobility, insufficient protection (a mortar shell or an artillery shell falling in the nearbys of the self propelled gun killed or wounded the gunners), not easy to conceal due to the tall profile, and the crew had no protection against the bad weather.

Their only advantage was to give a decent mobility to antitank guns that (as correctly remarked By Thinker1111) were too heavy to be manoeuvered by hand, both in tactical (manoeuvre to gain a good firing position) and strategical (keep the pace of the advancing armored forces, move quickly to close a gap in the defence lines) terms.

This concept was applied later with the "Hornisse" (Hornet) - late renamed as "Nashorn" (Rhino) - a Panzer IV hull that carried the potent 88L71,2 "Lang", by the Britons, with the "Archer", a Valentine tank hull with the QF 17 pdrs, and even by the Italians, that placed the 90/53 on an M13/40 hull, and so were able to produce the impressive number of 26 (twentysix) of these effective vehicles.

All of these vehicles had their effectiveness, mostly due to the fact that they had a firepower significantly superior in respect to the tanks they foug

 
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Jeff_F_F       1/30/2007 10:06:18 AM
I think the JagdSherman is a fantastic idea. Our TDs weren't TDs they were just tanks designed for open country fighting against other tanks rather than infantry support work. Despite the opinion of some that the M-4 is a cavalry tank, with a gun designed for indirect fire and a closed turret it is the infantry support tank and the M-10 with its sloped armor, higher velocity gun, and open turret is a cavalry tank.
 
The only problem with the JagdSherman design is the same problem faced by our other TD, the one we called a tank, the M3. Had we produced it, there would have been no end to the wailing and nashing of teeth. Even today discussion groups would be decrying the idiocy of fielding a weapon system with a gun that was unable to pivot in a turret. Just look at the criticism that the M-3 receives. 
 
The usual view that is expressed regarding the M-3 is something like the following: "The M3 mounted a 75mm gun in a hull mount with limited traverse that limited its tactical effectiveness, while its turret mounted an obsolete 37mm gun. The british who fielded it in North Africa criticized the high profile which presented a large target to enemy gunners and gave it a high center of gravity, and the Soviet forces that received it under lend lease came to refer to it as 'the coffin for 7 brothers'" Some even go so far as to describe the 75mm gun as a howitzer, even though it was the same gun that would be later mounted on the M4. It is generally ignored that when the M3 was fielded, both its armor and frontal AT firepower completely outclassed any German tank then in the field. In addition the 75mm gun could indeed be fired as a howitzer which was extremely useful against 88mm guns in the desert, especially considering that the british tanks of the day were mounting 2pdr and 6pdr guns with minimal and no HE bombardment capability respectively. By the time it reached the Soveit union it was indeed obsolete, but the 'coffin for 7 brothers' moniker is seldom if ever presented in this context.
 
Never mind that the Germans and Soviets produced similar weapons. Americans hold America and American weapons to a higher standard than the rest of the worlds' weapons. We can't just build a good enough weapons system, which is what a Sherman hulled 90mm gun TD would have been, we have to be perfect. It drives me nuts.
 
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lastdingo       7/5/2007 9:41:44 PM
The Shermans had few German tanks to combat, even if one includes the StuG and JPz, most actions of the Shermans were against infantry, artillery, AT guns and logistics. It was a good tank for such work - no less useful for it than any German tank.
 

The first poster seems to assume that the US Army did indeed follow the ehavy firepower and protection path after WW2.
Well, in fact it did not. It was late to make 90mm a standard, switched late to 105mm and introduced the German 120mm calibre late as well.

The protection was not very special as well.. The only heavy post-war tank in service (M103?) was not much in use and the M60 had no composite armour as contemporary T-64.
The British and not the Americans developed the Chobham composite armour and the US Army got it no earlier than with the M-1, which came into service after T-72, Leopard 2 and I'm not sure but probably also later than T-80.

In fact it was not until some later 120mm APFSDS-DU  cartridge and teh SEP armour package that the US Army had truly a standard tank that was heavily armed and armoured by the standards of its time.


 
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Jeff_F_F       7/6/2007 1:03:56 PM
Funny, I started out agreeing with your position, but then I started doing a bit of research on the M60 and everything fell apart.
 
M60 was designed as an overmatch to the T-55 and to compete with the developing T-62, entering service in 1960. When the T-62 entered service two years later it had larget smoothbore gun but its while a bit stronger than the M60 on the frontal aspect was very weak on the sides, while the M60s side armor was only slightly weaker than its frontal armor. A US response was already in the works, and the M60A1 featured heavier armor on all faces, with the armor on the front face of the turret increasing by 40% to 25cm (10").
 
With the T64 the M60 underwent another modernization to the M60A3. It had the same thickness of armor but the turret was redesigned with better shaping -- longer narrower frontal profile similar to that of the King Tiger that presented a smaller frontal target and where shots from the front would be deflected laterally. The other improvements were better stabilization, a more powerful turret motor, and laser range finding system, all centered around being able to target and fire accurately on an enemy tank more quickly. It was actually a quite competitive tank, but not by the standard route of main gun size vs armor thickness.
 
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Yimmy       7/8/2007 6:22:14 PM
During the 60's, 70's, 80's, what was the American tankers thoughts on the Chieftan?

Shame Mike Golf no longer posts.


 
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lastdingo       7/9/2007 8:04:01 AM
The Chieftain was mechanically unreliable.

Funny, I started out agreeing with your position, but then I started doing a bit of research on the M60 and everything fell apart.
 
M60 was designed as an overmatch to the T-55 and to compete with the developing T-62, entering service in 1960. When the T-62 entered service two years later it had larget smoothbore gun but its while a bit stronger than the M60 on the frontal aspect was very weak on the sides, while the M60s side armor was only slightly weaker than its frontal armor. A US response was already in the works, and the M60A1 featured heavier armor on all faces, with the armor on the front face of the turret increasing by 40% to 25cm (10").
 
With the T64 the M60 underwent another modernization to the M60A3. It had the same thickness of armor but the turret was redesigned with better shaping -- longer narrower frontal profile similar to that of the King Tiger that presented a smaller frontal target and where shots from the front would be deflected laterally. The other improvements were better stabilization, a more powerful turret motor, and laser range finding system, all centered around being able to target and fire accurately on an enemy tank more quickly. It was actually a quite competitive tank, but not by the standard route of main gun size vs armor thickness.


Well, I disagree, of course.

The T-55 needs to be compared with the contemporary M48 Patton, not M60. All but M48A5 had 90mm guns, definately no overmatch over T-55. Same with the armor, no overmatch.

The T-62 can be compared to M60, which was again not superior in armour or weapon. The Russians actually introduced early APDS for their 115mm gun in the T-62.

There was no real counterpart to the T-64 and T-72, which were superior to M-60 in armour (early composite with rubber layer) and gun (125mm).
Late T-72 and T-80 can be considered as counterparts to M1 Abrams, but were still superior in firepower as long as the Abrams had still the 105mm gun.

There were lots of details that made the western tanks better than a simple armour/gun comparison suggests (fire control, ergonomics, ammunition quality, durability), but overpowering opponents Tiger-style with superior armour and guns is definately not typical of post-WW2 U.S. tanks. It only happened beginning with M1A1 and especially M1A2SEP.


By the way; at the time of the T-64, deflection of shots was no issue anymore as sub-calibre hypervelocity darts cannot be deflected.like full-calibre WW2 shots. Sloped armour was only relevant for complex mechanics of long rod destabilization and for weight-efficient armour thickness improvement.
 
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